Micah ditches Mommy

Micah comes back to my office with me after daycare on Tuesdays and Thursdays, mostly because I still have notes to type into the EMR, phone calls to return and files to strip for scanning into the EMR - and most of this just isn't possible during the day with seeing patients, so it waits until I'm done with appointments. It's boring, I know, but I try to have boxes or a balloon or something to entertain him, and there's usually snacks around. But I know it's a long wait until Steve and Thea pick him up.

Thursday my NP colleague was leaving for home, which is just down the street from the office and Micah went to follow her, stuck his hand in hers and without so much as a backward glance to me, his now not quite so adoring mother, trotted off. Karen had said she could take him home - and Micah has been to her house already back in July and she has a car seat in her car for her grandson Nate who is around Micah's age. Micah has seen her both around the office and as one of his health care providers. But still and all it just stunned me more than just a bit that he was just so OK with it. I felt like he was trading up for a better model or something.

Steve and Thea picked him up and then they were off to meet family for dinner, and I got to kill off the impressive stack of charts waiting to be stripped so the medical records people could scan them. Done, done, done - and all my charts. Of course since I'd let the pile grow to an almost unmanageable level, it took me until 10 pm to get through it all.

Generic Update

Last weekend we were in the DC area to visit Oma and for cousin Elise's 2nd birthday party, and to try and hook up with another cousin's kid who was coming to DC from Texas for a People to People Leadership Program.

Day 1 was a logistical nightmare:
- my mother left at 6:30 am for a Chesapeake Bay lighthouse cruise, departing from the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomon's;

- meanwhile, back at her ranch, my aunt was visiting overnight and was being picked up at 9:30 am by her friend who was driving up from the Richmond area and they were going to the Golden Tech-ite Reunion (a McKinley Tech reunion for anyone who graduated 51 years or more ago);

- and we were across Route 301 at the Sleep Inn, having gotten in late, and finally gotten Micah to sleep well after midnight;

- and Fred, the guy who details my mother's car, and on occasion my car, was coming at 9 am to do his thing (original plan was that he was coming at the much more civilized hour of 1 pm);

- I had a 10:45 am appointment with Lindsey to get my hair colored and cut;

- Steve had to be at my mother's house, with the kids, in time for me to take his car to go to the hair appointment, and then had to keep the kids from tearing up Oma's house;

- my aunt was returning from the reunion luncheon around 4 pm or so, and then my cousin and his son-in-law were coming after golfing somewhere in southern MD to pick her up and take her to Virginia, so someone had to be back at my mother's to be the doorman;

- and my mother was returning sometime after 6 pm from her jaunt.

Surprisingly, it all worked out

- despite my finding a note from my mother stating "LG, Clean out my car. Mom" after Fred had already arrived; this is not as easy as it sounds, because my mother's car is a rolling clutter magnet; it is not a task for the faint of heart or one that can be completed in a few minutes;

- despite being told the money for Fred was on the dresser, and me panicking when I perused both pieces of furniture in my mother's room that could be a dresser, and all the detritus thereupon, and found nothing;

- and despite calling my mother's friend Dorothy's cell phone number (which my mother left for me) and having it go right into voice mail (she had turned it off AND left it home, big help there) to see if she could ask my mother where the envelope was (found on the kitchen counter once I'd gotten to the "oh I'll just go to the ATM stage" of my panic;

- and despite being Lindsey's last client of the day; she was going to an afternoon wedding; it's not a confidence building exercise to know that the person wielding chemicals and scissors around your head is under time pressure to be somewhere else.

Anyway, everyone appeared and disappeared at the appropriate intervals, no one was locked out, cars got cleaned, gray was covered, no maritime accidents occurred, and all was well.

Sunday our only mission was to be at Belle Haven Park at 12 noon for Elise's party, and we made it, if a few minutes late. And we remembered her present and Mom's handicapped parking placard.

The party area was near the riverbank, and Micah managed not to fall in. Bonus. No one melted down, and everyone had a good time at The Very Hungry Caterpiller-themed party. Steve left for home from there, so the rest of us made a stop at the cousins' house where the little cousins got to play with each other, and in a two-for-two record, Elise managed to end her birthday clad only in a diaper and her smile. This is adorable at age 2, but it might get a little worrisome if it persists.

Thea got her first 5th birthday present from her cousins, officially opening our house's birthday season.

Monday, after checking out of Sleep Inn solo, we hung out at my mother's and then drove to the Hilton in Alexandria to hook up with Gregor. Unfortunately for him, he was being held hostage at Dulles Airport until all of the participants in his program arrived - and since we called him at around 3:30 pm, he'd already been here two hours or so and hadn't even left Dulles. We got to the hotel in advance of Gregor, so Micah and I scoped things out, Thea slept in her car seat with Mom staying with her. Once both kids were out of the car we picked a prime stalking spot in the lobby and parked on the sofas. I bought the children's cooperation with a $3.29 individual serving of Haagen-Daz ice cream for Thea and a bag of chips and bottle of water for Micah. May the hotel roast in Hades for its extortionish prices.

To burn off some energy, Thea, Micah and I went for an escalator ride, and one of the adults greeting the arriving People-to-People participants suggested a walk around the little lake, so we set out. Only to find that the path ended about one-third of the way around, and as we schlogged through the grass, and enormous tour bus turned into the hotel driveway. Thea was great about getting her run on, but Micah plopped on the grass demanding to be carried.

We made it into the hotel and back up the escalator in time, and yelled out "GREY-gor!" just as he got into our part of the lobby. Poor thing, 12 years old, cars, planes, buses and just when he's getting his bearings, he gets clobbered by a band of distantly related stalkers. He took it rather well, all in all - and since he was near the end of the group checking in, it gave us a bit of time to chat with him before he got swept into his first meeting.

This little adventure, and taking Mom along and having to get her back to her house before hitting the road put us on the road late. The children were in their pajamas, after eating dinner at Oma's, so it made getting them into bed at home easier.

11 Days Until The Big 5

Thea's birthday is eleven days away. Her party will be at school during lunch time, I'm taking the easy way out.

Her accomplishments even before hitting the ripe old age of five:

- starting to read in January 2008, pretty much on her own

- mastering simple addition and subtraction (thanks to Wu Laoshi, her after school program teacher in Pre-K)

- blowing up a balloon on her own

- learning how to whistle, though it still needs some practice

- sleepng in her own bed in her own room, finally

- beating me at Tic-Tac-Toe on more than a few occasions

- starting to learn Kung Fu in Kindergarten, she promises only to use her power on bad guys

- reading Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Chinese

- solving for 'a', as in if a + b = 10, and b = 5, then what is 'a', Daddy?

- pretty much making her mother feel like I must've been a complete turnip by comparison at that age

October 2, 2008

On this date, Micah is five months away from his third birthday and so five months from today, Early Intervention services will end. Bye-bye Ela, bye-bye Estra, bye-bye group.

In Monday's meeting, the social worker from the township schools seemed to want me to wait a bit before sending out letter requesting the Child Study Team to evaluate Micah's eligibility for preschool; more time to pass, the greater chance for Micah to improve - but all packaged in a veneer of waiting would be better in terms of scheduling around holidays and whatnot.

Screw that completely self-serving idea.

The letter goes out tomorrow. To both the social worker - who encouraged me to send it to her so she could get things moving rather than the Director of Pupil Services AND the Director of Pupil Services. Why light a firecracker when carpet bombing would accomplish so much more?

The school district has 20 business days to respond, and then 90 days to get all the evaluations scheduled. And our district prefers to do its own evaluations rather than accept any that have been done by Summit School or Micah's speech therapist.

I'm smarter than I look....maybe

Because I managed to find and install a counter on the blog, so now I will be able to tell if I'm just in this for my own amusement. (Reminder to self: Insert audio of sound of my own hand patting myself on the back.)

Today was our (Micah's and my) usual Wednesday: drop Thea off at YingHua and zip up to Summit School (with the minor pit stop at D-n-D for the large coffee), then homewards. Lately Micah sacks out in the car on the way home even before we get to the on-ramp for I-78, but today he kept me company until just below Bridgwater Commons Mall. He's now wakes even before transferring, so there's no hope of extending the nap beyond the actual time in the car. Therefore a trip to the Village Farm in Lawrenceville would extend his nap a little bit beyond the 45 minutes - but the little twerp woke up as we were getting off of Route 206 to take the back roads to Lawrenceville.

In addition to the tomatoes I was hoping for, I picked out a gigantic pot of mums and Micah chose a pumpkin, so decorating for fall has begun. Since we also killed off 30 minutes playing at the train table in the school's lobby, it was nearly time for the speech therapist to come. (She rescheduled her usual Friday morning.) Today we worked on saying mitt and meow-meow: mitt was just a new word and part of the cutting with scissors activity she brought, meow is to try and reform Micah's use of niao-niao for cat. And much to my surprise the BMW-driving therapist is a Phillies fan and listens to baseball on the radio whilst tooling around to her appointments. Not quite what I imagined. Of course listening to any sport on the radio is just below submitting myself for a pre-frontal lobotomy on the list of things I would even remotely enjoy doing.

Today at Thea's school, she started telling me The Very Hungry Caterpillar, in Mandarin - but she sort of lost the thread because her pal, Kalani, came over and was listening. The surprising thing was if I truly listened, I could pick out the numbers and some of the fruits. Thanks to the Learn with Jade DVDs. She promised to do it tonight, using her English copy of the book to help her remember how many of each fruit. This impressed her friend Lucas's mother; he's another kid in school whose parents are English-speaking so zero reinforcement of the Chinese-immersion on the homefront - one more reason I love Lucas.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Micah had his umpteenth audiogram a week ago - and because it was six months from the last one I managed to forget that to find parking in the JFK Medical Center parking lots is tantamount to driving all the way to Edison then driving half way back home, parking and then running carrying a thirty pound football, the football's diaper bag, and the purse with the referral (love those electronic referrals when you are still expected to product a piece of paper, so much for saving the trees), the insurance cards (unchanged since forever, but here's another ream of paper for you to fill in while making sure the two year old isn't snatching some stroke victims walker and dismantling it) and all the other alleged necessities.

The audiogram is basically unchanged from the umpteenth minus one audiograms that came before, though the results are allegedly more reliable since the audiologist (thanks to Ela) can now use conditioned play to evaluate him. Except that Micah's version did not include doing the first few trials together, both of us holding the plastic block to his temple waiting for the sound and then tossing the block in the bucket, which did not even have the shape-sorter lid on it, so he was bored in about two seconds and telling me to get my own plastic block if I wanted to play this game. He wanted Mommy to hold her own damn block, as well as one for Bunny Bear thank you very much. So this left me sitting on a butt-numbing hard stool, with Micah on my lap, Bunny Bear on my knee, holding plastic blocks against Bunny Bear's ear (the rabbit ones on his track suit, not even his 'real' bear ears) and another against my own head. Waiting to hear a sound. This mult-tasking balancing act sucked the life right out of me, so I could barely remember to toss my block in the bucket after Micah put his in.

He detested the bone conduction hearing aid that was used; it was a metal headband with the bone conduction aid on one end and it looked like it pinched. So all in all, same results, different day, come back in six months once I've again forgotten how horrid the parking is there. If the people weren't so nice there (the head of the department does Micah's testing), I'd be ready to find another facility closer to Princeton.

Micah's IFSP was renewed, so we have about the equivalent to another six months of services. All of the therapists, etc. will end on March 1, 2009, the day before he turns three. And now begins the transition process. Today a social worker from the township school district came for our first meeting, along with our service coordinator. It was just a meet-and-greet, scratch-and-sniff sort of get-together - though the service coordinator told the school social worker "that the parents want an out of district placement" so she wanted to get the ball rolling early. Way to let the cat out of the bag. This parent does want an out of district placement, but I have been conditioned, trained, groomed, whatever'ed into being a person who is going to play nice, investigate all options and play nicely until the district presents us with an IEP that is unacceptable. And then things will have the potential to get ugly.

I have nothing against our school district (other than the cut-off birthdate for Kindergarten is September 30, and no exceptions, and the Kindergarten is half-day so why bother fighting it anyway so say hello to private school, but all of that relates to Thea not Micah). I just know that the district has a major drive to keep children in its pre-school disabled program, and I am not going to have Micah in an environment where he is not getting what he needs because no one has the appropriate skills in auditory-oral education, and that means just because you have a speech therapist on staff doesn't begin to mean that constitutes an adequate learning environment for him. The district has better be able to furnish a report on the acoustics in its classroom, whether it can tone down background noise sufficiently so that Micah isn't being driving crazy by all the sound feeding into his BAHA, etc.

Anway, to start this off, I have to write a letter to the district, which has twenty school days to respond, and then it has ninety days to schedule all the assessments needed to make a decision about what its experts feel constitutes the least restrictive environment for Micah.

Either way, the choice is tough - in district, it's close, but not necessarily completely appropriate for his needs, or Summit Speech School, which is an hour travel each way - and hits the school district with a $55K/year tuition bill plus transportation costs.

The other parent with a son adopted from China also with bilateral atresia/microtia who invited us for lunch shortly before our trip to China to bring Micah home told me about her dealings with our township school district (not pretty) and gave me the name of a good special education lawyer.

Meanwhile and far away, Cochlear, the manufacturer of the BAHA Intenso that Micah uses, is having some sort of difficulty with the FDA, so there are BAHAs in Sweden awaiting shipment to the USA waiting for whatever the problem is to be sorted out. And from what little reading I did on the BAHA Yahoo! group, the problem is related to the titanium screw that is implanted in skull for those patients not using it on the softband (which is how Micah wears his). Which is what I'd worry about, the parts that get surgically implanted in the human body, not the little box that does the sound amplification. Unless the damn thing is emitting radioactive particles, someone had better get off their bureaucratic backsides and solve this because we have less than five months to have Early Intervention's help getting Micah a second BAHA to help him localize sound. More than anyone ever wanted to know about any of this stuff, and no pictures to compensate for all the blather.

Friday's Good Karma

Today was my day for finally mustering the mental fortitude to deal with renewing my driver's licence at the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission. This was the third time there for obtaining or renewing my license (last time in 2004, with Thea in tow, home all of a week or so from China), as well as several miscellaneous trips to obtain duplicate registrations or purchasing the Conquer Cancer vanity plates. All previous trips have made me wonder how the former Soviet Union could have created mindless, soul-less bureaucracy as an export product.

After driving Thea to school, caught behind every idiot with a driver's license who had forgotten how to use a turn signal to show intent as well as a total inability to allow enough room for others to go around while he or she holds up traffic with the unannounced left turn, Micah and I had our session with the speech therapist this morning; her whole idea of introducing Micah to scissors was a big fat non-event. He got to make two snips in a strip of meatballs and then glue them onto a paper picture of spaghetti - even with the coveted scissors he was bored in about three meatballs. And now I have to spend 15 minutes morning and evening hyper-correcting him for pronunciation, I think I'll leave that to Steve.

Micah's turning into quite a mynah bird, repeating everything he hears. Unfortunate when it's "stupid idiot" called out to the car in front of us.

So after speech and after applying a light coating of spackle to my face, Micah and I set out for the NJMVC. We got there at 11:45 am, and in addition to getting the driver's license we also went for a duplicate registration (different lines, no one-stop shopping, so it's not quite all sunshine and puppies) and were back in the car by 12:05 pm. And in the whole process, only encountered one snotty humanoid employee (the receptionist). Micah just loved standing on the yellow taped lines - he lined himself up next to me while I was having my picture taken and then lining up next to the guy in front of us at the registration section. (Get this, the chick flashed my current-about-to-expire license photo on the screen and said do you want this or a new one? I almost kept the four-years-younger me, but decided to go for the real deal)

Now I'm just sitting around waiting for the meteor to land on my head because that kind of stuff doesn't happen to me, so there will be a karmic trade-off somewhere down the line.

Meanwhile, back to life with an almost five-year old, Thea blew up her first balloon last night. She's been trying and trying, but just not getting the coordination of breathing, pinching the balloon shut while inhaling, and the power to force the air in. Then, it just happened. It was rather cool - and a redemonstration was captured on film to put installed on the blog at a later date.