The Queen's Rambles

I thought I was having a nervous breakdown Sunday morning when my computer finally gave up the ghost for real and true. No matter how much I played with the function keys and boot options, I couldn’t get it to boot. Finally, finally after three hours of trying it booted. Success!

But. . .

It took at least 3 minutes between each mouse touch to actually move anything. Obviously that is terrible for productivity. In fact, the whole past two weeks has been a mess of inefficiency. Not having a good working computer was costing my family hours and hours of my time and all of my patience. When it takes an hour to do a simple ten minute job, you know you’ve got to do something.

So here I am! No more Dell! I went out and bought myself a Toshiba. I have no idea if it is a better computer or not, though the sales guy (name tag said Big Mike, but I don’t believe it. I did laugh, though!) at Best Buy assured me it was a million times better than a Dell ever could be. He also tried to sell me a laptop with a touchscreen, but I am old school enough that I don’t need or want a touch screen. Why add one more thing that can break?

It’s amazing how fast I can get things done! I have free time back! And less stress! I swear I thought someone was going to have to call the paramedics for me on Sunday so they could escort me to a padded room.

Now if I could just figure out how to make the font a lot bigger, I’d be very happy. This OS is really modern and strange and I can’t find anything.

What else?

I took MommyProf’s advice and contacted the counselor at Erik’s school. It wasn’t so much that I wanted someone to fix my kid (though that would be nice!) but he refuses to talk to me and I was hoping a counselor would be professionally trained to elicit a response from a very stubborn seven year old.

The experience was very enlightening.

She called me after talking to him and recounted the whole conversation back to me. Let’s just say it was a very “Erik” conversation and she was totally stymied. The kid is like talking to a brick wall.

His main problem is that the teacher does not let them touch the walls in the hallway. She is new to the school and he believes she doesn’t understand that this is not a school rule. How can she just come along and deem the walls untouchable? So he does what he does best and tests the limits Every. Single. Time.

And guess who always wins?

The teacher, of course. Which means he gets sent to the back of the line every single time they walk anywhere, which makes him hate the teacher more. But if he would just follow the rules he would not be sent to the back of the line!

The counselor tried several approaches to get him to understand that if he just follows the rules he’ll be happy and that the teacher may be new, but she does have a right to create her own classroom rules. He rebuffed them all and told her that school is really hard because he doesn’t have any rules at home.

She suggested to me that perhaps we could institute some guidelines and rules at home so he could get used to structure and authority.

Every single person who knows our family in person has been just as baffled as I am at this assertion that we have no rules. I did let the counselor know that we have plenty of rules and that I wouldn’t believe half of what he says about school as long as they don’t believe half of what he says about home.

Apparently he is also talking non-stop at school, which is not surprising. The other kids are telling him he’s annoying and the teacher has gone from her cutesy little “pretend you have a bubble in your mouth that can’t escape!” routine to basically telling him to stick a bubble in it.

When we got home I talked to him a little bit more and got something big out of him. There is another boy named Eric in the class and this boy is very well behaved. Apparently the teacher compliments this child a lot and Erik thinks she is talking to him but then realizes she means the other Eric. Also, she calls him Erik with a K and the other boy just plain Eric and he wants to be the just plain Erik.

This is something I will address with the teacher later this week if necessary. I can see how that would be upsetting, especially when he is not used to sharing a name with anyone. The rest of it? Well. . .I guess he’ll have to learn to regulate himself. I want his school experience to be as positive as possible. I want him to be happy. But I can’t help the kid if he refuses to help himself.

I’ve been dealing with him for almost 8 years now. Getting him to cooperate with me requires every ounce of my creativity and energy. I could probably write a whole book about the psychology of dealing with his personality. I guess I can’t expect every teacher that he runs into to have the kind of patience and skill that’s required to keep him happy and semi-complaint. We got really lucky with his teacher last year. She was such a master at her craft. I can only hope that as he grows older he’ll learn some skills to make himself happy.

And now I have a big decision to make! Go to BodyPump and hope the childcare doesn’t notice the snot running out of Elsa’s nose? Or do the right thing and skip it? I want to go so badly, but I know they’ll kick her out of childcare so I don’t really have a choice. They are hard core in the childcare with their “two wipe” rule.

Today is her first day of preschool, so it was going to be stressful going straight from BodyPump to school this afternoon. She was going to have to eat her lunch in the car, which is not ideal, but since Gold’s Gym bought out our local gym they don’t let kids have food in the childcare room.

Do I send her to preschool with a snotty nose? I think they would be fine with that. You can’t keep a kid home from school for every little cold that comes along.