"He meets the criteria"

You know, if my kid was going to score in the 90s on something, I'd rather it not be the hyperactivity scale. *sigh* More later.

Nearly test day

Otherwise known as, the day we figure out whether kiddo has ADHD or just secretly enjoys screwing with us. That day was actually supposed to be Wednesday, but the hospital called last week and said, "Hey, the doctor wants to know why you're coming in again, and oh also, can you reschedule the appointment?" After a day of phone tag and snottily demanding an explanation because of the inconvenience, I got, "Oh, the doctor has to go to a meeting then." Oh, and that's our problem why?

It's not even the inconvenience, although yes, switching to a Valentine's Day appointment is an inconvenience, and not exactly the romantic outing I had in mind. It's feeling like a chump because I made this appointment in November and that still didn't guarantee we'd actually get it, clearly. It's feeling like my kid's potential problems are not even in the least interesting to the doctor. It's feeling like this is the level of total indifference we're going to be dealing with from everyone, till the end of time, if kiddo really does have it. Or else they'll say, hey, don't give your bratty kid so much soda, you crap parents, and then I will grab the nearest can of Coke, shake it vigorously and spray it all over that person, and then have to foot their cleaning bill.

I suppose the bright side is, it's one day less to wait. And restaurants are awful on Valentine's Day anyway. Not to mention every other holiday and pseudo-holiday. The last time we went out to eat on Mother's Day, at a regular restaurant of ours even, the service and experience were so godawful I swore we would never do it again.

I haven't been doing much ADHD-related research lately because I didn't want to get obsessive about it (yet). Still, of note recently: This report from NPR (courtesy of cousin H.), which notes that an elimination diet alone can't cure ADHD but can help reduce symptoms -- and frankly, eating more fruits, veggies, whole wheat and low-fat dairy is good advice for anyone. Getting enough protein in him has actually been a bit of a worry, because he doesn't like deli meat, rarely eats roasted chicken and can't have peanut butter at his nut-free school. (Though he does eat PBnJs on weekends, which feels a little subversive -- like his teachers are going to ring the doorbell and complain.) I've been experimenting with Greek yogurt, which both kids seem to like, and it's less runny than the regular kind, so kiddette is less likely to spill it all over her outfit. Also chia seeds, which are supposed to be a good source of protein and fiber and a gazillion other things, and no, we are not eating our way through a Chia Pet -- I got some flavored varieties at a health food store. The kids seem indifferent.

Seriously, though, every time I read any kind of article about improving heart health or brain health or weight loss or, I don't know, spleen health, all the articles say the same thing: Cut out the processed crap, eat more fresh produce, go easy on red meat, opt for low-fat dairy. Etc. etc. etc. How many times do people need to hear it?

I'm not that militant -- I did just let kiddo have a "burger sandwich" and fries for lunch, as a reward for surviving his dentist appointment. But that's a treat, not his regular diet.


Meantime, he's not any better at that whole impulse-control thing than he was before. We went here over the weekend -- it's a nice little museum -- to check out the Lego art exhibit, which yes, was pretty cool. Kiddo is fascinated by Legos; they're the first thing he reaches for when he walks into his classroom. He was thrilled by the exhibit. And by the other exhibits. And by all the rooms to run around in. And by all the people. Which would be why he ran from the basement play area all the way up to the second floor to see the train exhibit again. DH had to run after him the whole way, and DH is 6'2'', which means he can't duck and weave his way through crowds too well. So he wasn't especially happy with kiddo, and we started to leave. And then kiddo ran off again. I chased him down, thoroughly yelled at him and got him out of there.

I'm never completely thrilled with yelling at him in public, since that's probably one of the 1,000 things parents are Not Supposed To Do anymore on account of it wrecks the poor child's self-esteem. But you know, sometimes you're a little entitled.

And now, a point in his favor: We went to Trader Joe's the next day and he was a perfect little angel. Didn't run away, didn't play his usual game of hide-behind-the-food-displays, didn't whine about riding in the cart. Why? Because my friend M. came along, and kiddo chattered away to her the whole time about all the foods there he liked. Clearly, all I need to do to get him to behave is bring company. Do people ever do food shopping playdates?

So we'll see what happens tomorrow. It'll be nice to have some sort of answer. I think.

And he stayed seated for the whole movie

Which was the most impressive part, to me. Kiddo can't even stay seated through dinner. Or breakfast. DH took him to his very first Yankee game a few months back, and they spent more time strolling around the stadium than actually watching the game. (Although the Yanks lost, so arguably that was the right move.)

This was part of the reason I waited so long to bring him to a movie theater. Because even the five people at a half-empty matinee showing are going to get annoyed if your kid starts bopping up and down the aisles. Hey, I'd be annoyed if I were one of those five people.

The other reason, of course, being that it needs to be the right movie. As in, not a total piece of unredeemed garbage. Like, say, a Chipmunks movie. (Sorry, Jason Lee.) Or a Smurfs movie. (Sorry, NPH.) Or a Yogi Bear movie. (Sorry, Tom Cavanagh. No, actually I'm not.) Because I have to sit through it too, and I swore years ago that I wouldn't waste movie-theater money on bad movies. This is because I saw "Godzilla" in the theater and I still want Matthew Broderick to give me my money back.

"Beauty and the Beast 3D" seemed workable. Not so much the 3D, but because it's a classic, and the animation is well done, and oh all right, I love the movie. I know people freak about the whole Disney princess thing but 1. I don't see why that would apply to boys and 2. I love the movie. Belle is a brunette who is smart and loves books. In other words ... she's me! Well, me if I really, really liked yellow.

 So we went to the movie. He didn't quite get the purpose of the previews. (Considering what some of them were, neither did I.) Nor did he get the point of the special glasses, and refused to wear them. We had this whispered conversation about five times during the movie:

"Sweetie, you have to wear the glasses or you'll miss stuff!"

"No, I don't want to wear the glasses!"

And eventually I gave up. (To his credit, he really was whispering, so at least he listened when I warned him early on to talk quietly.) Though they didn't add too much 3D to the movie -- layered backgrounds, mostly -- so it was possible to watch minus the glasses.

And the movie is still great, like a lovely Broadway musical. Kiddo seemed to get into it. Near the end, he whispered, "Is the Beast dead?" And then a little girl in the audience asked her mommy the same thing, sounding near tears. Poor dear.

Kiddo reported afterward that he liked Beauty, and Mrs. Potts, and Chip, and also the part where Beauty throws a snowball and it hits the Beast on the head and she laughs at him. Figures the snowball fight would catch his eye.

So I'm going to declare our first moviegoing expedition a success, and look forward to the next one. Which will not be "Phantom Menace" in 3D. Jar Jar in 2D is bad enough.

Mommy monsters and other conversational oddities

So kiddo wakes up one morning and immediately -- before he can possibly get dressed, even -- starts to tell me about the big boat. "And it crashed into an iceberg, and it broke in half, and all the pieces fell into the ocean, and all the people got dead."

"Um. Do you mean the Titanic?"

"Yeah, the Titantic. And the driver -- "

"No, the person who drives the ship is called the captain -- "

"Yeah, and the captain got dead too."

My son, James Cameron.

I couldn't figure out where he'd learned about the Titanic, since it seemed not precisely age-appropriate to his class, and I don't think he's scored a Netflix account recently. My friend M., whose daughter is in his class, reported to me later that she'd stopped by the classroom for something and had noticed kiddo building a large boat out of Legos. She complimented him on it, and then he told her about the Titantic, and the iceberg, and how all the people got dead. M., slightly flabbergasted, asked the teacher if that was really the sort of thing the kids should be learning right now.

We figured out that another kid in their class had brought in a book about the Titanic, and that had been kiddo's source material. So ... good memory skills, sweetie!

I suppose it's not any worse than his explanation for why you have to look both ways before crossing the street: "If you don't, a car will run over you and you'll turn into a skeleton. Then you have to eat another little boy to turn back into a boy."

I swear we have not shown him one zombie movie.

It got even weirder a few days ago. He was throwing his usual "I don't WANT to go potty and you can't make me" fit, refusing to go upstairs, refusing to pull his pants down, and finally I snapped and really yelled at him. Because the word "saint" is nowhere in my name. And frankly, if you're going to pick something to throw a power-play tantrum over, why would you pick bathroom breaks? Is needing new pants and underwear really worth your moral high ground?

The next morning he told me all about the mommy monster. She came out of her cave and went into his classroom and came after him, and tried to drag him away, and then he kicked her in the face and tied her hands and she got dead.

"Uh huh," I said, wondering, should I take this personally?

He went on to explain that I am not the mommy monster, that the mommy monster is in fact a monster. I told him it still isn't nice to kick people in the face.



And then later that day, we were sprawled across the couch together when he looked down and suddenly said, "Mommy, is that your penis?"

Uh .... what?

I had to explain to him that women don't have penises. He didn't make the connection between women and Mommies, and asked again. I said that boys had penises but that girls did not. "But what do you have?" he persisted, and I somehow managed to avoid answering the question. Because really, I didn't think we were going to be tackling that until, oh, grade school? How about college? College okay on that one?

DH, by the way, found the whole exchange five kinds of hilarious, which means that 11 years from now when kiddette gets her first period, I will be making him explain the whole thing to her. Ha!

No. Sleep. Till. Brooklyn!

Or at least I'm assuming that's the song running through kiddette's head these days. Not that she's ever been to Brooklyn. But she's taken a firm no-nap stance for several weeks now. Which would be fine if she didn't actually need the sleep, but since she's a weepy, hormonal little mess every single evening, clearly she does.

She drops a toy, she cries. Her slipper gets jostled loose, she cries. She drops a piece of pasta at dinner, she cries. She has to stop watching "Phineas and Ferb" so we can eat dinner, she cries. Basically it's non-stop sobbing from school pickup to bedtime. Just imagine how much more enjoyable that makes dinner conversations.

Weirdly, she still naps for us on the weekends, at least eight times out of 10. (Although she didn't on Sunday. But Grandma and Grandpa were here, so the excitement might've kept her awake.) I figure she needs total silence and isolation to nap, and she can't really get either of those at school. Instead, she tries waking her little friends up so they'll play with her. Teachers: I am deeply sorry.

This is yet another way in which she's the polar opposite of her brother, who needs to listen to his favorite CD in order to go to sleep. He's been listening to this CD every night for several years. In fact he likes the first song so much, he'll yell through the bedroom door for us to come back in and replay the song for him. If he is somehow still awake toward the end of the CD, he'll yell for us to restart it. If you're thinking this is incredibly annoying, you are correct.

I just don't get all the fuss. I would love to have naptime. Every single day. I would save so much money on chocolate and caffeine.

They're both pretty good, actually, about staying asleep once they get there. There are no midnight wanderings or unexpected parental bed visits in this household, which I know is not the case everywhere. So once they're both down for the night, we can legitimately relax. I mean, after the dishes are done and their lunches are made for the next day, and laundry, and ironing, and cleaning the bathrooms etc., we can relax. And after I take kiddo for his late-night potty run so we avoid a.m. accidents. OK, basically we don't relax. But we could, is my point.

My real fear here is that kiddette is trying to ditch the nap altogether. And that would be bad. She'd be a weepy mess every single day, and I would never get anything done on weekends. Basically a lose-lose all around.

I hope she changes her mind. Either that or she and I can swap places for a few days. I'm sure she would do wonderfully at meetings. And I could nap!

My son the Angry Bird

I can't say I begrudge him his love of "Angry Birds." Or "Where's My Water?" I grew up on video games. The big Hanukkah present for us one year was a Nintendo. I had some moments of giddy euphoria trying to beat all the levels on "Super Mario Bros." And defeating the final big bad on "Legend of Zelda" gave me a strange sense of accomplishment.

While I was commuting into the city, I used to take my Game Boy Color on the train and play "Tetris" -- with the sound off, making me that much more considerate than every jackass around me conducting a cellphone meeting at 7 a.m. "Hello! Hello! Did you get my memo? What? What? We're going into the tunnel, I'm going to lose you!"

And let's face it -- I didn't just download the iPhone games for kiddo. I especially like "Water," even though it's so much harder than it looks, because the little gator is so goshdarn cute.

So I'm not really worked up about kiddo playing the occasional game app. His spotty concentration skills seem much more concentrated when there's a screen involved, and an interactive thing like a game has to be better than watching TV.

I did not, however, expect him to start live-action role-playing.

He decided one night that he was an Angry Bird, the pillows at the other end of the couch were pigs, and he threw himself across the couch to smash them. Fortunately he did not 1. smash the couch or 2. smash his head on the hardwood floor. No word on whether he rescued the eggs.

He decided this week, while I was on the phone with my mother, that the phone cord was in fact an Angry Bird slingshot. He proceeded to back up into the cord, then launch himself through the kitchen, the living room, the foyer, the family room and back into the kitchen. Several times. No idea whether any pigs were destroyed, but the phone conversation definitely took a beating.

Really, I love that he's so imaginative. Except that sometimes I don't.

Obviously he needs more ways to blow off steam. My cousin says a small trampoline works for her son, but I'm a little concerned about floor space. She also suggests loading up a small backpack, calling it an "explorer pack" or something similar and having him tote it around for a while, and I think this is genius because it's sneaky exercise.

I have checked out a karate studio nearby, and that's still an option, but it's a slightly pricey one. Haven't tried the indoor soccer place yet. There are a couple kiddie gyms -- thanks to all the birthday parties we've been to, I think we've sampled nearly all of them -- but for some reason I feel like an activity with very structured rules would be good for him.

The real problem is, by the time I get home from work, I'm just about out of energy (let's say I'm down to one bar) and he has just as much as he did when he woke up (let's say he figured out the cheat code and now has endless lives). A more awake me would have some sort of creative way to rein him in. The actual me sits there morosely and thinks, "Just ... please ... stand ... still."

We'll figure something out. In the meantime, we've warned the Angry Bird to fly a little more carefully.

Something's fishy

So as we continue the endless wait for the hospital evaluation to tell us whether kiddo does in fact have ADHD or is just exhausting and occasionally maddening for no good reason, I've been doing some minor (very minor) research. Minor, because I'm trying not to obsess. I have a talent for that. (I just spent the past three or so days flipping back and forth over whether I should get my hair cut, or keep growing it. Current decision: Cutting it.)

Several sources suggest that fish oil helps brain function and could therefore be beneficial to ADHD (see here and here and here), although the evidence doesn't sound conclusive. To sum it up: Might help, couldn't hurt, sure why not? Our first pediatrician, who was this interesting blend of holistic and mainstream, had recommended giving fish oil anyway, on general principle, back when kiddo was a baby. Which I did for a while, except he would spit it out and then his outfit would smell like fish all day.

And there lies the problem with fish oil: It smells like fish. You can't really get around that. The brand I'd been using is "strawberry" flavored, meaning it tastes like strawberry fish. Yum yum!

I got a supplement in "chewable" form at the vitamin store, thinking maybe it would be easier to take than the liquid form. Then, to be fair, I tried it myself. It's gross. "Chewable" means it pops fishy liquid inside your mouth. I knew kiddo was not going to go for this, but it was $23 for heaven's sake so I gave it a shot anyway.

Truly I am psychic. He hated them. Wouldn't touch them. I tried forcing them down his throat once, but decided that was not a long-term solution (or an especially nice one). Then I resorted to pricking the little balls open with the kitchen shears and letting the liquid trickle down into his orange juice. Which he caught on to in about, oh, two seconds, and complained. Also, the shears stank.

I tried another vitamin store and perused the nutrition labels on the kiddie DHA supplements. There are non-fish options available, but the liquid brand I'd used before appears to have the highest DHA/EPA content, so I went with that again. Because he wouldn't spit it out this time, right?

Actually he didn't. I put it in his orange juice again, and told him I'd done so when he asked about it, but this time it didn't bother him. Different enough taste, I guess. "I like this vitamin!" he announced. Hooray.

So we'll see if anything actually happens. In the meantime, I'd been meaning to get on a fish oil supplement myself ... and we've got most of a bottle of the little chewables left ... sigh.