We had a really good parent/teacher conference this morning!
We met with Laurel's teacher and one of the two
special ed folks that are working with her, and they were both very
upbeat. After a rough start with insane amounts of being pulled out for
various staff trainings, Laurel is getting increasing amounts of time in
the classroom and doing increasingly well with it. The other kids like
her and she likes them. She is still having to be pulled out a fair
amount to do other things, and she also doesn't have the stamina to make
it through the day without a nap, but she is still on an upward trend
with joining the class. She has also gotten an awesome new stander that
goes in any position from standing to lying to sitting and actually
looking amazingly like a desk (which is how it was when we saw it this
morning). She was in it for almost two hours this morning! We are really
hoping that it works out, and if it does, we're going to try to persuade
our insurance company that we need one for home.
They are also coming up with more and more ideas to adapt activities for
Laurel. Yesterday her vision teacher (whose sessions were going terribly
early on, we had heard previously - Laurel was putting her head on her
desk and refusing to work - but we were told today that the last 3-4 had
been great) set her up with a head switch on the right and a hand switch
on the left and she was able to use them successfully to sort two
different types of shapes! We are SO thrilled at this news, both because
everyone has been trying for a long time to find a setup with two
switches that would work for Laurel (it's the total key to using
communication software), and because sorting is actually what her class
is working on in math right now, so she is successfully working at grade
level in one subject, anyway. 
(I also suspect she's at grade level with her knowledge of letters, too,
but we haven't tested that comprehensively. She's been able to pick the
correct letter from a choice of two for a long time, though.)
Anyway, we are WAY proud of our tough little girl! As the teacher and
special ed person said, she has had so much new thrown at her this year.
But she is adapting and even thriving. The special ed person said her
supervisor was shocked at how much had been accomplished with Laurel
already this year! She is still not totally consistent - that has always
been a problem with Laurel - but it sounds like she is doing better than
she was in preschool.
The only bad but not totally unexpected news was that they are having
trouble with Laurel's afternoon aide/former babysitter. She has missed a
huge number of days already (but thankfully, except for the first week,
this has not been our problem!) and I think it is getting to the point
that her job may be in jeopardy. Also, and this did surprise me,
they are having trouble with her insisting on Laurel taking a longer nap
(and therefore missing most of the afternoon portion of class) than they
think Laurel really needs. I'd be inclined to side with them, actually -
1) Laurel has always been a power napper 2) I want her to be in as much
of class as possible. If that means she needs to take another nap during
the afterschool program, that's fine by me. BTW, she is doing very well
with the afterschool program, too! The first week or so seemed kind of
rough, but now she seems to be really enjoying being with the other
kids. We mostly think she likes school better than home these days! And
her teacher reported that Laurel gave her a big smile the other morning.
Laurel doesn't do that for just anybody, so she must really like her
teacher. 
So we are overall VERY pleased. I feel like kindergarten is already
going better than preschool and things are still trending up!
Oh joy, Laurel has Coxsackie AGAIN, and Bob is in Tucson...He
left early yesterday morning. By yesterday afternoon, it was obvious
that Laurel was coming down with something. It was also obvious that
there was a bad leak under the main bathroom sink, and something really
smells in there, which I still haven't figured out. By the evening
Laurel was emitting a huge snorking noise with every breath and I was
pretty sure I'd get the Worst Mother in the World award if I tried to
send her to school today, so I called the bus driver and left a message
on the school absentee line. Then when I got her up this morning, I saw
the pink spots on her left hand and ankle. I had to call her doctor's
office anyway to get them to call in a new Prilosec prescription (which
she really really needs right now - she's spit up a couple of times), so
I talked to the nurse, who confirmed my suspicions (this is actually the
first time I've seen the pink spots - the other two times she's had it,
she only had the mouth part of the hand-foot-and-mouth disease). But the
nurse agreed that that was very likely what it was, and said that Laurel
would probably be able to go back to school Wednesday. So great, that
will make three days at home with no one for company but Whiny Girl.
Except that I am going to have to bundle her up and take her to the
pharmacy once the Prilosec script is ready. Shoot me now? 
OK, I know, I should be feeling sorrier for Laurel than for myself, and
I do feel sorry for the poor kid. But yeesh, what timing! And I'm
still worried about what smells so bad in the bathroom...
Laurel has fallen sound asleep - so I want to tell you guys all about her homework yesterday - I'm proud of both of us for working through this!
Her teacher sent home a sheet with two sentences, a word, and a letter, and for each the child is supposed to circle whether it's a letter, word, or sentence. I set out to do this with her somehow yesterday morning (this was before she was really obviously feeling bad). Well, we've had her look at us for yes and away for no for a long time (and she tends to look in the middle when she doesn't have a solid opinion), so I thought, what if I had her look toward me for one thing, toward the middle for another, and away for a third? Well, that did NOT work. At all. Couldn't get her to look for any amount of time in any direction. Then I thought, what if I said the three choices one at a time, and had her look at me for the correct one? After MUCH cajoling and running through the choices over and over, I had gotten an answer for each, but three of the four were wrong. So I thought, OK, clearly we need some work on the basics here (I'd explained the exercise before we did it, but had only given her a few examples of each type of thing). So I got out her "A is for Angry: An Animal and Adjective Alphabet" book. I figured this was a good one to use, because each page has something like "Z is for ZANY," with the Z really huge (and with a zebra hanging from it), and the "zany" also pretty large, and of course the whole thing makes up a sentence. I went through a few pages with her explaining about the letter, words, and sentence on each page, and then I started asking her, "Laurel, can you touch the letter H? Can you touch the word HUNGRY?" Well, she did GREAT with that - was going right to what I asked for - so then I thought, well, maybe I was going about the exercise wrong. I wrote "letter," "word," and "sentence" in big letters in different colors on a piece of paper and explained to her that I wanted her to touch the word "letter" at the top of the page if it was a letter, etc. Then I went through the exercise again and she got three out of four right! She missed one of the sentences. Actually, I doubt she has heard that much about sentences before - I haven't really talked about them, and her teacher told us that Language Arts is the subject she's most likely to miss in class.
This morning I decided to see if it would make any difference if I wrote the sentence down and showed it to her instead of saying it. She still said that it was a "word" (which was her answer yesterday), but I showed her how there were four different words in the sentence, and then wrote down another simple sentence for her. This time she got it right! (And then we stopped, because that seemed like enough work for a sick kid.)
Anyway, I am getting two things out of this: 1) This kid is totally capable of doing grade-level work. I am absolutely convinced we'll be able to teach her to read; and 2) Yikes, it's going to be a lot of work to figure out how to go about this!
Sorry this got to be such a book, but I just had to share!
Perfect ending to a perfect week...
We had planned to go to Northern VA for Feldenkrais this weekend, but Bob has the stomach flu. I got home (after a long day of standing around and trying to be sociable at an open house at my office, while meanwhile trying to drown my miserable sore throat [I think I'm getting Laurel's bug] with tons of zinc) to find him sitting there with Laurel saying he'd felt nauseous for the last two and a half hours, and the fun began shortly afterward. Of course it was too late to cancel the hotel tonight so we're stuck for that. Meanwhile, Laurel pulled her tube out during her feeding - twice actually, but the first time I caught it right away (and then got to hear "She never does that when I feed her - not ever" - thanks, dear) but the second time it clearly went on for quite some time before I got it and our recliner is utterly drenched with formula. Then, because Laurel is off school on Monday and because I've been wondering what the heck has been up with the continued absence of Laurel's afternoon aide/former baby sitter, I called her and found out that she quit. (And that she has a job interview at 10 AM on Monday.) She said that the gal in charge of the afterschool program was demanding that she take Laurel away and put her in "her room" every time she cried at all, and that in combination with everything else going on in her life right now she just couldn't deal with it. Although she said (and I've observed this too, at least when I pick Laurel up) that Laurel gets to stay out with the other kids when the aide's not there. Apparently the folks at school were supposed to tell us that the aide had quit, but they didn't, so that's annoying. I guess it's not an utter tragedy - Laurel's actually been really happy in the afterschool program the last few days and has cried when I've said, "It's time to go home" - but it still sucks that things ended up that way. And I wonder what's going to happen now in terms of an aide.
Anyway, Bob is ensconced in bed for now and I have a mess to finish cleaning up (I blotted up what I could but still need to go at it with upholstery cleaner) and Laurel's dishes to do (me, I just had a TV dinner while I was typing this) and some more Cold-Eeze to take. Wheeee....
One more thing...my sister just called...For
whatever reason, I didn't even think about this today although I knew it
was going to happen, but the house I grew up in closed successfully.
That's good, right? OK. Sure. 
No, mostly I know it's a good thing. But still. Sadly, it didn't go to
the single mom who loved gardening that we first thought was going to
buy it (reportedly because her ex had messed up her credit), but to a
single dad with no particular interest in the topic.
I also found out that my share of the inheritance will be rather less
than I thought - mostly, because I just hadn't realized how much the
various costs had all added up to, or what a toll the Pennsylvania
inheritance taxes would take. It bites, though. I'll be getting about
$90,000 altogether, which sounds like a lot, but when considering the
expense of either remodeling the house to be accessible or buying land
and building an accessible house from scratch, it just isn't.
Ugh. I still have to wash Laurel's dishes. I was avoiding that by
surfing the Internet looking for toys for Laurel when my sister called.
So now it's 11:30, and they're still not done. Onward and upward...
We finally got our adoption log-in date! Our
dossier was logged in at the China Center of Adoption Affairs exactly
one month ago today, on September 26. Now we have a date to count from!
(Note the added ticker.
[Note: ticker is not currently working. I'll add it to the front page of
the website when it is.])
Unfortunately, that's probably all the interesting adoption news for a
long, long time now!
I'm
so PO'd at my bosses right now. This morning I found out that a
colleague (not in my agency), who was an undergraduate intern in our
office when I'd been out of grad school and working there for five
years, and who makes several dollars an hour more than me, is hiring an
assistant and she is even going to be making more money than me! Add
this to the fact that when our fiscal officer did a salary survey
earlier this year, I was at the dead bottom of the pay scale for my
position (never mind that I have 12 years' experience), and yes, I think
I'm a wee bit underpaid. I mentioned this latest insult to my boss
tonight, and her response was, "I'm sorry. You know, we were going
to ask for more money for the environmental program, but another program
was going to ask for increased allocations too and we didn't figure we
could get both. Besides, we'd have had to justify it." Hello, the
fact that your environmental planner is grossly underpaid isn't
justification enough? I've stuck it out in part because they offer such
wonderful flexibility and I need that, but I feel like in turn they are
taking total advantage of me and it's really getting to me. I am SO
tired of being told there's no money for me when there's money for
things like publishing enough 8-page color glossy "annual
reports" to put in every newspaper in the region. But as usual,
environmental jobs aren't growing on trees (no pun intended), so I guess
I just have to suck it up and take whatever because I don't know what
else I'd do. We really can't afford for me to not work... 
We went out to "Trunk or Treat" at Laurel's school tonight
- she was a pirate. (As usual, she chose that herself, from pairs of
pictures - my guess is she went with the pirate because she still
watches the Wiggles a fair amount, and the more recent ones have lots of
pirates - not only Captain Feathersword, but his whole crew.) I think she had fun at first, but it was bedlam and
got overwhelming for her after a while. But she at least started out
enjoying seeing her classmates and pushing her button that said
"Trick or Treat". (And no, this was not a shameless ploy on
the part of her parents to get candy - she can have lollipops, licorice
and soft chocolates [like Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, etc.]. The
chocolate's a new thing her speech therapist said we could add this
year. )
I think we'll give it another go next year, but be sure that the car with the car seat is in the parking lot we can escape from (there are two parking lots, and they close down the one with the trick-or-treaters, which is where the van [and Bob frantically giving out candy] were). Because we couldn't get the van out, we stayed longer than Laurel really wanted to. Oh well, live and learn!
I just fired this off to my boss...
The fact that we "have not laid sufficient groundwork" to ask for any more money for the environmental program is a source of great frustration to me, because the facts that we have committed to a lot for solid waste, that I am at the absolute bottom of pay compared to my peers (backed up by both the salary survey and the fact that the last three environmental job openings at the county all had a minimum starting salary higher than mine), and that I've been feeling a lot of stress trying to do both the environment and DSB in 30 hours a week, are not new news. I would have been glad to help make the case for more funding, especially as it falls on me to write the grant proposals to try to make up the difference. Unfortunately, this is a bad time to be counting on grants for funding, as federal funding, which is the underpinning for most grants that are open to local government entities, has been dropping like a rock - meaning both that there is less money to go around, and that we are increasingly finding ourselves in competition with entities like DEQ because their core funding is eroding. Last fiscal year I spent three full weeks on grant writing, and this year I've already spent 1 2/3 weeks in the first four months (although we're no longer tracking that on our timesheets, I'm stil differentiating it in the calendar I keep track of my hours in). Of course, the more I write grants, the less time I have to do other things, which feeds into my stress that I don't have enough time to get everything done.
OK, I don't guess at this late date that getting that off my chest will accomplish anything, but I'm not a great believer in letting things seethe under the surface, so there it is.
(For background, that came on the heels of the following:)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: (my boss)
> Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 10:00 AM
> To: Rochelle
> Subject: RE: draft SW agenda & MOU
>
> No, I'm not sure that we don't need environmental funds from
> localities, but
> we have not laid sufficient groundwork for that to include it in
> Thursday's
> Commission meeting or the budget submission due to the City/County
on
> November 17. The list of thing we have said we would do is very
> alarming. We
> do need to investigate any other possible sources of funding.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rochelle
> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 3:27 PM
> To: (my boss)
> Subject: draft SW agenda & MOU
>
> Here are a draft agenda and MOU for the solid waste committee. I
> edited the
> MOU that you showed me to reflect dates based on a 2006 plan and
the items
> that were added to the solid waste plan from the recycling action
plan (so
> now we've agreed to do even more...are you sure about that not
> needing more
> environmental money from the localities thing?).
>
I'll let you guys know what the fallout is...