Learning and pimping... It ain't Easy....

I am an active parent.  I am protective, supportive, encouraging and super motivated to encourage him to be the best he can be and model that as best and as much as I can.  I do not rely on the school to teach my child.  I rely on them to support our family in his educational needs.  I seek outside professionals for important therapies that my child needs that will help him be able to learn.  Things he doesn't get at school or at home, I seek out for him because I recognize it is important.   I struggle along with him (and because of him) to engage his little mind in learning when I see the strain in his eyes, the taxing demand on his ability and the defeatist attitude he assumes.  Learning is not easy.

Let me repeat that ... Learning is not easy.  (Neither is pimping ~ have you heard that song recently?).
Especially when learning also requires you to sit relatively still, to listen and follow multi-level instructions, to follow along on worksheets that are busy while sitting in a classroom of peers, to be active and attentive for large portions of the day and do it all while fighting the noises, smells and movements of others as well as the deeply seated drive in your body to engage all your gross motors in wiggling, moving and generally fidgeting.  Learning is developing a building block, a foundation, for the next thing.

But what if that foundation kept crumbling and you had to fix it before you could add to it?  And what if it was hard to fix it because the pressure you put on it caused it to crack.  Or the tools you needed to use were so loud you had to find your headphones and while you were looking for them you lost your hammer so you had to look for that.  And when you had yourself together, you remembered you really had to go to the bathroom.  Finally, you are ready to fix the crack and move on to something else but now that crack has totally crumbled and you just throw the hammer at it and push it all the way down.  Now you can't add anything else to it because you have to start over. THAT is how my child is learning.  Some days it may just be a little crack while other days the whole side of the building caved in over night and it has to be fixed before we can add more to it.

That being said, I send him to school with the greatest teacher and all the "tools" I can afford for the success of his day.  I help him at home for long periods of time with reading and writing.  We engage every sense in every way to learn.  We try and we cry.  Because we believe his education is important.  I also engage my little guy in amazing extra activities based upon his interests and abilities.  I open doors for him to participate in programs and interact with peers so that he can learn and grow socially and emotionally as well as physically and educationally.  I encourage his uniqueness and his ability to make individual choices even when I disagree.  Learning takes place in more than just the school... it can take place on a field or at the roller rink.  And for us it often does.

And yet through all of my encouragement and support I am astutely aware of age and ability appropriateness.  Perhaps because I am so aware of our challenges and successes I am curiously just upset by a series of occurrences in which materials were brought home from school that (in my opinion) should not have been allowed.  I have tried to remove my self from the situation and see it from a different view.  I would still be curiously bothered.  Material not appropriate for a child at the age of 6 ~ but a child who struggles to read and learn.

The problem is that this is material HE was ALLOWED TO CHOOSE.  There is not a section or area of appropriate material for a 6 year old, or 8 year old or 12 year old. There is free choice.  And I do not disagree that children should have choice BUT I think some boundaries need to be put in place.  For curious reasons, the fact is that repeatedly my child has used his CHOICE and brought home materials that were not age appropriate, he has not the slightest ability to actually read and the reason he gives me is simply because he has free choice.  Because it has happened so frequently (more than the 3 books I have pictured here), I have oddly lost my patience with it.

I do not believe having this ability to choose these books promotes literature or reading.  It does not encourage my child to read.  And if I attempt to read these to him, he has no desire to listen because the content is also not engaging for a 6 year old.  Free choice for a child like mine opens up a whole new foundation problem (if we refer back to the building reference).  Free choice often means he will do what ever he can to push the limit of the boundary.  Like if I walk him down the candy isle and allow him to choose one candy he will scan the whole isle several times and choose the LARGEST bag/package even if he doesn't like it and want that one because it is his choice and he wants the biggest.  So free choice in selecting material to bring home is just about grabbing something that looks hard or is big and fat or heavy... these have all been reasons he gives me for bringing home the books.

The weirdness is that I am a pretty open minded mom... YET ~ I would not take him to a video store and allow him to purchase Grand Theft Auto.  Nor do I allow him to watch The Family Guy on tv.  Nor do I take him to see movies at the theater or home that are above his ability to understand and process.  Nor do we allow him to watch much news because the fact is so much murder and mayhem make him anxious.  Nor would I go to the public library and allow him to rent a book from the young adult section.  Sure he has the ABILITY to play, watch or look at all of these... but there is nothing appropriate about allowing him.  My feelings apply in regards to the materials he has brought home over the last 4 months.  It is just not ok.

I have spoken to the appropriate people.  I have spoken at length to my son.   And yet when he gets the chance the next time, he will do the same thing.  He is like that.  Maybe like my kind husband encourages ..  I should just stop letting it get to me ~ who cares it is just a book, you don't have to read it ~ is his attitude.  And now maybe I will.  I have done what I can and I can just leave them in the backpack and forge on.

** Please do not interpret this as an attack on anyone.  It is not.  Nor is it a picture of my relationship with anyone.  It is a situation that has gotten me all agitated and because generally the response is to tell me I am over reacting when I do not think so.  I just needed to cleanse my mind of this strange occurrence and THIS my friends is how I do it... Move on now people... **

My glued up life

In our house, the struggles for sleep are very real.  And often I complain and bemoan the fact that we operate on little sleep, weird sleep and no sleep.  For a parent like me, it is a fact of life.  If your child wakes occasionally with a nightmare or leg cramp ~ multiply that by 100 and you will understand how it works.  We are not faced with screaming or crying.  We are faced with alert activity levels.  Where your child may be up for 20 minutes or an hour even, mine will be up for HOURS.  He will be hungry, active and not have a care in the world about the time.  He has no sense of time.

I share these issues not for solutions.  Because it is curious.  Because it is important for several reasons... first because the struggle is REAL and not just ours.  We just share it.  Because if you are an educator, there are other children out there who may have similar night issues and run on different level of energy in the day.  Because ADHD, autism and a range of issues have disturbing sleep patterns and to understand you need to just hear that the struggle is real.  I assure you... someplace out there is a mom as exhausted as I feel with similar nights and no one to GET IT!

SO..... Last night was off.  Could be because break was over and he was troubled by school.  Could be he had a ton of Cheetos and the artificial yumminess was bugging him.  Could be that he was overtired. Could just be for no other reason... just off.  He struggled to settle down and go to sleep but finally made it to sleep at 8:30pm.  At 10pm he was WIDE awake and chatting and bouncing off the walls.  At that moment I wondered what we had done that made him behave so "off".  At 11 he was up eating a sandwich with Doug (who does not handle it well).  Doug sat with Espen until midnight when he came to bed and said Espen was asleep.  At 1:30am the sound of a child in the room telling me that he was watching TV and if my feet were bugging me he knew what we could do to help. And he ran off.  WHAT THE WHAT.... so I drag myself out of the bed from the warm slumber I had just reached.  To discover an infomercial on and legos everywhere.  Espen was jittery.  He was wide awake.  He could not be still.  His eyes were huge.  Like he was on drugs... I honest asked Doug if we had given him melatonin or mistakenly his meds....

And yet he was so polite, happy and informed.  And proud.  He had gotten glue and built some lego shapes and "kragled them".  I was just coming into focus and it dawned on me to ask where he had found the glue because I keep it all put in a secret spot!  He was so excited to tell me he had gotten it from downstairs.

Now I was totally awake and in focus....  He had used his headlamp to sneak past where we were sleeping, down the stairs in the black of night to the creepy laundry room where he remembered I had taken his glue pen weeks ago and put on a ledge.  He retrieved the glue and creeped back up the stairs to the living room and got to creating his masterpieces.  He had the TV on and watched some information about a system to relax the feet.

I can't be mad at him for being who he is.  I fed him again and decided I better just stay in the bed with him.  So it took some pretty firm mom skills to get him to be still.  As you know, being still is the key to falling asleep!  It also got me an elbow to the face in the dark (my life is rife with opportunity to be injured).  At 3:30am he was softly snoring and I had felt his body finally relax and drift off to sleep.  I got out of his bed and managed a few hours of sleep before the alarm sounded for me to start my day and Doug left me to it... going off to work at 7!

Night wakening can be problematic.  We are in a rental and have just been hoping he stays inside the house.  He has not left or run for a long time ~ we are fortunate and get lazy.  The rental is hard to secure and we are here a short time.  However, he passes the front door before he ever gets to the kitchen.  It is secured with one door lock.  I may never hear him.  And so now I must worry and booby trap it at night so I can hear him if he should decide to leave.

Medication for sleep.... OF COURSE there is some.  We opt not to use it.  There is not a right or wrong answer here.  We can go for long periods of time with no wake ups ~ and since moving it is even better and we anticipate with the new house, the added insulation in his room will allow him a very peaceful and quiet slumber.  At some point in his life he will make choices about medication.  We can manage with little sleep because we feel we must help him figure out how to rest and manage himself when he is rousted with active imagination at night.  To function as he is in our society as it is, he will have to find coping skills.... and he will.  And amazingly this child can function quiet well with very little sleep.  He is today...

As for me.... well I am glad to be a stay at home mom who was able to hit the trail this morning and drink an extra cup of coffee.  My day is full and I have no time for rest beyond that.  Tonight we will all go to bed a little early and just pray the sleep demons are at bay....