Archive for February, 2009

Feb 20 2009

friday night blogging

Published by under amy's head

Hello party people!

I am NOT at a Jonathan Coulton show right now.

James is.

Our sitter was unavailable.

Which was just as well, because Jocelyn barfed this morning, we sent her to school, and then she barfed there as well (yeah i know, PARENTS OF THE YEAR RIGHT HERE WOOOOO!), so if we HAD had a sitter, we probably would have had to cancel her what with the barfing and all.

Actually, she hasn’t barfed since she’s been home, but she hasn’t eaten much either. James was on sick kid duty today. Since I had to *sigh* go to work to attend my BIRTHDAY LUNCH.

That’s right, my birthday is on Sunday. And no, we’re not really doing anything, because WE ALREADY DID IT BABY. Back in November, I bought tickets to see Dianne Reeves, perhaps my favorite jazz artist behind Ella Fitzgerald, and so when we attended that concert, it was pretty much my birthday celebration in advance. We had a lovely dinner with a bottle of wine, saw Ms. Reeves perform (she was divine!) and have a great time. So it has been very EASY for me to totally forget that my actual birthday is still coming up. (Even though I’m totally conniving my way into getting more presents by saying blatently to the kids, “SO WHAT ARE YOU GETTING ME, GUYS???”)

Yes, I’ve already gotten presents. In the form of an awesome jump ring cutter, called the “koil kutter”, and a handheld Proxxon motor tool. Was all that greek to you? Well, it’s jewelry related. I’m a bit addicted to chain maille weaving, and that requires TONS of jump rings. I used to coil the wire around a wooden mandrel, and then just snip rings off the coil with my wire cutters, but those are not perfectly flush ends. So then I went and bought a jeweler’s saw, and tried my hand at hand-sawing some jump rings, which really was MUCH better tahn the snipping business, but the cuts were not really perpendicular to ring, and you could see the sawing marks as well. So I convinced James to let me buy a coil holding saw set up and WOW is it awesome. I cut like 20 rings by hand in 10 minutes. Now I can cut 100s of rings in 10 minutes. And the cuts are perfectly flush!

But enough with the blah blah blah – here are some actual pictures of what I made with my super awesome flush cut jump rings:

(**WHOOPS! Forgot to add the photos when posting, so adding them now- they are at the bottom, scroll, scroll!)

Sorry – these are just taken with my iphone, so not the best, but I’m going to take some good pictures this weekend and actually list them in my cobwebby etsy shop, and I’ll be sure to post the good pictures here too. Suffice it to say, I have created awesome beautiful jewelry! I can’t wait to buy some sterling silver wire to make more in SILVER! The copper is growing on me, and I love that it is so much cheaper than silver (I bought the wire for these at the hardware store for under $20, talk about AWESOME) but there is something about sterling silver that is just so elegant and beautiful! Next week I’m buying some wire, and lots of it!

Work is crazy busy. I mean CRAZY BUSY. I suspect there won’t be much jewelry making for the next month and a half, because they’re encouraging overtime to spend some of the money left on our contract before it ends, and I totally am going to take them up on it. The beauty of my job is, I get paid for overtime. It’s not like, time and a half, as I seem to recall what regular “overtime” used to be in previous hourly jobs, but hours over 40/week are paid out, and I can think of about a bajillion zillion things we could use extra money for (um… sterling silver wire anyone?!) so I plan on working a ton.

However, last time I worked a TON, I ended up with some back problems that landed me in the chiropractor’s office 3x a week for 3 months, and then back every week or so for 6 months… so I an going to work like crazy, but I am going to make sure I stay healthy.

Ethan has been doing awesome EXCEPT of course, for this last week. He even got a few PURPLES at school in February! (the school’s colors are purple and white, so “getting a purple” is like super duper awesome behavior). This week however, not so good. 2 behavior review write-ups. We are hoping it was a blip on the radar and not the norm.

We had an appt with a new psychiatric nurse practitioner, but they cancelled on us because of problems with our insurance carrier. We haven’t yet made any appts with anyone else, because things are going pretty well.

We enrolled Ethan in a 3-day a week taekwondo afterschool care program. It’s daycare, but with a taekwondo class thrown in. He LOVES IT. It’s only been 1 week, but already he wants to go FIVE days a week instead of three. I told him it’s not going to happen if he keeps getting behavior reviews.

This is getting long isn’t it? I like this Friday night blogging business. I’m home alone, with some wine, and the updates are spewing out. Maybe I’ll try it again next week. No promises though.

merry birthday to me,
amy

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Feb 03 2009

More Ethan!

Published by under amy's head,daily,kids

Yesterday I hightailed it in to work early because Ethan’s school had a half day. I picked him up at 12:15 and then went home. I wasn’t planning on finishing up my work day until evening, after the kids are in bed, because often it’s too distracting to try to work with them around. I emptied the dishwasher while shouts of running and playing eminated from outside, but they had faded away by the time I was done. I had asked Ethan to stay in our courtyard, but he had wandered off, so after I got the dishwasher started, I put on my coat to check.

He was in the courtyard right behind ours doing just fine. In fact, he’s been doing just fine for a while now. Before christmas, I would definitely have been outside “hovering” just to make sure everything was going OK, to be present in case anything needed moderating. When friends are over at our house playing, I used to hover, for the same reasons. But it seems more and more that there is less and less of a need to “hover”.

If you’ve read any of the Ilg and Ames books on child development (I recommend them ALL, they are AWESOME), you know that they talk about the cyclical nature of developmental milestones, and how a child will go through cycles of equilibrium, and unequilibrium. The unequilibrium can be anything from your dextrous kid suddenly being a butterfingers or clumsy, which may happen before a new developmental milestone is achieved. It can be social as well. At the beginning of the year when we started having all these issues with Ethan I rushed out and bought the 6-year-old book, which helped me realize that 6 can be a tricky year, even if your kid is NOT having issues. The actual title of the book: “Your 6-year-old, Loving and Defiant.” Ha. Loving AND DEFIANT. It’s not just my kid! It can be a year where they test their boundaries and see what they can really get away with. It is a year where they really start to see themselves as separate from Mom and Dad, and the need to please Mom and Dad is nowhere near as strong as it was at Five.

When we met with the psychologist who gaves us the dreaded ADHD diagnosis, I couldn’t help thinking that even though we got the results of the test in early January, the test itself was administered in the THICK of the problems we were having, all the way back in early November. Thoughts I thunk and expressed at that meeting, “But he’s doing so much better now. Could he have just been having a bad day? Or a bad month?”

I think that it was naive of me to think of it as a bad day – we KNOW it wasn’t just a bad day, it was a bad 6 months! But now, we’re heading in to February and looking back at January, he really has made a marked improvement. He seems to have gained the ability to listen and change his attitude when asked (OK, when threatened! usually with loss of allowance!) We have had one bad incident where he would not listen and had to be put in his room, where he threw things, so I don’t want to discount that ugliness, but more and more, and especially after yesterday when he played with neighbor kids so well, I have to wonder, Was he just having a bad six months? A REALLY bad six months? Could we be reaching the end of the unequilibrium and heading into equilibrium? I also don’t want to discount the help that his Social Achiever’s class have given him. I have no idea if it’s helped, but hopefully it has.

I’m not saying that I’m just tossing the ADHD diagnosis out. But I do think the test itself is very subjective, and as things stand now, I am definitely in the “let’s wait and see” camp.

I must say it’s a pleasant place to be. Tomorrow we meet with the new psychiatrist, and I’ll be happy to tell her we’ve really been doing pretty well lately. And that hopefully we won’t need to see her much 🙂

-amy

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