I just sat down at my computer. It’s the first time today and I’d just spent an hour shoveling snow. As I settle in to enjoy a few minutes of “me” time I find my 9 year old son at my side saying, “Mom can we make some of those cookies?”

How do they know? I’m not just talking about pinpointing possibly the least convenient moment, I’m talking about the little boost you didn’t know you needed when you take those precious moments to do something with your child.

So the lesson for the day is that love really is spelled T-I-M-E. And if you’re up for a great recipe, that’s included too!

These are the best peanut butter kisses cookies!

1/2 C (1 stick) Butter
1 C Sugar
1 Egg
1/2 tsp Vanilla
1/2 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Powder
2 C Flour
1/2 C Peanut Butter
3 Dozen Unwrapped Hershey Kisses

Roll into 1 1/2″ balls and coat with sugar. Press thumb imprint, bake 5 minutes at 375 degrees. Remove from oven, gently press hershey kiss into the impression. Return to the oven and bake 3 more minutes.

It’s been quite a while since I blogged anything about ADHD. As I looked over past blog posts, I realize I’ve taken a little vacation from learning and helping my daughter with it. I didn’t mean to, it just became easy to get complacent and right now I feel a bit chastened. Don’t get me wrong, I never forget it’s there. We deal with it every day as I struggle to find effective and successful communication with my teen daughter. But as she’s grown and made such amazing strides compensating on her own for the struggles, I’ve allowed myself to take a backseat. I haven’t been reading, learning and keeping up with information on it and I know how valuable that is. Today I just feel like I owe that kiddo a shout out. She is amazing and she can (and does) do hard things every single day!

In the past 16 months we’ve lived in three states, moved two and half times and lived in 4 different homes. That’s a boatload of new neighbors, schools, church friends and social experiences. It’s a lot of change to digest in a short time. In fact, it makes my head spin to see it written out like this! Top it all off with moving headlong into teen years and it’s no wonder I’m a bit dazed.

As a parent, it’s hard to know when and how to share important information about your kids. Everyone knows something about their children that others don’t. Sometimes this information is big, sometimes it’s small but either way it’s a balancing act for the parent to identify the right times/situations in which to share these nuggets of wisdom. You constantly ask yourself if sharing will result in greater good, or make things worse. For example, when my daughter began Kindergarten I made sure the teacher was aware of her adoption status. This wasn’t because I wanted to call attention to her being adopted, in fact quite the opposite as I wanted to avoid any awkwardness about it. I felt the teacher needed to know before her upcoming family unit that my daughter’s details about birth and inherited genetic traits would be different and potentially awkward. Moreover, at that age she herself was still developing an understanding and I needed to help make sure it was positive. It was the right time to share this information, but it is still deeply personal and can carry unexpected consequences good and bad; it has to be held carefully. Her ADHD is much like this and because of those unknown and potentially unexpected consequences, I tend to err on the side of sharing too little especially as she gets older and gains more independence. I also worry that sharing can result in preconceived ideas or judgements that could be more harmful than helpful. Most days I’m a drowning puppy just struggling to keep my head above water. This is when some of my friends would say they put a dollar in the jar for future counseling and just move on. You do the best you can at any given time with what you have, but you always worry that it’s not enough or too much.

Well, last week my daughter (now 14) had a run-in with a fellow classmate. I found myself sitting in a room with the teachers, my daughter, the other party and that child’s parent discussing the mishap and trying to resolve any unkind feelings. As soon as I understood the dynamics involved, it was obvious why there had been some fireworks. Unfortunately, I was the only one in the room who could see with that clarity because I was the only one who understood key information about my daughter’s ADHD. I found myself wishing I’d been able to share my knowledge before the confrontation. With my daughter’s permission, I was able to share it after with the teacher. While it ended on a positive note, I couldn’t help but question if I’d dropped the ball in the balancing act of sharing information which would have altered the conflict resolution scenario.

Here’s the reality. My daughter has ADHD. She will always have it. It won’t magically go away as she gets older. But as she continues to mature and develop she can learn to balance and counter its detriments and live a functional and happy life. The strides she’s made in the past two years are evidence of this. But it’s still hard and I often forget how hard. In reviewing past articles I’ve written on it I came across this list on communication and ADHD and immediately felt myself sink in my chair for how much I’ve forgotten. Four years ago I found this checklist and shared thoughts on it. The intent is for the person with ADHD to circle and rate which of the items in the list they either acknowledge themselves or have been told by others they struggle with. Constant review of the list can help them see if they’re improving. Where I felt short was the constant review because in four years the issues have shifted for my daughter a great deal.

Ability to identify and express your feelings
Check-repeat what you heard and ask if you heard it right
Join a conversation without disruption
Stay on track in a conversation
Identify and reflect feelings of others
Actively let others know you are following the conversation
Miss pieces of information-”blinks”
Ability to keep a conversation going
Voice too loud or too soft
Speak too quickly
Interrupt others
Too quiet-rarely speaking in conversations
Talk excessively
Order or boss others
Criticize-judge or make evaluative comments
Disregard or minimize statements of others

The reason I share this is an effort to help others understand what “hard” means for my daughter. Most of us have experience with several of the above issues at one point or another in our lives. But my daughter knows each item intimately and experiences all of them simultaneously, every single day. I can’t even imagine that. She doesn’t experience them because she’s not smart or doesn’t care, she experiences them because she has a medical condition that impedes her ability to communicate. She has no control over it happening, only learned responses in dealing with the results. Her condition, while not as visible as an eye astigmatism with corrective lenses, is every bit as real. In fact, the lack of visibility is harder on her because it feeds the lack of understanding and harsh judgements of those around her. I wish so much I could remember myself, as well as share with others how hard she works to keep relations good with everyone she knows. I wish the rest of us could have a little more compassion and understanding accepting her mistakes with it. If she can do hard things, so can we.

More of my thoughts on ADHD.

Taylor’s home with a bad cold today, so he took part in some of Cidnie’s school fun. They had fun making their model volcanos. Now, they’re only wishing they could speed the drying process so we can make them erupt!

Taylor also had a fun weekend babysitting his classroom’s silk worms. Mom was a little less enthusiastic about them, but she’s glad he had fun!

Saturday, we took a trip to Muir Woods where the kids got to learn about birds as a bonus to visiting the park. I think hearing what an Owl hears was one of the top day’s events.

Life with ADHD isn’t impossible, it even has its upsides. I’ve spent the last 7 years learning more about what ADHD is and what it isn’t; how to help cope with the challenges and even how to have some glimmers of success. I’m grateful for this knowledge, and one day I’ll be grateful for the reason I needed to learn it. Unfortunately, that day is not today. Today I am frustrated. Today I feel inadequate. Today, I’m drowning in a pool of irritation and inability and it looks like this:

This was my attempt at explaining to my thirteen year old daughter this morning what she does that makes me and everyone else in our family so crazy. I was trying to visually show her what it feels like to talk with her.

There was an episode on the Brady Bunch years ago about living by exact words. Greg attempts to slip up his parents and get his way by pointing out how their exact wording didn’t account for his actions. The moral of the story/episode was living by exact words is dreadfully impossible and frustrating. Well, that is our most recent development hurdle with our ADHD daughter. She gets hung up on words. No matter what we say, she seems to focus on one word to argue over. To her conversational counterpart, this feels like she’s screaming a message of not listening. In this example, I’d be saying the phrase and she’d respond with an argument that it was more like yelling, singing, etc. and not talking; completely missing the forest for the tree and causing me to want to pull my hair out in frustration.

Admittedly, we got off on the wrong foot this morning. The first topic of study resulted in a push back and battle of wills. When I started pointing out some corrections on her creative writing project she bristled. I bristled back. After a few terse words and both of us verbally agreeing to start over and “fix” the problem. I moved on to the next lesson of format when writing quotes. First, she cut me off before I could finish what I was going to say. This didn’t lend well to fixing things and caused me an opportunity to rant on how frustrating it is to be interrupted, especially when she didn’t know what I was going to say. She thought I was going to point out grammar details like capitalization and quotation marks. I told her no, actually I was going to point out with the help of the current book she’s reading how conversation is written in paragraph form. She relented a little with a simple sorry. But the moment I resumed with an example she responded with a correction on an exact word in the example. Snap.

Now, in the time it’s taken me to write this, she’s continued through her own frustration. For the first five minutes I heard pounding on the keypad of her laptop and huge sights as she worked on her story and corrections. The next five minutes brought singing of music while she typed, and the following five a request to be done on this project and work on something else. She also sent me an instant message asking me to please forgive her for making me so frustrated and she was sorry. This is one of the great upsides of ADHD. In 15 minutes the world changes and all is right for her again.

This is when I am actually a bit envious of her abilities. To work through frustrations and confrontations so quickly and so completely, to forget everything that just made you so crazy so quickly…well, suffice it to say, I think this would be a wondrous gift!

While I don’t possess this ability, I can benefit from its contagious nature. My pool of frustration is on the decline and my breathing has normalized. I still worry that I can’t figure out how to penetrate that shell of understanding. I don’t know how to reach her and help her develop these life skills that are so critical to her future success. I worry that they will become permanent handicaps for her in her future relations and life experiences. I find a measure of comfort in remember past developmental hurdles and how I worried the same way then, but she did master many of the concepts and habits that I wasn’t sure she ever would. There is hope. There is always hope. For today that has to be enough.

I’m sitting here trying to compile a few thoughts and I find they keep shifting. Hmmm, that’s a clear representation of my life at the moment. Ironically, I now live in earthquake territory so maybe my sub conscience is trying to adapt?

Perhaps, this is in part to blame for my lack of blogging lately. I keep thinking I’ll be able to get a few thoughts in order and then get back into the swing of posting more of them, but they remain ever elusive. In hindsight, some of the best posts come when I’m just able to spit (well type) it all out as it’s hitting me. But lately, I’ve had less time to ramble with my keyboard when my mind is racing.

My daily schedule has shifted in the past month. Between plans and efforts to get our ducks lined up to move back home to be closer to family and enjoy better schooling for my children, I’ve thrown in some homeschooling of my 13 year old. All the projects I’ve been doing in my mind (yes most haven’t yet formed into the tangible, physical sort yet), have been put back on hold. On the upside, other benefits have been present. Like helping my daughter with her memoir book of our recent family trip, not only did she stretch some academic muscles we also have now a nice completed book of pictures and journaling. That makes one project started and completed!

Speaking of projects, I find myself daydreaming about them a lot. In fact, I’ve become quite adept at creating things in my head. For example, my blog is updated with all my file sharing neatly organized. Additionally, the boxes of paper and photos waiting to be digitized are empty and recycled with the contents neatly organized on my portable hard drive. For that matter, all my computer files are neatly organized and updated. I’ve mastered the art of making sushi rolls and pastries. My body reflects hours of careful toning and exercising, my mind filled with hours of educational reading. See how fun it is?! Now, if I could just figure out how to transfer all those wonderful thoughts into physical actions.

It’s hard not to feel distracted when another big change is looming on the horizon. I laugh at myself remembering the thoughts I had a few years ago when everything was going so smoothly and I wondered what might be coming. If I’d only known! It’s funny how comfortable you can get busying yourself with daily grind efforts and how things that are taking all of your precious time and resources can be so quickly redefined. This is all good, the new definitions and directions are both freeing and educational in nature. Now if I could just get everything to sit still for a moment.

In a matter of eight weeks life will shift again. I’ll be in Idaho taking all the next steps toward securing new stability for my family. It will be an event that factors in extended family on both sides which brings more facets into play than one mind can rightly think about without exploding. So I attempt to push it all aside, telling myself that things will be easier when I can be doing things instead of thinking only. I shift. Again.

Perhaps it’s not so bad, this shifting. Perhaps the shifting is what enables me to maintain my balance? Yes, this is a good way to view things. Embrace the shifting.

Braces are off!

Dad says she’s getting too cute and we may have to find some ways to ugly her up a little! Mom thinks he may be right! ~wink~

Mastered his fear of heights!

Wouldn’t you know after we’d prepped the family for his anxiety over heights and thrill rides/attractions he’d show us up?

How did they get this big? And when did that happen?

This was Taylor in his Thomas Jefferson costume yesterday at school. He’s spent the last few weeks working on his biography for him. Yesterday, he had his interview in front of the class. My two favorite parts were his entry and his closing answer. I have to point out that he didn’t answer the question of whether or not he was a perfectionist with a mere yes. It was, “Yes, I am.” How perfectly fitting for this little lad!

I was so proud of him! Here’s a little video clip of his interview.

It all started with a book. Well, I should preface that the most recent event started that way. I’m actually finding this is a repeating pattern in the waters of parenting a teen.

The new “thing” for my thirteen year old daughter has been to hang out with her friends at the library after school. Generally, I’m cool with this. I’m not so naive as to believe they’re only working on homework, I understand the social elements of this age group. I’m wary of their curiosity - well, more of them educating their peers on their own understandings of said curiosities - but I can’t stop the rain from falling. So I compromise, I take a second glance at the situation and here’s what I see: I can’t control everything, and honestly I wouldn’t want to. Experience is the true teacher, but it can still involve my guidance. So I let my daughter go be with her friends and I maintain a close connection and communication with her about what happens. She’s learning that for her honesty she’s rewarded with more freedoms and can continue to enjoy this activity of library gathering. I’m grateful for this pattern, though I don’t mind telling you it quite frankly scares the snarf out of me. Last week, I learned how her friend sitting next her was chatting with a cute boy on Facebook and how she kept pulling my daughter over to see the conversation. Suffice it to say, the boy was boldly sharing what he wanted to do to her in the too typical crude language of today. Good news, my daughter is frankly sharing an event of the afternoon. Bad news, it is so obvious that this behavior is viewed by kids as both acceptable and just the way things are today. Enter the reason for this post, the book.

We were driving home and my daughter asked me what ‘p u b e s’ spelled and meant. My first instinct is a negative relation, but I answer her honestly that I don’t know, it’s not even a real word to my knowledge. She hands me her book and says, it’s right here. I read the paragraph it was listed in:
~~~~~~~~~~~
Snow Angel: i could NEVER not shave my pubes. that is just gross. but even if i did have a pubic hair problem, which i do not, u and zoe would still luv me, right?”
~~~~~~~~~~~

So my first instinct was sadly right on target. But where did it come from? What’s the point in writing like this? So I go back a few paragraphs to find the reference and find this:

~~~~~~~~~~~
mad maddie: my brother’s new girlfriend doesn’t shave her pits OR her pubes. he brought her to this family party at lake lanier this weekend and she wore a bikini.

mad maddie: it was basically like she had a pelt. the pops pulled me aside and said in this really loud whisper, “guess she forgot to mow the lawn, huh?”
~~~~~~~~~~~

I’m speechless. Between wrestling with the content itself, the idea that dad would talk like this to his daughter, the grammar, etc. I feel like I’ve been swallowed in a torrent of information leaving me disoriented. Knowing that my daughter is waiting for a response, I ask her what caused her to choose this book. She says simply her friend told her she just had to read it that it was really great. She’s just started it, which was true as this was only page three. (Incidentally, later I asked her if she’d been able to realize in her first three pages that the book was going to be full of content not worthy of her time or in alignment with her values. She said no. This, I told her is why she needs to ask for my help so she can learn how to do that for herself.)

Side story, a few weeks ago another “friend” told her about a website she just had to go to because it too was really great. We’ll leave it stated simply that the video chat site referred to is a disaster. So pulling from this experience I gently remind her that sometimes our friends don’t have the best advice and it would be in her best interest to share their suggestions with me before diving in.

Okay, so reality check here. The stuff her “friend’s” are suggesting are definitely morally corrosive. The good news is, she’s sharing them with me. I hope this means I’m playing a few cards right and that I can maintain that relationship. I can’t imagine not knowing about this stuff she’s dealing with every day. It still scares the snarf out of me.

That last line by the way is the crux of this book’s author’s reasoning. Since being exposed to this book I’ve done a little research to see how other parents were receiving it. I found an article where the author addresses being under fire for her books. She states: “…that parents anger springs from fear.”

I would like to address this because there is fear here, as I’ve clearly stated but I don’t think it’s of the variety the author is describing. I’m not afraid of tackling tough and sensitive subjects with my kids. It comes up all the time. I’m actually a very big supporter of my kids hearing the right information - from me. I’ve got a very open door policy on talking honestly about what moral and sensual things mean. My fear stems from the flippant and rampant acceptance of crudeness and lack of moral compass views thrown at our youth. This time in their life is so turbulent anyway, they don’t need any help stirring the waters they are forced to navigate. While it’s easy to recognize the physical changes taking place, they’re far from the only thing developing. These adolescent years are formative brain development years, a time when their development turns to the frontal region as they begin developing their reasoning and impulse control skills - which by the way, won’t fully mature until their mid-twenties. This is one major reason why pleasure seeking activities are so prevalent among teens. Scientifically, we can now prove how their brains are starting to process differently rewards and pleasure. So they turn outward for more social interaction and peer pressure takes center stage.

THIS is what scares me. We’re taking our youth at their most vulnerable state and asking them to process very adult moral concepts and themes. And we’re asking them to do it before their ability to successfully process it is developed. I defy you to find an adolescent who didn’t feel that pleasure and reward rush from reading a book like this, even if they’re able to acknowledge the content isn’t of moral material. With such direct and powerful image wording and descriptions let alone the addressing of topics they’ve been told by adults they aren’t ready for yet, we’ve just sugar coated an already tantalizing treat. The danger to me is how we’re helping them form their thoughts and opinions during a time of key development. Most parents don’t want to be excluded from their child’s process during this time, but tools like this book are aiding that war as well. Morals never have and never will compete with the glitz and glamour of immoral, and those presenting immoral material will never share the realistic results of the behaviors. After all, no one wants to see the disease and hardships that come from immoral choices - there’s no fun, money or profit in that. Parent’s are already at the disadvantage and children are already vulnerable - why do we need to exploit both yet more? I don’t understand it. I mean, kids have every reason to target parents in their battle for independence, we make them brush their teeth, shower and finish homework. We’re evil. Trying to help them process and understand why content like that shared above is morally corrupt is fuel to an already glowing bonfire. This is where my fear turns to anger. So yes, I am angry and it does stem from a fear, just not the fear the author is talking about.

The only thing I know to do as a parent is keep up the second glance. I can’t take it for granted that what my daughter is doing or seeing is okay - even though I know she’s got the foundation of a strong moral compass - I’ve got to take second looks. I’ve got to stay involved no matter how hard because I’m my daughter’s best advocate while she’s growing her own armor. I can’t send her into battle without full protection. So until that brain is developed fully, you can bet your buttons I’ll be crusading in front of her and I’ll gladly take on authors like Lauren Myracle and all the content she’s addressing head on.

Other thoughts on parenting teens:
Independence

I shared recently how I’ve been working on increasing my own education through available technologies today. I’ve been focusing on taking in at least one lesson a day in various subjects. With a love of history, today I watched the first part of a series on Thomas Jefferson.

It is common knowledge today that Jefferson was well educated and influential with his knowledge. Many declared his writings as “evidencing keen intellect.” It is no wonder that he would be chosen to work on writing our nation’s Declaration of Independence; a document that not only stands the test of time but also personifies the embodiment of educational wisdom.

I was struck with how we owe all we now have at our disposal for learning because of our ancestors like Jefferson. What are we doing with it? What would they say about our education system today? What more would they teach us? I fear we’ve squandered that gift. I fear we’ve lost the very art of learning.

Today we seem to care more about buzz words, statistics, standards, etc., etc., etc. than we do about whether or not our children are succeeding at gaining wisdom and knowledge. Teachers lament receiving students who come unprepared to learn their material and they are quick to point out that they have no time to review or re-teach in order to keep up with today’s schedules and standards. These standards are a direct result of our competitive desire to prove how smart our kids are. No one bothers to take the time to see if our kids are really smart or not, they just see test scores and try to find ways to increase them. One tactic is to throw more content earlier to students. Consequently, we continually increase our expectations of mastery for a broad array of subjects before most kids are old enough to reach the bathroom sink by themselves. And how do we measure the smarts and abilities of students and educators? Why, with a brilliant “one test fits all” approach. Boy we’re smart.

So, in a time when all resources were scarce, computers didn’t exist and there were no endless lists of structured programs and legislation to govern it, the most brilliant minds of our time developed. And now that we have all those things and more we’re producing a generation capable of winning texting contests. In fact, I doubt many of them could hold a candle to the educational wisdom of their ancestors. Interesting isn’t it? And it doesn’t end there. Here’s another interesting comparison between then and now. Jefferson, who we’ve already determined was brilliant and well educated would have been doomed to fail by our ’standards’ today. According to records, he started school at age 9. I’m confident that most people would completely flip over the suggestion of not starting formal education until the age of 9 today. My son is only 8 and he’s in his fourth year of his public school career. We’re not even going to go down the preschool path.

Not only did Jefferson not begin school until the age of 9, his first five years were spent on only two subjects: language and nature. History and science weren’t added until his second school at age 14 and math, astronomy and architecture wouldn’t be introduced until he was 16. I’ve shared before how my son’s kindergarten curriculum had the subjects of data analysis, algebra and geometry. I’m sorry, but I think discrete mathematics at age 4 and 5 is ridiculous. And while my son has probably had more homework in the last 4 years than Jefferson had until he hit college, I would argue that he’s not got anything on Jefferson. None of today’s hype impresses me. I simply don’t buy in to today’s theories and beliefs on education. I think if Jefferson and his peers could talk to us to day they’d have a lot more to teach us and it would have an awful lot to do with backing up, slowing down and focusing on basic and fundamental education.

I’d wager that Jefferson didn’t feel deprived by spending his first 9 years of life free of school. Kids can’t be kids today, they’re not allowed; there isn’t time for it. How can they be when a simple playground accident is treated like an act of malicious intent or they’re supposed to understand and spell words like equivalent and metamorphic by the time they’re 8? (I didn’t make those up, those are straight off my son’s vocabulary list this week.) Our expectations are out of alignment and seriously whack.

When are we going to see there’s more to learning than we’re focused on seeing today? What I wouldn’t give to spend a few days in the same room as our forefathers; we’d have a lot to talk about.

I can’t resist posting on this. I was just catching up on a million blog posts and news feeds and came across this article about San Francisco taking a stand against McDonald’s Happy Meal. As we now live in the San Francisco area I thought it an appropriate introduction! *giggle, snort*

Here’s the skinny:

So the city of San Francisco has taken a stand.

“In an effort to curb the swelling rates of kids who are overweight or obese, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted in favor of a law that would require any meals that package a free toy to include fruits and vegetables and contain no more than 600 calories or 35 percent of its calories from fat (about 210 calories or 23 grams of fat). The meals would also have to contain a beverage that’s not loaded with sugar or fat.

At a time when an estimated 17 percent of young people aged 2-19 years are obese and about an equal number are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the restriction on the popular Happy Meal is a worthy effort.”

Welcome to San Francisco.