When in the swamp, do as the swamp folk do

 In our impromptu family reunion trip to the South, we encountered many different new experiences. We checked out Pensacola’s white sands, we visited the Black Water River State Park, and even braved the array of fresh seafood from the Gulf, including some awesome seafood nachos at Flounder’s on the beach:

Some of us traveled to the exotic Waffle House for cheesy grits and fresh ham, even.  The South is a marvelous blend of interesting tastes and experiences!

Then there’s the swamp.

My son-in-law was excited about the possibility of seeing alligators in the wild at the Black Water River Park, but although we did see several living things, an alligator was not one of them. So we went to Alligator Alley across the border in Alabama instead.

This place advertised over a hundred alligators (at least the adults…there was a slough of young’uns, too), and we got to see quite a few.

 Of course, as in any swamp, alligators were not the only occupants:

And of course, the day would not be complete unless everyone got to hold an alligator!!

And of course, the obligatory, “Will the guy get eaten feeding hunks of hairy wild pig to the wild alligators?” On the way out, Yurie had to check out the other wildlife–glad that fence was there. That guy looked like he meant business!

So we counted to make sure we had all the children, and left the swamp, reminiscing on everything we’d seen and also so much we hadn’t seen, that lived just under the water’s shadowed edge…

Making the utilitarian into something beautiful: Read Between The Signs

If you find yourself driving along Interstate 79 between Erie and Pittsburgh someday, you’re invited to stop off in Meadville for a unique sort of art exhibit: Read Between the Signs.

The first line you’ll notice, just a few blocks east of the Interstate, is a beautiful garden of giant flowers created from discarded road signs.

They’re right in front of the PENNDOT parking lot, so there’s room to pull off the road and thoroughly admire them.

The project comes from the Arts and Environment Initiative, and artist/Allegheny College professor Amara Geffen. She and her students have been the primary constructors of the flowers and accompanying 1,200-foot panel that stretches along US 322 since 2002.

The 3-D sculpture reflects many local landmarks like the Kepler Project, the County court house and also events like the Crawford County Fair and the Thurston Classic balloon celebration:

There’s no cost to stop and view the exhibit, either at the PENNDOT lot or at the shopping center lot across the street, so it’s a great way to add a little color and repurposed, recycled art into your day!

For more information on how the project expanded beyond the flower garden, see Amara Geffen’s discussion here.

So stop by and enjoy!

 

 

Coming up for air

This title of this piece has multiple meanings, one a literal application to the many aquatic stars we saw last month at the Georgia Aquarium, but another just in trying to sort 0ut a life gotten much too layered and complicated to handle.

Kind of like sorting out the complex layers of African cichlid existence in an underwater river setting, our lives at this moment have trails shooting off in all directions. Some of them are quite positive: Little Miss has really settled into eighth grade, supported by a fine AS teacher, and enjoying half a day of classes with her peers. She has also overcome many of her sensory issues and had taught herself to sing and dance AT THE SAME TIME while she’s using the Wii dance programs. Who would have thought it, five years ago or especially ten? A lot of hard work on all sides. Well done.

Dr. Doo-be-Doo has matured significantly as he’s moved into high school age, making some of his social interactions rough, but not more so than a good proportion of other young men his age. He’s found a gaming club to join to stimulate his imagination, and has become involved–even auditioned–for the local Meadville Community Theatre Youth show in March, which makes his father and me both happy. We’ve met so many nice people through there, and we know this will be good for him.

Both kids have improved their grades, their social interaction and their grip on this world. We’re very proud.

Having an exchange student has helped a lot, I think, showing what a “normal” older sibling would act like. Because Yurie is from Japan, she’s used to a more standoffish interpersonal mode that works fine in our house with the spectrum kids. Everyone has plenty of time to work solo and not be overwhelmed by the others.

The other part of it is, of course, while we’re not having our lives sucked into oblivion dealing with the Captain’s apparently incurable issues, we can actually interact with the others in a pleasant way and build good relationships.

Which is why, when the therapeutic foster care people threw up their hands after 18 months of treatment that had achieved exactly zero because the Captain thinks therapy and learning coping skills is “stupid” and he has no intention of changing anything about himself, we came to a crisis decision.

With the sharks circling, and the county’s plan to send him home, completely unchanged other than to have gained new manipulation tools and catch phrases from the therapists, what to do? We went through an escalating four years of hell before he was placed. We asked for help from agencies, doctors, respite people, family members, and followed every lead we got. He still continues to have no accountability or take no responsibility for his acts. He’s not sorry about anything. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be a Newtown-style shooter, especially since he has confessed that the reason for all his transgressions is to get attention.

And their best suggestion is now to send him back here, unrepaired and they’d toss six hours of therapy each week the family had to endure KNOWING that the Captain will have none of it?

No. No thank you.

What this means is personally humbling for me, of course, because the only other alternative is to release him into the Children’s Services system. Ironic that this is where I work every day, representing other parents whose children are abused, and neglected. Those caseworkers are now going to have access to information about my personal life and the right to dictate what we’ll do. We’ll likely pay child support to the state for keeping him in care, even though his placement there is entirely of his own doing. A humiliating ten months left until he turns 18 in December 2013. But I’ve cleared it with my boss, and he understands exactly what we’re up against. He supports me.

There’s always a possibility that the Captain will see the error of his ways, especially mixed in with the general CYS pool of placees, and realize all he has to do is make a real change, not just a plastic one.

But I think taking him in before we’re sure of this is no different than wrapping ourselves in jellyfish tentacles, so pretty to look at, but deadly and continual poison injections into out lives thereafter.  He’s admitted in the last two weeks that he did so much of the stuff he did to punish us and to get attention. And he hasn’t worked through one whit of it. He stands just where he was after he’d lived in our house locked in his room at night for eight months, after he lived outside in a tent for two, and after 18 months in therapeutic foster care.

As much as we care about him and want him to do well, we also have to look at the big picture.

We have saved the other two. Years of TSS, occupational, physical and more therapy, testing (Little Miss is off for another round in Pittsburgh next month), daily, constant prompting with any medium available. Perhaps that’s all we can do. The decision’s been hard, but now that it’s been made, it at least feels right.

So we’ll see what the rest of the year has to bring. E is expanding his teaching, enjoying it. I’ve got six novels coming out in 2013, after 6 in 2012 as well. Still practicing law, so we’re coping on a daily basis. Absent a magic wand or some potion to make the Captain see his way clear to wanting to be a helpful, cheerful, determined member of the team and working to get there, I don’t see what else there is. If the family falls apart altogether, maybe there’s a possibility of splitting the kids in some sensible way, where he can come out of foster care. But if the family falls, I fear for the well-being of everyone. We can’t let this one link break the chain. I hope. One month down. Everyone fasten their seatbelts for the rest of the ride.

Konnichiwa! to our new guest from Japan

We’ve embraced the idea of an exchange student once again, after a good many years. The last one we had was Patric from Sweden, and I remember his favorite thing was to walk by K and her friends watching Titanic and tell them “The boat sinks.”

(oops–spoiler alert!)

But that was probably 13 years ago, and Ayako several years before that, so we thought we might try it again.  We have been blessed with a lovely young woman named Yurie from Tokyo, Japan. She has meshed with the family very well, and we are learning from each other all the time–mostly about cooking!

She’s very active, and so one of the first things they did was all go on a walk up the hill into the woods. Doctor Do-Be-Doo is clearly playing Indiana Jones here; I’m not sure they came home with anything purely archaeological in nature.

She’s a very hard-working student, which is a good example for our two at home. Even though she’s still working on her English (which is pretty good, considering!), she decided to take up Spanish here– I’m not sure how she keeps her brain from spinning. And she’s adapted to staying in a family with some special kids. So that warms my heart.

But like I said, she loves to cook. Her family has spent considerable time in the US, so she’s interested in all sorts of food. She’s been here almost two months, and we STILL haven’t gone to McDonalds. Can you believe it? But she’s showed us how to make sushi, homestyle–so much easier!!– and Japanese curry, while we’ve made Cuban black beans, Mexican food, Indian chicken and all kinds of stuff. One day we finally had meat and potatoes, and she’s like, “Is this American food?” Poor kid.

And she made her grandmother’s famous cheesecake. BEST CHEESECAKE EVER.

Yurie is very sweet and brought all sorts of nice things for the family, including this stunning kimono for Little Miss. The worn out tennis shoes add such a fashion statement, don’t you think?

This has been carefully hung up and saved for a special occasion, for sure.

We got to go camping in The Vehicle one weekend, anyway, but then Himself got signed up for a community theatre show and all the weekends got blocked out. Yurie and the Doctor got drafted to work back stage and even to have a few lines onstage, too, so it’s been an interesting experience.

She finds that Americans, particularly the students, are not as ambitious and hard-working as those in Japan, which doesn’t surprise me a lot. But we’ve adjusted her school schedule so she has more than just academics, like food, and broadcasting, and she also signed up for intramural basketball and hip-hop dance lessons, so she’s a busy girl!

She’s looking forward to the holidays as much as little kids do, so we’ll have a chance to demonstrate what Americans do for some of these holidays, as far as celebration. Her parents have celebrated Halloween and Christmas before, from their previous time here, so we’ll see if we do it differently. Probably. I bet she’s never had frozen pizza for Thanksgiving. (Long family story waiting to be shared).

We’re hoping to travel later in the year and take her to Florida at Christmas, to Asheville, and who knows where else. The program she’s exchanging with has organized trips as well where she can see all about DC and NYC and other places in a tourist sort of way. Any suggestions as to what’s “not to miss” for a nine-month visitor to the States?

Never give up, never surrender–a way of life

So, as many of my readers have commented, I have a pretty busy life, trying to balance the day job with the writing career and still take care of a family and breathe once in awhile, too. Fortunately, as the children have grown up, their special needs have been addressed, for the most part, and don’t affect the day-to-day living situation as much as they did in the past.

That’s a huge accomplishment in my book. Two out of three of the children have overcome their ‘disabilities’ to the point where they can function alongside their peers on a day to day basis and also contribute in the home setting. The Captain is still struggling with his issues, but we encourage him in his therapeutic placement and continue to hope that he will do the same, someday.

Because so many people were asking how I can manage all these things at the same time, I’ve written a post about it for the readers/writers site The Polka Dot Banner.

I left out the part, of course, about how I do all these things because I’m a woman and a mother and we just do what we have to do. The political candidates can bellyache about all those who complain they need help from the government to keep on surviving, but I’m here to tell you that I know a whole subculture of parents of autistic and other special needs kids who bust their butts every day to keep those kids moving forward, no matter what personal sacrifices they have to make. I applaud each and every one of you. Keep on keeping on, even when it seems like no one else is on your side and you’re ready to just lay down and surrender. Don’t. It pays off.

It’s all about the sound and fury…

So I’ve lived in this rural county since 1990, which you’d think would be plenty of time to have explored every piece and parcel, certainly every activity. But there’s one I’ve put off all these years, till now:

The demolition derby.

For a long time, of course, we couldn’t go because of Little Miss’s sensory issues. Remembering back to her huddled on the concrete floor at Disney’s Hollywood Studio car race show, her ears covered, we wouldn’t have wanted to put her through that.

But now she and her brothers are teenagers, starting to get interested in bigger pictures and less focused on the individual stresses. She’s learned to self-protect in most every situation, and with a set of earplugs, she did fine, high-fiving when the car she picked in each heat didn’t completely self-destruct by the end.

Me, on the other hand? Cringing right and left as the cars ran into each other ON PURPOSE, leaving trails of torn metal detritus across the mud track.  I spend so much of my time cleaning up after messes either in life or in law, that it was strange to watch people purposely destroying things.

But at the same time *whispers* It was fascinating. You couldn’t look away….

I’ve known several people over the years here who’ve driven in the derby, including a spunky woman whose divorce I worked on. She escaped years of abuse with my help, and to celebrate, she challenged herself to do something thoroughly wild and wonderful. She didn’t win, but she had an incredible experience. Good for her, I say.

Was it a highlight of the county fair for me? No.  The first waves of excitement were great, but as the heats wore on, it seemed to be for me, just more of the same. The boys, though? Fascinated giggles and cheers throughout the whole event. Even Little Miss said she’d love to do it herself sometime in the future. But as she confessed to her father, “I’d have to wear a helmet, though.”

That’s my practical girl. An evening well spent with the family, bringing something to everyone. And still time afterward for the always-delicious Nick’s Italian sausage sandwiches, maple candy and fireworks (which we had to watch from the safety and sound-breaker of the van, of course, but that was okay).

And now that the derby’s off my to-do-sometime list, maybe next year we ride the flippy-car-that- goes upside-down -and-spins ride.

On second thought, maybe we just get another slice of elderberry pie from the usual stand. Bless you, Methodist women. Your homemade pies make my heart happy.

 

There’s no place like home…and even home is disappearing

Today I’ve written a post for one of my new writing gigs, GEEZER GUYS and GALS, about how the fact that we’re such a mobile society has thrown families far and wide, and how I think that’s a real loss for our kids and theirs.

To do it, I went by my grandparents’ old houses (not owned by them any more) over the last year and took some photos to share. Stop by and leave a comment about your own “home place” and whether it still is home for you.