Happy Halloween and We’re Off!

Two things:

1. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!

Fluffy had a ball trick-or-treating tonight in our neighborhood under black and grey clouds and in and around beautifully balmy breezes. He went as W1001, his creature from the computer game, SPORE.

When Fluffy described the creature, Dave was aghast. “Tell him he can’t wear pink! Boys his age don’t wear pink!” 

“I will do no such thing!” I retorted. “It’s Halloween! It’s a costume! And besides, W1001s are ALL pink. The boys and the girls. Everybody knows that.”

And so, pink he did wear. With a smattering of white:

 

 

W1001, side view without mask...

 

 

W1001, after trick-or-treating, with mask...

 

 

And one giant yellow and black eye seen on his back in the second photo.

 

2. We’re off to Portland, Oregon tomorrow morning for family immersion program at the PACE (Parent and Child Enrichment. Now there’s a wonderful acronym).  

For an entire week! La la!

We will report in upon our return.

Carry on. 

xx!

 

 

 

Hopeful Parents Today–thoughts on medication…

Gang? I’m at Hopeful Parents today. Come on over.

 

And come back tomorrow for pictures of Fluffy’s, well, unique Halloween costume!!

 

 

Acronyms with meaning and magnetism?

I am so thrilled by everyone’s comments on their dream school. I am amassing all the responses, ideas, visions. Not sure where it will all go; they’re percolating. Me love percolation, the word alone, like something surprising and satisfying is bubbling, transmuting–purrrrrrrrrrrcolaaaaaaaation. Mmm.

I want to make bumper stickers and t-shirts but first, I need a good name, a good acronym. Any ideas?

RISE seemed good = Re-Imaging Schools for Everyone but it turns out there are bazillion other organizations with that very name.

I was just in the shower, brainstorming with the bottles of shampoo. It turns out, I’m not very good at this. All my ideas spell things like:

MESS (Meaningful Educational Strategies in School)

MEEK (Meaningful Education for Every Kid)

CREAK (Creating Real Education for All Kids) 

er, not quite what we’re going for. 

I tried DREAM Schools (Designing Rich Education for All…what? here is where I get stuck. Mildren?)

REAL Schools = Re-Imaging Education for All…Lids? Learners? sort of weak. 

Energizing Kids for Success

REAP? Re-Imaging Education for All People? 

 

Anyone?

oh my god, this movie looks terrifyingly amazing

Precious

 

Wow.

Will you join me for a million baby crawl on Washington?

Go here to join the baby crawl on Washington to demand toxic chemical reform in our household cleaning supplies! 

Create your own baby and join the crawl!

Support my baby: Go here. Click on Find A Crawler. Choose: by Baby Name. Enter: Wyatt. When you see him crawl by in his blue onesie, holding his flag, click him!

Re-imaging School

 

Fluffy on the flower bridge

I started homeschooling Fluffy when he was kicked out of preschool, exactly five years ago this month. It was reflex. The charming, small, Waldorf-inspired program couldn’t have been more gentle and introductory, two mornings a week with a teacher, an assistant, and seven other three-to-four year olds but it was too much for my guy. Unless he was getting undivided one:one attention from the teacher, he hit, bit, threw things, ran around and, flailed the curtains, knocked over chairs. The local school district wanted me to enroll him in their program, a brightly lit large cluttered busy room with fifteen other kids. It was plainly counter-intuitive, like offering a bloody mary to someone newly sober and allergic to tomato juice.

 

Ah, no thank you.

 

I’ve been homeschooling since. It’s been quite a journey, a learning experience, for both of us. I never questioned homeschooling at first. It was the only choice for Fluffy. That I knew, so what was there to question? But after a time, the stress of the isolation started to wear me down. I would say to people, “I’m homeschooling TO school,”  meaning, I’m doing this now so that Fluffy can, one day, be in school, thrive in school. And then I’d look anxiously off into the distance, the lines around my eyes and lips forming like time lapse photography on a riverbed during a drought.

Up until  a few months ago I called myself a homeschooler out of necessity, a reluctant but committed homeschooler because even though I have absolutely loved being home with Fluffy, witnessing his growth, sharing silly and fun adventures, literally learning along with him through books and field trips (I tell you, the things I didn’t learn in school!), I always thought it would be easier, better for both of us, if he could happily be in school, feel part of a group, log fat chunks of his life with other kids and grown ups, be influenced by many different minds and styles, have that independence.

Then something interesting happened. I realized that’s not true. I’m not a reluctant, committed homeschooler. I’m a happy, committed homeschooler.  I love my life. I feel lucky. I feel changed. I feel honored. I feel enlightened. I feel cut loose, empowered to be a free thinker the way Fluffy has always been. One is let to believe that stepping outside the bounds of the current educational system will be varying degrees of scary, overwhelming, impossible, and forbidden but it is, in fact, liberating.

I still want Fluffy to have friends, feel part of a group, be influenced by interesting people of all ages and different styles. I still want him to emerge into greater and greater independence and autonomy as I do the same in the grown-up world but I’m not in any hurry. And I also seriously doubt whether his journey will include a ’school’ in the typical sense, at all. 

I don’t think it’s accidental that over the last week I have talked to five different parents whose kids (all with Asperger’s) are currently being let down by the school system. So much so that in four of those cases, the parent has withdrawn their child from school, taken them home, and placed a toe on the threshold of homeschooling. The teachers have used restraining holds, put the crying, terrified child in empty rooms and held the door closed, been unable to deal with the child’s mounting response to not feeling understood that an ambulance was been summoned to cart the child off to the psychiatric ward. In some cases, the behavior of the teachers is quieter but no less troubling because the overall attitude comes from tsk-tsking the child’s ‘problem’, their attitude, their potential aggression, etc etc.

It makes me so upset I could spit. 

In the best of worlds, I believe that teachers are doing the best they can. They care. They try. They implement strategies they think will help. Or, more to the truth, they implement strategies they know and hope that it helps.

I’m not here to bash teachers. I’m really not. But I believe the current educational systems in place for the most part, need a complete and total overhaul. They need to be RE-imagined. We need to go back to the drawing board, start with brainstorming sessions that think entirely OUT OF THE BOX.

There are some wonderfully innovative schools out there. I want to know about all of them. I want to go visit them, study them. And then I want to synthesize what I’ve seen, learned, with what I’ve experienced over the last five years and see if I can imagine the kind of educational structure that could truly serve Fluffy one day. I have a feeling if it worked for him, it would work for a few other kindred spirits as well. 

It would have to start with small classes. And I mean small. Not ’small’ classes of 12-15 kids. I mean classes of 4 – 6 kids, maybe 6-8 tops. That’s a lot of information, 8 kids in a room with a teacher or two. That’s 10 bodies, moving, talking, thinking. I know my writing group of 7 goes haywire when more than one of us talks at the same time and we’re a bunch of relatively NT grown ups sipping tea in comfy chairs.

So, now it’s your turn. What are your thoughts? Ideas? Criteria? For the ideal educational system for your ASD child?

Don’t think of what’s possible or realistic. Just dream.

a week of being 50

hey! guess what? i like 50.

i like it!

it feels weighty but not heavy. it feels ripe and powerful, like i’m gonna kick a little ass. 

i’m entering a decade of expansion. lord knows the last decade, the decade of my forties, was about contraction. i had to shrink the world over here, my world, fluffy’s world, make it small enough to hold gently in my hands, small enough to step into and not be flattened by big winds and open views. small. manageable. but nice. gentle. safe. interesting. safe. fun. safe. 

are you noting a pattern?

it’s still about ’safe but not too safe’, the magic ratio wherein one can stretch without undo stress. in fact, that’s my entire homeschool curriculum in a nutshell: create the safe but not too safe experiences for maximum stretching and minimum of stressing. for both of us.

on a related note–hear this: fluffy is wearing jeans! regular, zip-up, button at the top, jeans. his first! he’s worn them all day. “I like them, mom. they feel good.”

i can’t tell you how much that thrills me. fluffy in jeans.  we’ve tried them before, jeans and other zip-up, button or snap variety and they were all NO GOs. only elasti-waist numbers worn like martinis–shaken with a twist. but now! 

is it silly to be thrilled by such a thing? 

who cares if it is?

that’s the power of the freedom fifties.  

 

Happy Cincuentanera to Me!

Me = 50. So far, so good. 

The crowds are dispersing; I woke up with even a bit more space inside my head.

We had family morning cuddle time as usual but this time, Dave, Fluffy, and Beegu climbed into bed with freshly brewed coffee, freshly wrapped presents (wrapped in paper decorated by Fluffy’s crayon cursive messages and space battle cartoons!) and my freshly purchased iPhone. 

La la!

Breakfast was a fat slice of homemade raspberry-mango pie baked by my husband. That’s right. My husband baked a pie. For me. His first, ever.

Yum.

After pie, the doorbell rang. Beegu skidded across the slippery floor and barked vigorously, if a little nervously. A little old man stood on my porch holding a beautiful bouquet of flowers from my dear friend Kim in NYC. Behind him the sun sparkled as rain fell in silver needles.

“Wow. Rain and sunshine and flowers!” I exclaimed.

“Yup.” he replied, zipping up his coat. “One minute it’s dark as night; the next minute, sun’s blazing through my windahs and then, by golly, it’s raining all over.”

Yes. ‘Ain’t it the truth.

Last night, two new writer friends took me out to dinner. I wore a delicate necklace from my darling sister. I’ve gotten many a birthday call and message from many a friend, virtual and otherwise.

I am feeling incredibly lucky, buoyant, energized. 

Many heartfelt thanks to all of you out there. You have ALL enriched my life and fattened my heart.

And now, my personal goal: to learn the theme song from The Piano (a beautiful movie highly recommended), called The Heart Asks Pleasure First by my birthday.

I’m a LONG way from performance level but in the spirit of spitting perfectionism in the eye (something I ask Fluffy to do every damn day), I offer it up here (Fluffy and I have a tiny conversation about a third of the way through):

Oh poo. I had it working earlier…

last day in my 40s

today is my last day in the 40s.  

if you think i’m milking this transition, you’re right. i need the whole pack of wolves for this one. 

yesterday, my AARP card arrived in the mail. uninvited.

M told me to throw it out, at least put it out of sight. i followed his advice. how can i be a card-carrying member of an association of RETIRED PERSONS when i haven’t even gotten my career off the ground?

today, i awoke with a tiny bit of space in my very crowded mind. small but significant.

i’ve mentioned the stacks and piles of things in my home before and i want you all to know i am not using hyperbole. they really are everywhere. i haven’t been able to figure out how to sort through them, how to deal with them. i say this with sincerity. i pass by them, splicing them out of my view. every once in a while, i stop and look down, staring, scratching my head. i can’t quite make out what one would do first. what? kneel down. see, right there is an issue. my knees  have not been the same since john robison led me on a three-hour rigorous mountain hike a month or so ago, tromping ahead of me with his back straight and his legs strong, me scurrying behind panting saying things like, did you bring bug spray? and what’s that you just said about snakes?

the knees are shot. so i can’t kneel.  i could bend at waist, fold over at the center line and poke through the items. but then (a) my face would instantly pulse with blood and (b) what would i do with said items? 

i see this as good news actually, portending a shift that is on the way. i haven’t been able to deal with the stuff because the gal who used to deal with that sort of thing is no longer here. the one who used to burn the candle at both ends, ramp up the adreneline and churn through the task. i haven’t been able to deal with the stuff because i’ve been waiting for the new gal.

i wonder what she’ll be like?

today, i’m having a peek. 

once i noticed the tiny bit of space, the infinitesimal clearing in the mind crowd, i had an impulse to clear off my desk, the one i’m in front of right now.

then the doorbell rang and julia, my new writing friend, was standing there holding out the most spectacular cupcake i’d ever seen. “to celebrate the eve of your birth. everybody needs a cupcake on their birthday eve.’

then my sister called and left a message a day early, she said, since our mother would  have been in labor at this moment, fifty years ago, and that means, she continued to say,  i was in there, in blast off position, ready to break through.

think of that. we must have really want to get here to be willing to go through a whole person. 

i found my sweatshirt, the black cotton hoodie that i’ve been looking for the last two months.

and i just returned from a rehearsal of my new African Spiritual choral group led by Evelyn Harris, she of Sweet Honey in The Rock fame (she’s the second to the last on the left). i adore her. she put me with the tenors, my voice reverberating in deep down low, holding the ground.

and because of this space, i sang my heart out. i didn’t know all the notes in the new harmony, but i didn’t care. the gals around me did. as i sang, i listened, sliding in and out of where i was meant to be.  

this little light of mine

i’m gonna let it shine

this little light of mine

i’m gonna let it shine

this little light of mind

i’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

 

Movie Quest Update

I am officially off the Movie Quest.

I got behind. Then I tried to catch up. I couldn’t manage the Netflix discs efficiently so I had to rely on Instant selection which was decidedly less diverse. If I was totally into Hitchcock, say, I had material for a solid week. But you see, a Hitchcock once or twice a year is fun. Every night? Not as much. 

In fact, seeing so many movies made me love movies less. I began to require not just great movies, but PHENOMENAL ones or else I was left flatter at the end.

This was the opposite of feeling fuller, plumper, riper. For example, a week or so ago as I sat watching Go, I felt bored, agitated. It was okay. There were some good parts but it wasn’t delighting me, tickling me, inspiring me. It felt more like a chore, an item on my To Do list. And I thought, I want to quit Movie Quest. Because I can.

So I did.

But I’m not done with movies. And I shall, after today, return to my usual practice of mentioning the ones that stand out for me, either in their brilliance or in their vileness. 

But before I go, here’s a quick run-down of what I’ve seen in the last few weeks:

Documentaries:

My Kid Could Paint That

Interesting peek inside a family with a gifted child. I ended up believing the family. I’d love to know what you thought.

Supersize Me

Beautifully done scathing and terrifying look at the fast food industry. Ick. I am so sorry I’ve ever eaten that food or that I took my child to eat there. Sadly, I know we will be back. But I will certainly impose longer breaks between visits.

Surfwise

I don’t know anything about surfing or surf culture so this family was new to me but wow, what a family. And eeeek. The dad, Dr. Paskowitze, ‘dropped out’, bought a camper, and took his family on the road for what was to be an endless groovy lifestyle of togetherness (9 kids plus mom and dad) and surfing. Perspective shifts drastically as the movie progresses from sunny to dark.   

Billabong Odyssey

Again, I’m not a surfer nor am I about to become one but I was blown away watching these guys (and gals) surf 10, 15, 30, and yes, 100 foot waves. THEY ARE GODS. It must be true. Fluffy and I watched this one afternoon when he was feeling sick and oohed and ahhed the whole time. Full disclosure: we skipped around to get to the coolest action.  

The Slasher

Not the bloody kind, the car-salesman-big-closeout-prices-slashed kind. Window into a bit of this guy’s world. He reminds me of some guys I used to know, tortured, hard-luck guys trying to do the right thing, clearly very bright but uneducated and carrying around some big ghosts that they try to keep under wraps with the smoking and the drinking and the non-stop moving around.

A Family Undertaking

We used to bury our own up until fairly recently. Now it’s big business. Listen, I’m terrified of death, dying, any and all things that are about leaving this world. This movie helped calm me and educated me. In fact, I’ve decided to insist on a home burial. 

Scott Walker: 30th Century Man

I didn’t know anything about this guy. Very interesting film and mysterious music. Not necessarily my style of stuff but I ended up buying a cd after watching this. He strikes me as a genuine genius. 

 

Family/Kid:

Pink Panther animated shorts

These are super short, a few minutes, five tops. We’ve seen about 20 of them. The first 6 were SO FUNNY. No words but truly hilarious animation. We were all rolling and that’s rare for us.

 

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

Terrible. We all gave up on it. Not worth renting. Not even worth watching for free.

 

A Monkey’s Tale

Hard to remember this. Fluffy liked it, though. That’s all that matters on family movie night.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Delightful! I liked the book and, like you, thought how can they make this into a feature film? But they did a wonderful job.

The Black Stallion

This is a MUST SEE. Have I already said this? A must see. Brilliant, beautiful movie, more like two movies in one. The (near) beginning has a long series of scenes shot on a beachy island that are breathtaking. 

Peter and the Wolf

Odd animation little animation. A bit scary with a strange ending. (I wasn’t sure it was the ending I remembered from the story i heard as a kid.) 

James and the Giant Peach

Wonderful romp. We just finished reading this so it was great timing. I appreciated that they skipped over a lot of the terrifically mean things the aunts said and did to James because that was rough for Fluffy when we read it (and listened on tape). 

 

Other:

Kinky Boots

Quirky. Entertaining. Based on a true story.

Stranger than Fiction

Fun movie. Loved Emma Thompson.

Being Julia

Annette Bening in one of those  ’tour de force’  performance. Generally, I’m a fan, loved Drifters, but this movie, though perfectly well done, left me underwhelmed. 

Shades of Ray

Independent film Some funny things and some wonderful performances. But predictable.

The Interpreter

Engaging enough thriller with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman.  

The Nines

Bizarre; interesting at points. I can’t recommend it.

Swimming Pool

Charlotte Rampling is one of my favorites so I hung in there with this seemingly slow-simmer mystery and then it COMPLETELY disappointed me in the end.

Lifeboat

Hitchcock’s play in a boat during WWII. good performances, especially Tallulah Bankhead (my alter ego according to my parents) whom I totally revere. 

Pan’s Labyrinth

Dark, gorgeous looking film that is not for the faint of heart.

Go

It didn’t work for me. I wanted it to but it didn’t.

 

TV Series:
Weeds; Season 1, 2, 3, and three episodes of Season 4

Let me tell you that Dave and I were IN LOVE with Weeds, with Mary-Louise Parker in specific and with the writing, the look, the premise and the style of this show. We were little Weed-heads. All through Season 1. And 2. In Season 3, Dave started to disentangle himself, started to sober up, but I was still stoned on the thing.

Then Season 4 arrived. We watched three episodes.

Three.

It felt like a chore. The writing sounded tired, trying too hard.I didn’t quite buy the new location.  I didn’t like Albert Brooks in that role. I missed the other characters. Nancy (the main gal, Mary-Louise Parker for the three people who don’t already know this) was getting on my nerves. Not the actress. I worship at her milky white feet, her divine and perpetually dilated brown eyes, her lips in pepetually suck on the straw of a beverage.  

I was all pumped up about her character up until that point. I got a kick out of her ballsy, male-ness, her obvious sex appeal, her reckless slide into this other world, the underbelly, the thrill she derived by surrendering to her new role, her growing pleasure as she discovered and exercised her new power and, well, freedom. But in Season 4, I was not feeling it.

I wanted to say, Nancy, get a fucking grip. You’ve got two kids in trouble. You’re out of that ticky-tacky place. You’re free! To make whatever life you want! You’ve had your fun, your Blowing The Lid Off the Tight, Predictable, Cookie-cutter Life fun. Wise up. Stop dressing like a whore and step off the Train of Self-Destruction.

But instead, Dave and I stopped watching, slipped the disc into the Netflix sleeve and sent it back with the companion disc for Season 4.