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Today I focused my attention on the house. I started by cleaning the kitchen because when the kitchen is clean everything else seems more possible. The rest of the day was spent organizing my office and the storage room. We’re planning to start producing merchandise other than books and I really need a place to put it all. The time has come for my office to eschew doubling as a guest room and admit that it is just an office. The futon has been evicted and shelves were put up instead. I’m still not done in there, but it is a start.

The futon is currently taking up space in the family room. Howard and I had discussed putting it in the front room, but after watching the antics today I don’t want it there. The kids were all very excited about the new family room furniture. First they discovered that if they hit the mattress, dust came puffing out. Then they discovered that they could lift it into a bed or fold it into a couch. This was highly amusing to them and highly nerve wracking to me. I kept hearing Thump-CRASH as they switched it back and forth. The frame of the futon is metal and made a lovely CLANG sound. I could just picture smashed limbs and I forbade them to fold it out anymore. I declared it to be a couch and only a couch.

But this was not the end of the fascination with the futon. The kids discovered that if they pushed the mattress out of the way, the back of the couch configuration made a great jail. They would stand on the mattress with their backs against the slats. Their hands would be shoved behind them through the slats as if they’d been handcuffed. We had four neighbor kids over and this whole elaborate game evolved including the jail, a jailer, and 6 kids all being pokemon, or unicorns, or whatever. It was cute to see them all lined up there, but extremely chaotic and noisy.

They climbed. They jumped. They argued. Fortunately no damage was done to either futon or kids, but it was a close thing multiple times. I think the futon needs a new home and we need to invest in an airbed for guests.

Patches is the only person in our house who can’t read. He feels this distinction strongly and has been trying to work with letters and writing for months. I saw him wanting to read and write, but I was too busy to give him more than cursory help. Yesterday and today I sat down with him and we started working on reading. It made him so happy.

I have piles of early reading materials. I collected it all when I was working to teach Link to read. Reading did not come easily to Link. He needed lots of practice at very easy levels, but the stories were so simple that they quickly bored him. It was a very different experience teaching reading to Patches. With Link I cut each lesson in half because it was too much for him to take at once. With Patches I’m actually skipping material because I can tell that he’s already mastered it and doesn’t need to practice more.

I wore out on reading before Patches did. He sat down with a book and carefully learned all the words in it so that he could read it himself. But he wasn’t just memorizing, he was paying attention to each written word and matching it to a spoken word. This kid is going to be reading in no time at all if I just keep making time to work with him. I intend to keep making the time. This is what Patches needs right now.

We haven’t yet gotten comfortable with our shifted priorities and schedule. Not everything fits yet. Grocery shopping for example. I have to find a place to fit that in where it won’t disrupt some other important thing. The waiting until we run out of milk completely and then running to the store grumpy isn’t working well. Also going to the gym is physically exhausting, which changes what we’re capable of accomplishing during the rest of the day. My pace isn’t frantic or heavily stressed, but I do have to keep moving steadily all day to get things done. I’m hoping that habit will make everything work more smoothly, but we’re only two weeks in. We haven’t achieved habit yet.

Despite the kinks in the new schedule, I am filled with a sense that we’re on the right path. I feel strongly that we just need to stick with the new schedule and everything will turn out all right. I can already see shifts in the kids’ behaviors that are a reflection of the shifts that I’ve made. I’ve talked more with them about their lives in the last two weeks than I did during the months of October, November, and December combined. I’ve noticed that very little substitutes for proximity and availability.

I’ve learned that Kiki has been helping a friend deal with some girls who pick on her. Kiki also told me about an event in her German class where she got the approval of all of her peers by angling the teacher into letting them finish a movie. Link told me how he really likes his resource class because it gets him out of composition. He explained how writing is hard and math is easy. Gleek snuggled and cried over the fact that there was an assembly and she did not get picked to help demonstrate despite the fact that she was working her very hardest to be good. Patches revealed that he is upset and nervous about being in charge of the song for Family Home Evening next week. A little practice and talking eased his mind tremendously.

It is like they’ve got all these thoughts and stories and hurts balled up inside them and I’m slowly managing to pull them out. I can see the kids unclenching and relaxing into this new way of being. I am here for them in a way that I have not been for months and they are really glad. This is the right path. I can tell.

This afternoon Gleek climbed into my lap as I was browsing the lol cats at icanhascheezburger.com. She was instantly entranced with the amusing animals. I scrolled through the pictures so she could see them all. Then she started reading the words in the captions. At first she was thrown off by some of the odd spellings and pronunciations, but a couple of them had her giggling so hard that she nearly fell off my lap. She demanded to see all of them. We clicked through a couple of pages until my patience was wearing thin. There is only so much lol humor I can take in a single sitting.

In order to appease Gleek’s continuing demands for more, I printed out two of her favorites so that she could share them with her siblings. That was the first error. Gleek returned with Patches in tow. Then I had two kids demanding more lol cats. I printed out a third page to get them to let me work for awhile. That worked for a time. But shortly Gleek was back in my office. She had put the words of the captions to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and now serenaded me with lol cat humor. All the kids thought this was the height of humor and cleverness. The song has been sung repeatedly throughout the afternoon. The show has even been taken on the road to perform for the neighbors.

Tonight at bedtime Gleek was making a plan to print out ALL of the lol cat pictures and sing them. We’re going to have an operatic length Ring of the Lol Cats.

This morning I watched as Link and Gleek ran from the car into school. I watched as Link purposefully shortened the stride of his 10 year old legs so that six year old Gleek could stay ahead of him. Letting her reach the school building first is a small kindness he does for her and for me. The excitement of getting to the building first has her jumping out of the car and running for school instead of clinging to my waist.

Our dishwasher’s motor died Sunday night. The nice dishwasher repairman will be bringing us a new one, but until he does we’re washing up by hand. Every night as I fill the sink, Gleek scoots up a stool and does all of the washing for me. She loves it. I love it too because the job is so much more pleasant with two of us.

Kiki has to give a talk in church on Sunday. This will be her first time speaking in front of the entire congregation. I’m very pleased that she is working on the talk already and very impressed that she is trying to make it reflect her own thoughts rather than just finding a story to read out loud. I hope this is a good experience for her.

In the car one day Patches and I had a delightful little conversation which started by him asking “When I grow up, can I be your friend?” I answered that I would love for him to be my friend. He smiled satisfied and started rattling off that he would come visit me and we would play games together. Then he paused for a moment and added that he would need to find a mom first so that he could be a daddy. But before he did that he needed to grow up first. And when he grows up, he will need to shave, but he will keep the hair on his head and just use haircuts. He paused a moment more and declared that he would shave his head too. I was suspicious of this last and mentioned that it was possible to be a dad while still having hair on your head. I pointed out that his friend’s dad has hair. Patches responded “Then I will just use haircuts, but I will shave beards.”

Note: What follows is a loose sorting of thoughts on the subject of giftedness. All opinions expressed in this post are subject to change upon receipt of further information. Today’s ideas may be tossed by tomorrow.

As part of my resolve to focus more on the needs of the kids, I have borrowed some books to read. I have long resisted doing any research into the special needs of gifted kids because I believe that all children have special needs. It seemed irrelevant to study about giftedness when I just needed to pay attention to my kids and figure out what they needed. I continued in this opinion even when Kiki’s teachers kept trying to give me literature, or send me to seminars, or show me websites. I was quite stubborn. I did not want to subscribe to the idea that some kids are gifted while others are not. This week I caved and did some reading. The first thing I figured out is that “gifted” is merely a category descriptor for a set of behaviors and needs. “Gifted” does not mean better. A gifted child may actually cause far more chaos than joy in a family that doesn’t know how to deal with their behaviors.

I wish they would pick a different term than “gifted.” It’s as if this small subset of the population has been given a super special present that no one else gets to have. The fact that I am part of the subset makes me alternately glad and guilty. I resolve the feelings by making sure that I use my abilities to make the world a better place. Another part of me has a hard time believing in the whole concept of giftedness because it doesn’t seem rare. My whole family is highly intelligent. Howard’s whole family went through gifted programs. And now I am a parent and I have to discern the needs of my kids. As I was reading about the characteristics of gifted kids it was like browsing the behaviors of my children. Gleek has that. Patches and Gleek both do that. Oh there’s Kiki. This one is Link. On and on. These are supposedly diagnostic descriptions of gifted behaviors but I find myself thinking “doesn’t every kid do that?” Am I so accustomed to oddness that it seems normal to me? Am I weird? Rare? I don’t feel like I am. I don’t feel like my kids are. It all seems…normal.

In order to meet the educational needs of my kids, I may have to endure putting them in gifted programs. We did that with Kiki and it was miserable. On the other hand, if I’d listened to her teachers and studied more about typical gifted behaviors, perhaps it would have been a better experience. Assuming I already know the answers is typical for gifted people. Apparently I’m susceptible to the faults of the category as well.

Have I mentioned that I dislike categories? I don’t like thinking that I fit into one. I don’t like thinking that my kids fit into one. Categories seem limiting, confining. They are like little boxes. Labels and descriptors are better. They attach without impeding movement.

Ack. All this is me spinning my wheels to no point. Tomorrow I read the book about actually managing the problem behaviors typical in “gifted” children. That one may have some useful applications rather than just high theory that makes my head hurt with contradictory emotions.

Running running all day long without a stop to rest. I hope that soon I will settle into this year and this shifted schedule. I hope I will soon dig out from under the unending pile of beginning of the year accounting. I hope that sometime I’ll have a day that is empty of urgent tasks. I don’t want all my days that way. I like being busy. But all busy all the time is exhausting.

I think it was the broken dishwasher that threw the morning out of kilter right from the start. I discovered the dysfunction when I went to unload clean dishes and discovered that they were not in fact clean. This meant that I not only had breakfast dishes to hand wash, but also the dishes from last nights company-for-dinner event as well. That piled on top of all the other looming tasks of the day made me want to sit down and cry. And then the kids were not cooperative about getting ready for school.

It wasn’t a good start for the day. Things got much better when Howard sent me out of the kitchen because he had figured out a dish system that worked best if no one else was in his way. They improved further when my kids were glad to see me after school despite the fact that I’d not been nice in the morning. Gleek and I had another quiet snuggle time where I read her a story and then she read one to me. I had a nice long talk with my backyard neighbor in which we conspired to help both our kids. It is so nice to have a friend who knows my kids well enough that she sees everything I see, but she sees it all from a slightly different perspective. She had some excellent ideas for new approaches to some of the interpersonal problems I’ve been wrestling with.

Our family has a good strong foundation. We all love and depend on each other, but all of us have been distracted lately and it is time to do some maintenance work. It is time for me to pay attention to my interactions with the kids. I need to see the unintended lessons I’ve been teaching in my hurry to get things done. I need to change my behaviors and attitudes to make sure that I am building up my kids rather than undermining them. I never meant to hurt them, but after enough times being told “Not now, I’m working” they decide that they aren’t as important as work. I need to fix that since the point of working so hard is to maintain the family and the life we’ve created together.

Today I looked at my calendar for this month. There aren’t many events written on it, and yet my days are still full. My days are full of things which are too small or too regular to make it onto the calendar. I don’t write down “get kids ready for school” or “Pick kids up from school” because those things happen every weekday. Instead the calendar is devoted to reminding me about the less regular events. Unfortunately this means that an empty calendar day does not mean I have nothing to do.

My things to do list comes in layers. There are things to do for the businesss. There are things to do for the house. There are things to do for Howard. There are things to do for the kids. There are things to do for me. There are things to do for my faith. There are things to do to build friendships. I can’t work all the time, but frequently I take a break from one list by doing things on a different list. This works particularly well for the kid list because mostly what the kids want me to do is sit still and pay attention to their things. But some days I reach the end of the day and feel like there has never been a break at all. The lists feel unending, but they can’t be abandoned because all the things are important.

At those moments, when the lists of things to do seem to rule my life, I need to remember that I am the creator of the lists. I have the power to edit or discard them. I won’t pitch the lists, because the things on them are important to me, but it feels good to know that I could if I so choose.

We took the kids to a book release party this evening. It was for The Red Dragon Codex from Mirrorstone books. Howard and I had never met the author before, but we received an invite via a friend and decided to go. Part of our attendance was selfish. We wanted the chance to see how someone else ran a book release party. We’ve done three now and I was curious to see if our idea of a book release was at all traditional. Since this book is a Young Adult title the party was aimed for kids as well as adults. There were coloring pages and activities for all ages. Our kids had fun, though part of the fun they had was running around like hoodlums. Fortunately they fit right into the crowd of other kids, so I did not have to turn into mean mommy and make them stop.

The party was very enjoyable. We got to see some friends from the Salt Lake area that we don’t often run into. I wish we’d been more prepared though. We forgot to bring a book that we’d promised to one friend. We neglected to bring cash with which to buy a book. And mere hours before our departure we determined conclusively that Howard is completely out of business cards. Naturally all of the thing we did not bring would have been useful. Oh well. I guess I was thinking “family outing” rather than “business contacting opportunity.”

In the end it was a good event for all of us. Now I need to sit down and read the book we bought.