Mariposa Academy Homeschool

Five more days till Zeke turns four. Five more days, in all likelihood, till I have a diaper-wearing, non-potty-using four-year-old. We talked about it two days ago, and he agreed that he would start using the potty. We decided that he would get a sticker for each time he sat on the potty, and candy when he actually went. I’m so against sticker charts and the whole reward/bribe/threat/punish way of parenting, but I am desperate and willing to do anything that will get him to use he potty without traumatizing him. He said he would use his Dora potty, which he picked out himself. He said that he would start “the day after tomorrow,” which is today.

Of course, today he wants nothing to do with the potty. Refuses to get near it, and actually backed up on the couch when I put it on the livingroom floor. I can’t get him to explain why he doesn’t want to use the potty, I have no idea what to do, and I am actually beginning to worry that I might end up with a kid of six or eight who still does not use the toilet.

I have been wondering whether Zeke has some sort of sensory processing disorder, and I know that sensory kids often have trouble with potty learning. But from what I can gather, the trouble is mainly about being able to realize when they have to go and/or being able to control their bladder or bowels. Zeke has neither problem. He knows when he has to go, knows when he goes, almost always asks (well, whines) to be changed when he is wet and sometimes when he is poopy. When we have tried in the past to get him using the potty, he has held it in rather than sit on the potty, so I know he can do it. He just out-and-out refuses to go. He seems afraid of the potty, but I can’t figure out why. We’ve tried two different freestanding potty seats, the regular toilet, and the regular toilet with one of those cushy rings. He doesn’t want to use any of them. We’ve read potty books. He’s picked out big boy underwear. We’ve talked about how he will still be my baby boy even when he is a big boy who can use the potty, and I will still snuggle him and pick him up and things like that. I’ve done everything I can think of, and he still will not sit on the potty.

Maybe once we get him evaluated and figure out what’s going on with him, we’ll get some ideas about potty learning. Even the evaluation, though, is something I don’t have high hopes for. I’ve been leaning toward sensory problems because that’s the closest thing I can think of, but it’s not as though I’m seeing a ton of red flags for that. He fits some of the criteria, but not that many and not that severely.

Meanwhile, I find myself besieged by naysayers of two different camps. First are the “He’s fine” people. “Sounds like a typical three-year-old,” they tell me, when I describe my struggles dealing with his behavior and trying to figure out what causes it. “Three-year-olds have tantrums. They don’t always like to have their clothes changed or their nails clipped. That’s just what they’re like. He’ll grow out of it.” Yes, three-year-olds have tantrums. But the typical three-year-old does not have several intense tantrums a day, every day, each lasting at least 15 minutes and sometimes over 30, triggered by the tiniest thing. The typical three-year-old does not SCREAM nonstop for 45 minutes, so loudly that you can hear him outside when he is in a second-floor apartment with the windows closed. The typical three-year-old does not start slamming chairs against walls over and over and then cry for half an hour because you opened the wrapper of his snack bar instead of letting him do it.

Yes, many kids don’t like to change their clothes. But it usually is not difficult for two able-bodied adults to wrestle a three-year-old child into a clean shirt. Most preschoolers do not wear the same shirt or socks three days in a row because that’s easier than dealing with hour-long tantrums every morning.

There are days when I am reduced to tears because I am so exhausted and frustrated from dealing with him. There are days I am worried that the neighbors are going to call Child Protective Services if he doesn’t stop crying soon. The only people I ask to babysit him are my parents, and even they have a really hard time with him. I’ve been waiting for Zeke to grow out of this “difficult phase” since infancy. It hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not about to happen when he’s four-and-a-half or five without some sort of intervention.

These are often the same people who just “don’t believe” in verbal apraxia and say that speech therapy is unnecessary, he’ll just grow out of his speech problems at his own pace. Now, certainly not every kid who starts speaking late or has some speech problems has apraxia. There is a wide range of normal when it comes to child development, and many kids have articulation problems that resolve on their own. Apraxia, however, is not something that resolves on its own. It requires speech therapy, and in severe cases some kids will still not speak “normally” after years of therapy, though their speech will be greatly improved. We tried the “wait and see” approach with Zeke. What we saw as we waited was that his speech was not getting better, and he was getting more and more frustrated when he was not understood. At two-and-a-half he was putting entire sentences together, but we couldn’t understand at least 75% of what he was saying. It’s no coincidence that the particular pronunciation patterns and problems he had, and continues to have, are typical of apraxic kids. It’s also no coincidence that he improves noticeably with speech therapy and backslides when he goes a while without therapy. If your kid or your neighbor’s kid grew out of their speech problems without therapy, great! They did not have apraxia. My son does.

So that’s the first type of naysayers. Usually, those are people who see Zeke infrequently or not at all. Then there is the second group. These are people who do see Zeke regularly. They have witnessed his outbursts. They have seen that he is not a generally happy kid. They might have babysat him and had to struggle to change his diaper, or spent forty-five minutes trying to figure out why he was screaming, or wondered why he still isn’t potty trained when he’s almost four. And these people seem to think that Zeke is this way because of my parenting. I don’t use punishments such as time-outs or taking away privileges, so obviously Zeke has tantrums because I let him get away with it. I should just “make him” use the potty or change his shirt, and once he realizes who’s boss he’ll listen to me. Since I don’t use rewards or punishments to force my kids into compliance, I obviously expect Zeke to behave only when he feels like it, and he is unsure of who is in charge. I shouldn’t “let him” have a tantrum.

Then there are the questions and suggestions, meant benignly, but so completely frustrating and unhelpful for me. “What do you think set him off?” “Wow, he really got upset! Why do you think he reacted that strongly?” “There must be something you can do to get him to use the potty. Have you asked him why he doesn’t like it?” I just want to scream, “I don’t know why he’s like this! Trust me, I wonder about it everyday, and I want to figure it out more than you do. I do know how to parent my child, and I’ve already thought of everything you’ve said or are about to say. Unless you are a professional or the parent of a child with similar problems, you don’t have any answers for me.”

Happy holidays! We finally bought our tree yesterday and started decorating it. I am trying to get into the holiday spirit, which is hard for me here in Charlotte. The holidays, to me, means snow on the ground. Here it’s been in the 50s and 60s. Just plain wrong. I miss the city even more than usual at this time of year. I want to walk down the street with snow crunching under my boots and Christmas tree vendors lining the sidewalks. I love those tree vendors. With trees lines up on both sides of the sidewalk, you end up walking through a magical pine-scented tunnel every time you have to run to the drugstore or the fruitmarket. The trees would be fresh from upstate or New England. Sometimes when we took them home we had to allow the ice crusted on their branches to melt before we could decorate them.

The tree we bought yesterday came from Home Depot. It had a pre-printed, bar-coded pricetag hanging from one of its branches.

I miss seeing the holiday windows, watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center, buying roasted chestnuts from a pushcart. I would always put the bag of chestnuts into my coat pocket to warm up my hands for a bit before starting to eat the chestnuts.

I miss seeing menorahs and Kwanzaa candelabras and in shop windows, as well as signs reading “Season’s Greetings.” Here it’s a struggle to find Chanukah wrapping paper. I miss the usual greeting being “Happy Holidays!” That’s something I grew up with and took for granted as normal, and I was shocked to find out that here in the South such a mild thing as respecting all religions means that you are “waging a war on Christmas” and “taking political correctness to the extreme.” Here the usual greeting is “Merry Christmas,” to Christians and non-Christians alike, and if you have a problem with your religion not being acknowledged than you are obviously over-sensitive.

But I am trying. Santa is coming, snow or not, and the kids are beyond excited. Yesterday Adrian suddenly decided to invite my sister and brother-in-law over for Christmas dinner tomorrow, which is throwing me into a tizzy. I don’t know why I’m stressing over this. It’s not like anyone is expecting a traditional Christmas dinner. I don’t think my sister or brother-in-law have ever even been to a traditional Christmas dinner, so they don’t have any expectations. It’s just us having dinner together, which we do all the time. But I do want to do something festive. Adrian’s mother is coming Wednesday and staying for a week, which is completely stressing me out. Saying the woman drives me crazy is putting it mildly. I am off my Zoloft and awash in pregnancy hormones. It’s not going to be a pretty week.

See what happened there? I started out saying I was trying to get in the holiday spirit, and ended up complaining. Ugh. I think I need to put on some seasonal music and mull some cider and relax. Really, things are going to be great. We have a lot to be thankful for. Adrian got a job! Not in NYC, which is what we were hoping for, but he got a job here in Charlotte and it pays more than his old job. It’s a six-month contract. Maybe we can pay off some debt, save some money, and move to NYC in better financial shape once the contract is over. And we’re having a baby in just a few months! What could be better than that?

Sometimes when I take a step back and look at me and Adrian, I am amazed. We come from such completely different backgrounds– racially, religiously, and socio-economically– but on a personal level we are so incredibly similar in so many ways, and our relationship works so well. Not that we don’t have to work at it, all relationships take work, but we are just… sympatico, you know? We GET each other.

We were talking last night about money and he said that when he met my family, he encountered an attitude toward money (or maybe a relationship with money) that he had never seen before, and he thought it was a Jewish thing, but it turned out to be a class thing. I grew up very privileged. Upper-middle class and completely oblivious to other classes. I did not know anything about money. I didn’t know how much my parents made or how much big-ticket items like houses and cars cost until probably my junior or senior year of college. I did not know that I was rich– I thought everyone lived like we did. I mean, of course I knew logically that there were poor people, and I saw homeless people and stuff, but since I also knew lots of people who had more than we did, I had no concept of how privileged I was and how grateful I should be. For instance, I clearly remember explaining to someone that the fact that we rented a ski house all winter and a cabana at a beach club all summer did not mean that we were rich, because everyone in NYC had a country house. And really, most of my friends’ families at the time (junior high) owned country houses, so I felt poor compared to them. I really thought that having a country house was the norm.

Just to clarify, this class solipsism was not the attitude Adrian was talking about. It was something else entirely. It’s just that his comments about that was what sparked me thinking about our backgrounds today, and thus to write this.

I NEVER want my kids to grow up with the sense of entitlement, and the solipsism, that I had growing up. Ironically, I think my parents raised us that way on purpose. My dad grew up poor (child of immigrants, born at the end of the Depression, his mother widowed when my dad was 15, living in a tenement in the South Bronx, which at the time was mostly filled with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe). I think he wanted to protect us from the way he had been brought up. He never wanted his kids to want for anything. And while my mom grew up middle class, she had a sick mother that she helped take care of from a young age, so she had her own adult stresses in her childhood. Classic “American Dream,” wanting your kids to have more than you did. But I would never do it the way my folks did.

Adrian, meanwhile, grew up hovering between working-class and desperately poor. In many ways I guess his family’s story parallels my dad’s, a generation later. Immigrant parents, tenements, but this time in Inwood (upper Manhattan, above Washington Heights), and the people are Catholics from Latin America, mostly the Dominican Republic. His family was always struggling, but when his father suffered nerve damage in his hands and could no longer work, they were so poor they shopped at the dented can store. They would open unlabeled cans for dinner, every night was a surprise. His family decided to move back to DR because they could live on his dad’s Social Security (which he got before the age of retirement b/c he couldn’t work), since the dollar was so much stronger than the peso. He was, in some ways, rich compared to most people in DR. They had servants, but as Adrian tells me, in DR, even the servants have servants. It’s a way of life there. The fact that his parents could afford to send him to high school means they were wealthier than many Dominicans– most kids have to work to support the family by the time they hit their teen years. And his family had electricity (although there were blackouts every couple of days), their own cistern full of water, and their own propane tank for cooking fuel. Those things are marks of wealth in the third world. But then again, he had two pairs of uniform pants and two uniform shirts for school, all bought second-hand and scrupulously washed and ironed every night and mended when needed. And he went barefoot much of the time.

When Adrian moved back to the States after high school, he lived with his aunt, and when the rest of his family moved back, they lived there, too. His dad stayed in DR, but it was him, his brother, his mom, his grandmother, his aunt, his uncle, and his three cousins all living in a two bedroom, one bath apartment. The parents didn’t have to enforce a curfew– whoever got in too late knew they’d be sleeping on the floor!

I think class is the most different thing, the thing that has had the greatest impact on us, because we were both ensconced in a world of people just like ourselves, with no real knowledge of how the “other half” lived. But we are also of different races and different religions. Of course I had known Catholics and Hispanics, and he had known Jews and white people. But when we first started dating, we really knew very little of each other’s cultures. We learned all about each other’s foods, customs, and histories. I learned some Spanish. There’s so much we don’t know about other countries’ histories, even when our own countries’ histories intersects. For instance, did you know that the US invaded DR three times in the last century, and supported two coups there? I had no idea, until I met Adrian.

We learned to live in each other’s worlds, both literally (geographically) and figuratively. When I was still living with my parents on the Upper West Side, he would stay over so much that he was practically a household member. He spent weekends at my family’s country house in the Berkshires (yes, they did buy one, when I was in college. They ended up moving there full-time for a few years, before they moved to Charlotte). Later, we both lived with his mom in Inwood for about a year, and then moved into our own apartment two blocks away. When we went out on the weekends, if we were too tired for the trip all the way uptown, we would crash at my parents’ apartment while they were up in the Berkshires. I learned to speak a little Spanish, enough to get by in Inwood, since that is the primary language spoken there. I also learned little things you never think of– like when I would buy clothes in stores that didn’t have dressing rooms, I learned to wrap the waist of pants around my neck (as if the pants were a superhero cape), and if they fit around my neck that way, they would probably fit around my waist. He learned to speak a little Yiddish, and to navigate through Zabar’s and kosher dairy restaurants.

For a couple of years we lived in Fredonia, NY, a tiny town where we both felt completely out of place and where we were pretty poor. Then we lived in Northampton, MA, where again, we both felt out of place, and we were poor enough that we said a little “please don’t bounce” prayer every time we mailed the rent check and relied on what, to put it plainly, was theft. I worked at a health food store and when my friend rang me up she would toss some things into my bag without ringing them up, or she would ring them up at much lower prices.

Now we are nowhere near as poor as Adrian was growing up, and nowhere near as rich as I was. We scrimp and save a bit to make ends meet, but we own a condo, and we are not worried about paying our mortgage or putting food on the table. Adrian recites the blessings in Hebrew when we celebrate Shabbat and holidays, and on the rare occasions (timing doesn’t work with his work schedule and the kids’ bedtime) that we go to temple he enjoys it. Sometimes he will surprise me by teaching me something about my own people that I didn’t know. I speak to our kids in Spanish, we have a tree during Christmas, and Santa gives them presents. I cook kasha varnishkes, matzah ball soup, moro, and yuca. We both deal with other people’s bigotry and try to shield our kids from it. We meld our cultures in many ways. I still have to guard against my white, middle-class biases and assumptions.

As different as our backgrounds are, though, our worldviews and our beliefs on most major issues are remarkably similar. We are both very far left politically, though he is slightly more to the left than I am. We mostly agree on how to raise our children. The only two parenting differences I can think of are that he wasn’t quite as gung-ho about homeschooling in the beginning as I was (but he was never against it), and that he is much more pro-vaccine than I am– which is totally understandable, given that he grew up seeing typhus and polio and stuff like that first-hand. Our ethics and values are basically the same. We each usually understand where the other is coming from.

Ironically, I think our disparate backgrounds and experiences have helped us empathize more easily with each other. Him being an ethnic minority and having faced discrimination, as well as having grown up poor, helps him understand what I go through as a woman. Anyone who has met him can testify that he is not macho at all and is the farthest thing from a “typical guy.” I think it also helped that he grew up outside of the football-loving, beer-drinking white American male culture. And I think being a Jewish woman has helped me to temper the sense of entitlement that comes from race and class privilege.

I created a Chanukah iMix to showcase the music I’ve been playing today. Click on the link below, and your computer will launch iTunes and show you my iMix:

Rachel’s Chanukah iMix

I am happy to say that we started multiplication on Friday, and Llani no longer finds math boring. She understood the concept readily, and enjoyed figuring out the problems. I think she was just doing addition and subtraction for so long. It was getting old and it wasn’t challenging her enough.

We stuck mostly to our routine on Friday, and it was a good day. I am really seeing the difference between sticking to a routine and not doing so. We are all happier. At the same time, I think having off days on Tuesdays and Thursdays balances it out so the kids have enough freedom to pursue various projects. And when I say “the kids,” I basically mean Llani. When Llani and I are doing lessons, I invite Zeke to join in (on a three-year-old level), but if he doesn’t want to that’s fine with me.

We’ve been doing a lot of Chanukah stuff– reading books, doing worksheets and art projects. Llani has been busy making presents for her grandparents, great-grands, and aunt and uncle. We’ve been talking about the history of Chanukah, and she’s interested even when the talk does not involve latkes, presents, and dreidels.

After the holiday, I think we’re going to start studying ancient history again, like we tried last year. She’s been asking for it. I think she wasn’t quite ready for all the work last year, but maybe now she will be. I’m not sure, though– what sparked her interest again was finding some ancient Mesopotamian puppets we made last year. I’m not sure if she just wants to do the crafts, or if her interest will still be there when it comes time for reading and discussing the history.

Meanwhile, she caught Zekey’s cold, and is just miserable. Congestion, coughing, fever, nausea. And Zekey isn’t over his cold yet, so now I am dealing with two sick kids. Adrian is also catching it. Ugh.