The calendar says

When I looked at the calendar today, a couple numbers jumped out at me. 6 months. 27 weeks.

It took a bit longer for another number to come to mind. 3rd. As in 3rd trimester. Depending on which exact calendar one consults, I am just on one side or the other side of that major milestone.

Early on in this pregnancy, we designated several points for when we would take action. Some were not arbitrary, such as the first trimester wait for telling other people. Some were arbitrary, such as waiting until after the mid-point ultrasound to start making purchasing ideas, even though we had no intention of changing our purchases based on the new baby's sex.

Slowly, we've been going through the masses of clothes and other items we've had in storage and sorting through them. My goal was always to have the bulk of that done by the beginning of the third trimester.

Hmmm... I think maybe I've accomplished that, but I haven't paid close enough attention to be sure. We definitely are not at a point to start organizing all that I have pulled, as the dresser we intend to use is still tucked into Scooter's closet and full of clothes nobody's using right now. Should probably do something about that.

The other general dates I have in mind are December 1st and after Christmas. December 1st is when we will go ahead and spring for the car seat since we want to bring it with us when we start minivan shopping. After Christmas is when I plan on actually washing all of the baby clothes we've piled up in the crib and doing some of the other stuff that will signal we're really preparing to care for another baby.

I think I've mentioned before that keeping so quiet for the entirety of the first trimester has meant that those weeks remain less real to us and somehow don't feel like they should count. But my growing belly and this active baby, not to mention the days of the calendar, tell me I won't be getting that time back!

(Dis)organization

In some ways, this year's teacher is more organized than last year's. Her days follow a more predictable pattern of reading, activity centers, math, and other subjects. She sends home a packet containing a weekly note and homework assignments every Monday, and everything is due back on Friday. She has her standard ways of getting her students' attention.

But it's the little things that fall through the cracks and, of course, lead to a number of Scooter's problems.

Today Scooter walked out of the school building in tears. It turns out that for library time, his class went to the book fair that is currently running. Since Scooter had no money, he couldn't buy anything. I had, of course, left the house without my wallet since I intended only to pick up Scooter and then walk back home.

Now I suppose I could have deduced that this was a possibility. I knew that the book fair was still going on, in the library, and I knew that his class was scheduled for the library. But I also knew that the fair is set up in such a way that there is an area of the library not taken up by the book fair. So maybe they were going to meet there, maybe the librarian would have picked out some books for them to check out this week.

I just checked back in this week's note and there is absolutely no mention of the book fair.

Similarly, I thought to send Scooter's Halloween costume with him on Friday--just in case. Again, no mention of whether or not they'd be doing anything costumed, but at least that time I made the right connections. When I got there for the classroom party, every kid but 1 was wearing some special outfit.

This same disorganization also means a less support than Scooter needs. She relies on telling the class when they need to do something and then expecting them to follow through. With something like folders, she'll remind them to put them into the bin at the beginning of the day, but has no system for making sure the kids all comply. Consistently, Scooter does not get his folder when he's told to, and then various papers don't make it into her hands. Or conversely, he forgets to grab stuff from his cubby and comes home without anything. We have a communication book to help us keep track of what's going on at school, and vice versa, but it doesn't do us much good when it doesn't come home.

When I mentioned that things clearly weren't ending up where they needed to, her response was that she saw it happening a lot. I don't think that she's unwilling to give Scooter the support (in this case, making a concerted effort to ensure Scooter is following her directions), but that she just doesn't quite see what her role is. She believes strongly in 1st graders taking on more responsibility, but doesn't seem to understand that Scooter's not going to get this on his own.

I'll be going in with a camera later this week so that I can take pictures for a visual schedule. My plan is to get information about what he needs to do at the start and end of each school day, translate this into pictures, and then attach it to his backpack. Then I just have to get him into the habit of following it.

LoPaWriMo (Local Paper Writing Month)

So one of the questions that arose in my meeting in Toronto a couple weeks ago was how much I can realistically accomplish in a measurable way. Especially given how little I have been able to produce in the past year. And so the plan is to see what I can come up with in the two months before my maternity leave begins and then use that to formulate a realistic schedule.

I've decided to co-opt NaNoWriMo for this purpose. No novel. And definitely not 50,000 words--that would be dissertation length. But I've decided to pump out at least 15,000 words in the next 30 days. That should get me a solid draft of my paper and some outtakes to be saved for my dissertation proposal and the big paper itself.

In academic-paper-writing terms, an average of 500 words a day is fairly ambitious. I tend to go a (long) while with very little productivity and then a burst of four or five pages in a single day. But that has not exactly gotten me very far lately, so I'm going to give this a go.

I won't be sharing much, if anything, of what I'm working on since it doesn't fall within the interests of many, if any, of you. And I'd say something about it potentially affecting my output here, but it's not exactly like I've been posting all that much, so you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever.

Official

To borrow a line from Trillian: In a move that surprised no one, he has been diagnosed with Asperger's.

But it's official now. Full report to follow, etc, etc.

Nonetheless, they sent us away with a short letter making it official. And a good number of suggestions.

The hardest part will be figuring out if we can get any services close to home or if we'll be traveling to Big City on a more regular basis. That will be the case for certain things, like the nutritional counseling we can get through their clinic, but we're hoping to find a good, local match for some cognitive behavior therapy once we get onto our new health insurance.

I also came away with a few suggestions for people to call for myself. (And not even a batted eye when I asked.)

This is not a panacea, but at least we feel like we've been on the right track and have opened up a few more avenues for help.

Let the wild rumpus start

Dear Boy-child #2,

STOP KICKING MY CERVIX.

It hurts. And we need everything to stay in place down there for another 12 weeks at least.

Sincerely,
Your Incubator

With Scooter, we inevitably began to assign personality traits while he was still in utero. When the doctor used the doppler, he would kick at it. He doesn't like being disturbed, we'd say. The sound bugs him. Sure enough, he has always been particularly sensitive to sounds--and this was probably a window into his sensory issues.

This guy is more laid-back. He has not been crazy about the doppler or ultrasound, but his reaction is to move away from the noise slowly. During our long ultrasound, he lazily turned his back. But he never struck out at the source.

He's also more active than Scooter. We started out with fairly predictable blocks of movement. But while Scooter stuck more or less to a schedule, this guy will start kicking at almost any time. A lot. And everywhere. His favorite position is transverse, but twirling around is popular too.

I can't help but assume that this one will be on the move early and into everything. Truly my wild thing.

Closer to official

We've only been asking questions since Scooter was 18-months-old. To be fair, Trillian is the one who initiated them. Mostly I felt like I understood why he was odd in the ways he was--and most of them pointed to my family's bank of personal quirks, so I mostly didn't want to follow that trail too far, at first.

I wrote a while back about a particular student whom I recognized as likely having Asperger's. There's a moment I left out from that anecdote. As I read the article, I so got it. I completely understood where the kids they were profiling were coming from. But, I told myself then and a thousand times after, I am empathetic to a fault and overly sensitive to others' feelings. That means this isn't me.

A couple years later, Trillian and I were sitting in the coffeeshop near our condo. Our conversation, as was common in those days shortly after Scooter turned 4, turned to autism. Both of us had moved into fix-it mode, lining up OT and looking into other options for him. I had mostly gotten over the guilt I'd been feeling about the role of my genetics. And I finally spoke out loud an idea that had been brewing for a while at that point: I have Asperger's. My ability to read emotions and my sensitivity to others are both the result of years of observing and categorizing.

I think that since then, we've known that Scooter would end up just on one side or the other of the diagnostic line for autism spectrum disorder--our guess has long been Asperger's, a suspicion that has only grown stronger as Scooter gets older.

And now we're moving towards official.

Scooter went in for educational testing last week, the ADOS administered by the district's autism team.

The written report will take a few weeks yet, but the word has come back to us that he most definitely qualifies. He goes in for a full evaluation and possible medical diagnosis soon. We don't expect that outcome to be substantially different, perhaps just further refinement of where we are now.

This reminds me a bit of when we got our second-parent adoption. Suddenly we had official recognition, but at the same time nothing changed. Everything is exactly as we've known it to be all along.

Except that this time there's the kernel of the potential for where this will take us down the line.

Education shorts

Various thoughts, all tied more or less to the topic of education.

I'm tutoring a student in Latin. We're going on a year of meetings. It's good money for the amount of time I put in, although there's a lot about the set-up that goes against my educational instincts.

He is a student of the teacher who is retiring next year, whose position I will probably be applying for. I've almost gotten over the preemptive guilt I feel for planning on taking the position if it's available and then leaving if something opens up at the small liberal-arts college in Capital City (which is such a good fit for my interests), even if that means being at the high school for only a year. At the very least, I'm at a point where the best interests of my family and myself would be enough to help me past the guilt.

Anyway, this teacher uses a textbook I despise with the heat of a thousand suns. An argument could be made for its pedagogical place, but definitely not the way this teacher uses it.

This may sound awful, but I think the teachers among my audience will get it. I just found out my student aced the Latin test we were preparing for. Aced it. And there's no way he should have. I know what his skills are and I know what a test should look like for what they covered. He probably would have failed the test I would have written for this section. (Or maybe not, since I would have taught last year completely differently and would have set different, very clear expectations for my students.)

At the same time, I'm into my second education course and still not exactly wowed by any of the process. I'm working hard to put my blinders on and make it about what I need to get out of the course, but that's a little difficult when one graded aspect of the course is online discussion.

My last professor had a rule for our discussion board that responses should be substantive; we were supposed to aim for a minimum of a 4-sentence paragraph. I thought, at the time, that it was a little condescending to have it spelled out for us so specifically, but now I get it. We've had a lot of main posts of 2 or 3 sentences and even more single sentence replies. It's really hard to have a true conversation in such a context.

My real schoolwork--the PhD stuff--is suffering in the meantime. I can't focus long enough to write anything above an undergraduate level (which, despite the ed program's insistence that it's post-bac, is all that's required for my online courses). I've stared at the same paragraph of my paper for over a week now. A chunk of this is the dread I'm experiencing over my meeting next week, as I try to explain to an entire committee without children why my son's first month of 1st grade has been so consuming.

We head to an educational evaluation for Scooter tomorrow, so at least if we walk out of there with a diagnosis (limited to the school setting, but a diagnosis nonetheless), I'll have official words to throw around when I'm in Toronto.

Did I mention that I'm officially enrolled in a third institution now too? For my ballet class, so it's not a major academic commitment, but it does mean that I feel more of a need to follow the syllabus than otherwise (there's a grade involved and I can't slack when there's a grade involved). So I'm headed off to throw my pregnant body around the dance floor.