only who i am has moved to wordpress!

My new digital ranting grounds can be found at onlywhoiam.wordpress.com.

This blog will stay around for a while so that everyone can adjust their links and feeds and the like...

moving?

I may be moving only who i am to wordpress. The old new blog (or new old blog?) can be found here.

If I can figure Wordpress out, I'll probably stick with it, but jeez, is it different from blogger.

levity?

So this morning I had the honor of landing on the blog rhymes with write for the first time and laughed my head off at several of the entries. It made me wonder why all of my blog entries are so serious.

Blogging time has been eaten up lately by Facebook time. I love Facebook, because it has brought me back into touch with a lot of people I had either given up hope of seeing again because we last saw each other in 1991 when we graduated from high school, people I loved dearly when I worked with them for brief weeks in the summer at Concordia Language Villages, or people I wring my hands about not calling as often as I should. Or people I would call who would not call me back. Now I at least know that they're alive because they update their status every now and then or send my pet cat Lola a homegrown coconut in Pet Society.

Still, Facebook doesn't allow a person to craft good writing - at least beyond coming up with a pithy way to share 'I'm tired' in your status update for the nth day in a row. So on our nap walk this morning (I walked, E napped, he seems to find this really the ideal way to fall asleep, being pushed around in a buggy cozied up between a sheepskin and a double-thick fleece blanket), I decided: less Facebook, more time to blog. And blog something funny, or interesting, or random, and not just frustration or sadness about Down syndrome or life or the like.

(Although I just looked through recent posts and noticed that there was plenty of randomness, like kombucha.)

So what's new?

I've become the mother of a kindergartner who rides the school bus home. Whoa, when did that happen? Love the availability of the bus, as E usually goes down for a nap around 11 and I was having to wake him around 11:40 to go get T at school.

It freaking SNOWED on October 10th here. It's melted already, thank God, but really... snow? Snowpants? All that? On October 10th?!

E has started belly crawling (my pacifist term for 'combat crawling' or 'army crawling'). Put something desirable across the room and he will very determinedly inchworm his way across the room to get it. He also has two brand-new, shiny white little teeth. Both of these - the crawling and the first tooth - happened on Michaelmas, the festival of St. Michaël. Michaelmas (pronounced mick-el-mus) is about preparing ourselves for winter and drawing up our inner strength and light to get through the dark season. Talk about drawing up inner strength! Pop a tooth and become mobile!

More to say about the tattoo I want, but that deserves its own post.

T's favorite joke:

Knock, knock!
Who's there?
Who!
Who Who?
Is there an owl in here?

I HAVE CONQUERED THE SQUASH.

walking a fine line

Today was our back-to-school ECSE (early childhood special education) "team meeting" of sorts, with me, E, T (ugh), E's regular teacher, the ECSE case manager/supervisor and a random person from the deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) department who showed up even though E's teacher (Mrs. D) called her to cancel. She figured that Mrs. D had actually gotten the date wrong and meant a different date she should cancel from her schedule, and came to this one just to be safe.

She wasn't supposed to come to this one, because she wasn't supposed to come to evaluate E and whether he would qualify for DHH services until I signed the form saying that i wanted him evaluated for DHH services. This one was just to review E's progress thus far and to adjust his individual education plan (IEP) if necessary.

In the past month, in the absence of his teacher (they got August off), E has begun doing "so big!", clapping, waving as a greeting, verbalizing 'ba', 'pa', 'da', 'ma' and 'na' (and 'bla'!) and sitting unassisted (and catching himself as long as he goes forward... if he goes backward, boom! followed by 'WAAH!').

I swear, E hates to perform for Mrs. D. Whenever she's over, he looks at her dull-ly. He will play a little, but he rarely verbalizes. Part of this has to do with the fact that he always seems to be ready for a nap when she arrives, even though his time with her is 9 AM. Still, he got up this morning at 6:30, so naptime would be 9:30. Around that time, not only did he start to yawn, but he filled his diaper, while everyone was asking me questions about how hearing, noting how well he responded to external stimuli and T was trying to engage Mrs. D in a talk about starting kindergarten tomorrow.

I was feeling highly overstimulated, and I would guess that E was too. People wouldn't even leave him alone long enough to take a shit. I finally said "hey, listen, he hasn't gone for a day and a half, and we really need him to GO. So this is good, and I want to leave him alone to just poop, all right?".

By the time they left an hour later, E was crying and unhappy, T was bouncing off of the walls and I had to get us ready for dropping off T's belongings at school and a picnic after that. E fell asleep with his bottle but then would not stay asleep when I tried to lay him down. There was much unhappiness.

I was unhappy, too, and the worst part is that I invite these people into my home and work with them to keep tabs on my kid. Every week I get more suggestions on how I can best "help" E to meet his next "goal". And I am, frankly, starting to get a bit jaded about the process. Now granted, I am sure there are many families out there who would have no idea how to even interact with their child with a learning disability, who might leave them to sit in a chair all day or not talk to them. We aren't these people. We talk and play with him like we did with T. For the most part, I have let go of any expectation of when E will reach all of the milestones that children meet as they develop, because he is reaching them... he's just doing it in his own time.

So why do I have to turn them into 'goals' that must be observed twice per session on two separate dates in order for them to be documented? If a retarded kid claps joyfully but his special ed teacher doesn't observe it twice per session on two separate dates, does he make any noise?

Sorry, that was crass, but that's how I'm feeling lately. In the absence of his special ed teacher, he seemed to make MORE progress. Perhaps because we weren't nitpicking and documenting his every move and just enjoying him?

Even though it may not sound like it, I am seeking input on this one. Those of you with kids with DS who are reading this - did you find ECSE useful? unnecessary? the best thing since sliced bread? Did you have to tweak it to make it work for you? As we see it right now, the most useful part of his ECSE has been our OT, who has taught us infant massage. At the same time, she is rather adamant about him wearing special shorts to hold his legs together because she thinks he won't ever get his knees underneath him in order to crawl because he tends to be so frog-legged, and he's so strong. Amazingly enough, he is working on putting his knees underneath him all on his own, without the shorts. Still, we are only "entitled" to her services every other month - she alternates with the PT who has been fairly useless.

I can see the value in having someone who specializes in speech development and hearing loss working with him. He has mild hearing loss in his left ear and mild to moderate loss in his right, both of which may be due to fluid in the inner ear. And kids with DS usually have some speech difficulties. But how do you work on speech with a baby? I guess we'll find out.

I just want to let him be. I don't really want him to go to school in this district anyway. My gut is telling him that he will do fine all on his own, without someone coming in and bringing their bright green plastic, light-up electronic singing caterpillar. (It was all I could do to not make a snide comment about how deprived my poor children are, what with their wooden and cloth toys and all. Sheesh, poor T, all he ever plays with in the backyard is a few tools and an old maple stump. Someone call CPS for neglect.) Still, what if I'm wrong?

take away my crunchy parenting card

If I don't drop out, they're going to kick me out. So I'm going, I think? - and voluntarily - and here's why:

1. I love wearing my baby, but when I do, he sweats like crazy. When he sweats like crazy, he gets dehydrated, and when he gets dehydrated, he gets constipated. When he gets constipated, life gets really bad. Also, when he takes a nap in the Ergo, his nap is very short. When he falls asleep in his buggy (lying flat, good for the spine), he sometimes sleeps for up to 2 hours and wakes up HAPPY. But constant babywearing and demonizing the stroller: nope. Strike one.

2. The boobs don't work. Milk bar is dry. Baby can't latch anyway, probably partly due to hypotonia and tongue thrust associated with Down syndrome. As has already been documented, all has been tried. I make no apologies except to him for him missing out on something I couldn't control anyway. Baby is formula fed with bottles. Strike two.

3. I've given away or am in the process of giving away all of my cloth diapers. PT recommended to us to diaper E with the absolute trimmest possible diapers to minimize the typical duck-footed leg/hip development of babies with DS. Every cloth option we tried made him look like a frog. Completely. Then I found out that Jo was bitter the entire time we did cloth with T about spending all of her spare time in the kitchen and in front of the washer, and that she thought that disposables were a very, very good idea. Particularly the disposables from Costco. While I did agree that we could do disposables because of the leg/hip development issue, I lobbied hard for a greener option, like Nature Baby and the like, but she totally shut that down with this pearl of complete wisdom:

"I would rather pay the big bucks to put organic food into his mouth than pay them to provide him an organic diaper to shit in."

Grrrrr... damn you for being so right! Strike three.

So... aren't I everything that the hard-core, judgmental crunchy mamas love to poo-poo? I push my baby around in his stroller, then sit down to change his disposable diaper and then feed him formula out of a bottle? I am straight out of a mainstream parenting magazine! And yet... I DON'T CARE! I'm doing what I feel I need to for my kid... and really, isn't that what counts, despite the opinions of some others who think they know better?

My friends seem to still like me anyway.

third new year's resolution accomplished: blog roll (somewhat) updated

I managed to add a handful of the DS blogs I really want to make an effort to follow. I am just guessing there are more out there which I've left off simply because I suck I'm busy trying to get to making that cup of coffee every day and don't read all of the blogs I want to. I want to read your blog too, even if I've left it off of the list. Bring it to my attention. Thanks.

attack of the killer scoby (cue violins from Psycho)

In 2007, I fell in love with kombucha, a tasty, kind of vinegary beverage that's supposed to be very good for you. The first time I drank it, I think I made a face, but I couldn't stop drinking it. (I've been told that this is your body's way of saying "MORE! MORE! DETOXIFICATION! YES!".) The stuff is, however, expensive, and I read that making it is easy, so I got a scoby (acronym for symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) and set out to make my own.

I found the most thorough and entertaining instructions on brewing kombucha at bacteriapimp along with a lot of great pictures of what healthy scobies are supposed to look like.

I was doing great with brewing kombucha until I got pregnant with E. I drank kombucha for about 8 weeks into my pregnancy, and then the smell of it was suddenly the highest form of bad one day and I stopped. I ended up just pouring the whole batch into the compost and writing it off to my über-sensitive pregnant sniffer. I promised to get back to brewing some day.

That day came this year when two friends wanted to learn how to brew their own kombucha. I knew someone who always has a spare scoby, and I had the knowledge, and so I decided to both help them out and dive back in myself. I did okay for a month, maybe two; and then I started neglecting my brewing duties. The brewing kombucha would sit and ferment happily in the warming oven of the stove - no direct heat, but plenty dark and cozy - and the kombucha would just get extra-sour. Good for warding off molds, not so good for drinking. One batch was on the verge of impossible to drink, and with that batch I vowed to always, always always keep up with my brewing so I didn't have a repeat of that batch.

That was about 3 months ago.

Yes, the last batch of kombucha has been fermenting for 3 months. Or longer; I forget. Quite possibly 4. 5? Who knows. At any rate, the most interesting thing happens when you let kombucha go that long: the scoby grows. And grows. And grows. AND GROWS.


Until it is a completely solid mass verging on a foot thick.

(That's a gallon jar.)

OK, only the top 6 inches were actually solid. I had to take a huge carving knife and cut through it so that I could get an edge out over the lip of the jar and then twist, pull, squeeze and finesse this huge blob of slippery, congealed scoby out of its happy home. Hacking at a kombucha scoby felt a bit murderous... after weighing it (and photographing it for posterity) I rushed it out to the compost bin, dumped it, quickly replaced the lid of the composter and hurried back into the house, as if I were afraid that something was going to come avenge the scoby's murder. The part that I removed and did not keep for future brewing weighed over 3.5 pounds.


The very bottom of the scoby was absolutely gorgeous... well, as scobies go. It was full of lovely, floaty dark brown yeasts. I kept the bottom inch of the scoby, as well as the cup and a half of kombucha that was left from the original GALLON of tea. I was actually surprised that there was so much liquid left but I think that the scoby sealed it in well and kept it from evaporating.

The new batch of tea is brewed, the sugar has been stirred in and it is cooling, and tomorrow morning I will set the scoby a-swimming. I hope it will be happy (if I listen closely, do you think I'll hear it saying "ah! ah! new caffeine! new sugar!"?) and in a week, I WILL be bottling kombucha and starting a new batch. No more 8-inch-thick mats. I swear!

by the way, Stacy N and all other 'bucha brewer wannabes: I will have baby scobies again, and can put your name on one.