Slow Down, Gym Shoe!

A Love Letter To The Blogosphere

Dear Blogosphere,
      It seems like only yesterday when I met you... but its hard to believe its been nearly five years! Look at how we've both grown and changed! When you and I first hooked up, we were partners in uncharted territory. It was really just you and me against the world. I remember sitting on the floor of Diana's bedroom, with the computer keyboard in my lap, creating my first blog just so I could lament about how upset I was about being left alone when the entire rest of the "family" went out to dinner together. That first blog, The Girl In The Closet, was mostly about Asperger's Syndrome, and my experiences with it. I wrote about my social awkwardness and how simple things, like driving through a toll booth, cou turn out to be disasters for me!
The adventures of "The Girl In the Closet" ended in 2007 when one of my relatives came across a post in which I had wrote about my mother being too controlling. The relative had called my mother and told her, and my mother ordered me to discontinue my blog. So I called it quits on "The Girl In the Closet" (which wasn't such a big deal because I had no readers anyway) and I moved to Livejournal. Angel Was Here was a continuation of my first blog, but new and improved! I mostly wrote about school, work, and my visits with Diana, Anthony and the kids. Back then, I tried to protect everyone's identities by assigning them all aliases. Throughout this blog was when I went through a lot of life changes. I tracked down Maggie and Melissa (known in the blog as Mandy and Sarah-Jo) and got molested by their dad, the Assgrabber. I was supposed to move down to Carbondale for school, and ended up having a nervous breakdown and moving back after about four days. In what seemed like rapid succession after that, Diana and Johnny broke up, DIana got pregnant with Pufferfish, my beloved dog died, and Jimmy moved onto the scene.
 I also got more serious about blogging. I learned about memes and sponsored posts. I read other people's blogs. I started a blog called They're All Our Children, in which I discussed a different' children's issue each day. I used sponsored posts in that blog to donate money to different children's organiation. I went to my first BlogHer Conference.
Unfortunately, when I Started caring for my nieces in early 2008, I didn't have as much energy to focus on my topical blog. I had then moved my personal blog over to All Day Her Dreams, which is, ironically, a lot like The Girl In The Closet. Once I started watching Little Bear and Pufferfish, I began this blog and entered the world of the Mommy Bloggers! (No, I may not be an actual Mommy, but I think I can hold my own when it comes to talking about raising kids!)
SO, Blogosphere, nearly five years we've been together, and still going strong! Many people do not understand the special love I have for you. They don't get why I choose to spend so much time with you. The truth is, you give me so much. Whenever something good, bad, exciting or horrible happens to me, you are the first to hear about it. I poured my heart out to you when my dog died. I took comfort from you when I had a nervous breakdown. You guided me through every horrible part-time job I held before I started watching the girls. When I told you I was ditching school too much, you didn't judge me. When I told you about the Assgrabber, you sympathized. Whenever I was sad, when I was angry with myself, when I felt hopeless, when my feelings were hurt, when I was injuring myself, you lent a sympathetic e. No matter where I was... whether it was at Diana's house, in my mom's basement, in California, or at a library... I knew I could find you. You gave me a way to communicate. When I could not put my feelings into verbal words, there was a chance that I could put them into typing.
You also opened a new world to me. You let me glimpse into the lives of other people all over the country. Because I have my own special needs, and have worked with children with special needs, I tend to read blogs by parents of children with special needs. Because I want to become a foster parent, I read blogs about foster families. And in the Blogosphere Ifound so many heroes...foster parents and social workers who are truly dedicated to the kids they raise and work with, parents who find creative and interesting ways to help their chlldren, and all of the brave and unique children they blogged about. In the Blogosphere, I found myself with a huge family, who I look forward to checking in with several times a week. I've seen miracles happen here. I've seen bloggers rally together to donate money and gifts to struggling families. I saw a little boy with dysgraphia and Asperger's Syndrome begin to write his own book. I've seen families struggle with homelessness and cancer and other hardships, and overcome them. I've seen so much.I've become so much. And its all because of you.
So, Blogosphere, I wanted to take this time to profess my undying love for you. Happy Valentine's Day!

With love,
from Nicki, Little Bear and Pufferfish!

BlogBlast: How Do We Show Our Love?

Time for another Parent Blogger's Network Blog Blast! This time, they and the people at Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education want to know how families show their love for each other!
One of the first times when I witnessed truly selfiess love was a family member who demonstrated it not for one of her immediate relatives, but for complete strangers.
It was a chilly winter night. Me and Diana were both about 19 years old, driving down Roosevelt Road in an attempt to find a beauty shop that would cut Monkeyboy's hair. Monkeyboy was three, and fought so much in the barber's chair that we had actually gotten kicked out of three different places that night!
As we neared our town, we heard a huge "BOOM!" The sky in front of us lit up firey orange.
I've always been terrified of loud noises and fire... even separately! Part of my sensory disorganization, I guess But when we drove ahead and saw what had caused the boom.. an explosion at an apartment building... Diana insisted that we stop. All sorts of people were gathered around outside, shivering and worried. The people in the apartment building had had to get out fast, without their jackets.
We happened to have a lot of blankets and jackets in the trunk of Diana's car, things left behind by random friends. Diana handed Monkeyboy to me, and ran to the car to get the blankets and jackets. She started passing them out to people who had kids. She took off Monkeyboy's jacket and put it on  toddler who was shivering badly, having been in the bathtub when his family had had to run out of their house!
This was something straight out o Chicken Soup For the Soul! I came from a family where relatives loved each other, but compassion was not always demonstrated, especially not to strangers. Even down-and-out relatives were expected to fend for themselves! Diana was one of the first people who showed me a different, more universal, sort of love.
Throughout the years, Diana continued to demonstrate her love to the world. She did things like pass out hamburgers to homeless people, take care of children when their own parents couldn't, and let homeless friends and family members sleep on her couch.
I hope we can always be the type of people who have enough love to share with everyone!

A Post About Facebook

I belong to Facebook. I also have Myspace, but I barely use it anymore. Facebook seems a little... I dunno... more decent than Myspace. Not as many random people constantly trying to "Friend" you because they want to have 20 million friends on their pages. On Facebook, I have about 30 friends. Most of them are my family members... Diana, my mom and dad (yes, they're on Facebook, can ya believe that?), my most favorite aunt, some of my cousins. I also "friended" a few people I went to high school with... mostly kids I grew up with from elementary school on.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I had a horrid time in school when I was a kid. I had undiagnosed ADHD and I was pretty much socially and emotionally immature, all along. It was okay up until about fourth grade. Up until then, kids were just friendly, and I played with anyone. When you're little, kids do tease each other, but its not so brutal, and the teachers are able to keep a closer watch on the kids. But starting in fourth grade kids started teasing me a little bit and not being as tolerant of my differences. By fifth grade, I was completely considered a "nerd", with no friends whatsoever. The kids who thought I was weird were no longer happy just to ignore me, but wanted to torment me as well. I spent most of my recesses at Detention anyway, back then, due to stupid misdemeanors such as not doing my homework and not paying attention in class. But on the days when I had recess, I was usually either sitting around reading, helping out in the special education class, or being teased by a crowd of "popular" kids. This followed me all through junior high and some of high school. By high school, though, kids settled down. People didn't blatantly make fun of others anymore. If people didn't like you, they just ignored you. And I pretty much was ignored, until about junior or senior year, when I started making some friends.
Anyway. In junior high, two of the girls who tormented me the most were these girls I'll call Cheyenne and Gertrude. (Don't ask me where I got those names... just popped into my head!) Their teasing went way beyond how the other kids teased me. These girls could bring me to tears. They were in my gym class, which is the worst class to spend with bullies! They would kick my shins when we played soccer, spray me with deodorant in the locker room, whisper cruel words into my ears while the teacher was taking attendance. I literally used to pray, with all my heart, that Cheyenne and Gertrude would die, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
They tormented me all through eighth grade. In high school, I had no classes with them, and they just sort of faded out of my life.
Fast forward to Facebook.
I've always wondered what happened to Cheyenne and Gertrude. In highschool, I used to imagine that horrible things became of them... they became hookers, or drug addicts, or career criminals. But as I got older, I figured it was more likely that they just outgrew their meanness and became normal people.
One day on Facebook, I was looking at a list of people in my graduating class, and I noticed that Gertrude had joined. Impulsively, I clicked the button to "friend" her. I just wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to be able to see her page, see what her life was like now.
To my surprise, Gertrude accepted my "friend request" that very night. She even made a comment on one of my photos... a picture of Pufferfish, in fact... saying "very cute."
It was so strange to me! I wondered if Gertrude remembered how cruel she had been to me in junior high, and if she felt bad about it. Maybe my sending her a friend request was a way of saying I forgave her for all of that... a way of showing myself, and her, that I had grown up. I was feeling pretty good about that. I felt proud that I had gotten to a point where I could look at a person who had once been my enemy, and say, "That was a long time ago. Maybe we aren't going to become actual friends, but lets at least be Facebook friends!" I even noticed that on her profile she looked like she'd become a pretty nice person.
Then, today, while going through my Friends List in order to complete a meme, I realized that Gertrude was gone. When I checked, I saw that it was true. Gertrude had deleted me from her Friends List.
How weird is that? She could have been just cleaning off her friends list and deleting lots of people, and she could have been quitting Facebook or switching to another account or something. But my name on Facebook is slightly different than the name I went by in highschool. Instead of being listed with "Nicki" as my first name, I am listed as "Angel Nicki." So I think the thing that is most possible is that Gertrude didn't really realize who I was when she accepted my friend request. Once she figured out that I was that Nicki, from junior high, she deleted me.
I know I shouldn't even care... but I can't help feeling a little hurt and embarrassed by the whole thing. I've even thought of sending her a note (you can send people notes on Facebook without being on their friends list) but I don't know what I'd say. I wanted to talk it over with the Blogosphere first.
Gertrude was a bitch in junior high. Is it possible that she never did outgrow it?

Does Kindness Even Matter?

A few weeks ago, my mom showed me this email that a co-worker had sent her. The email was about five puppies that had been found in the street, supposedy by my mom's co-worker's friend. According to the email, the guy who found the puppies could not keep them, so he had tried calling all of the no-kill shelters but none had room. He was going to have to take them to the regular pound within a week, and if they didn't get adopted within a week after that they would be put to sleep.
When I read the email I got really upset, especially because the puppies looked a lot like my dog who died last October. so I figured I'd do as much as I could to help those puppies! I forwarded the email to all of my Meetup.com groups that were in the area, and one friend of mine forwarded it to another friend who worked for a dog rescue organization. I thought, "Those puppies will find homes for sure!"
well, I haven'treally talked to my mom in a while. This morning I saw her fo a few mminutes and I thought to ask her, "What ever happened with those puppies?"
As she was running out the door to work, she replied, "Oh, it turned out to be a hoax!"
A hooax? all that for a hoax? Someone's idea of a joke?
When I think about that, and about what happened when me and Little Bear tried to buy presnts for a needy family at Christtmas, and about the situation with Marcus and Brittany and Topher's mom, and with Melissa and Maggie, etc, etc, etc... Diana says she's losing faith in humanity. I was trying to argue with her for a while, but nowo I'm starting to agree. I mean, maybe she's right. Maybe you can't even try to do good in the world anymoe, because too many people are out there trying to trick you. They may be trying to take advantage of your kindness like the kids' mom did by wanting Jimmy and Diana to do everything for her and her kids so that she didn't have to do anything for herself. Or they could be people who use your kindness to throw it in your face and make fun of you, like the dog email people and the Christmas people. Or they could be people who really need help, like Melissa and Maggie, but the negative powers-that-be are stronger than anything you could do to make a difference, and the people in power who could help just won't.
What do you think? Readers, lurkers, passer-byers, please chime in here! is there hop for humanity? Is there any point in trying to be kind anymore? In the words of the Black Eyed Peas, "Where is the love?"

This Will Break Your Heart

A sixteen-month-old little boy died at a day care center in Lincolnshire, which is about half an hour away from where I live. The story is so sad... The day care worker was holding him, got irritated because the other children in the room were getting noisy, and hurled the baby to the floor so hard that he suffered massive head injuries. The saddest part is the description of how the baby grabbed his blanket and crawled to a bouncy chair, where he lay for a while until the day care worker realized he wasn't waking up. And the part where the mother said sometimes the  baby used to have trouble falling asleep, so she had to stay up with him, but how now she's glad because it meant she had gotten to spend more time with him. It makes me want to gag, thinking how that baby spent his last moments.
The saddest part is, I used to work in day care centers, before I started getting into working with kids with special needs. I worked at several Kinder-Care centers. And I can totally see how something like that could have happened. I mean, I remember horrid things happening in those places. I remember the lead teacher picking up a toddler by the straps of his overalls and shaking him. Another assistant teacher, who was watching through the door, went and got a director, who just told the lead teacher to take a break and asked me to take care of the 8 toddlers in the room on my own. I remember hearing about a teacher in the two-year-olds room who tied kids down to their cots so they wouldn't get up at nap time. The same teacher had once gotten in trouble for punching a kid. I remember babies being left in bouncy seats or swings for hours, and being told not to pick up or move the babies because it would make them get used to having attention.
Some people who work in child care centers absolutely love children and are very patient people. But not all. Some (even many) are just trashy people who cannot get any other jobs. I'm not trying to insult anyone... after all, I worked in many day care centers myself! But it is really easy to get a job in a child care center. If you have children, or younger siblings, can answer some basic questions about child development, and can pass a background check, you can work in a day care center. You have to have a certain amount of college credits to be a lead teacher, but that absolutely does not mean you won't be left alone with a classroom of children if you're not certified. I worked in places where 16-year-old highschool students, at their afterschool jobs, were left in charge of classrooms of toddlers. I remember one girl in the classroom next to mine took her toddlers outside to play, brought them back in, and left one outside! She didn't notice until some parents coming to pick up their children saw the little boy standing by the gate all alone. The "teacher" who left him out there was sixteen, you know? Watching eight toddlers! I remember two teachers getting into a verbal altercation and swearing at each other, right in front of the children. My nephew, who was three, was at the daycare where I worked, for a while, and I remember seeing his teacher yank him up by the arm, from behind, to take him to the bathroom before nap time.
If you have infants or toddlers, don't put them in chain daycare centers like Kinder Care or Minee Subee. They don't really focus on teaching these kids anything, or nurturing them. They focus on having as many children as legally possible, with as few staff members as legally possible, paying their staff members as little as legally possible, so they can make more money. They hang up  "lesson plans" on the walls for parents to see, but those lesson plans are never carried out.  At one of the jobs I had, I worked from three to six, and when I got there I was told to write on the dry erase board what activities the children had done during the day. I pointed out that I had no clue what the kids had done, since I hadn't been there, and the director rolled her eyes and told me to just make a few things up! Thats what these places are all about. I'm not trying to scare parents or make you feel guilty... but many chain daycare centers know exactly what they have to make themselves look like in order to get you to trust them, and exactly what they can get away with once you're gone. The best places to put children in day care are places like Montessori or Waldorf day care centers, or centers run by colleges or hospitals or social service agencies. Thats the best advice I can give you.
I guess this is a rant, but it just made me so sad, hearing about that little boy. :(
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Be Kind... Our President Wants You Too!

Our newly inaugurated President Obama suggested that we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a day of service. I heard about the suggestion kind of late, but since I deinitely do want to pass all the kindness lessons I can onto Little Bear and Pufferfish, I scrambled to come up with a service project we could  do at the last minute. So I went to two websites that lists the names and mailing addresses of children with serious illnesses. The girls (Sarah and Little Bear, basically, since Pufferfish didn't really get what we were doing) and I picked names off of the sites, and spent the day making watercolor pictures to send to some of the children on the sites.
Little Bear picked a two-year-old girl named Hailey. We read that Hailey likes Winnie the Pooh, and Mickey Mouse, so Little Bear painted a bunch of pictures of Winnie the Pooh, Tigger and Mickey Mouse. I kept on telling her that this was something President Obama had asked us to do (causing Sarah to joke that President Obama had called us on the phone this morning to personally order us to make watercolor paintings) and I asked Little Bear how it felt to know that her paintings would make Hailey smile. Maybe the most important thing to Little Bear was that she enjoyed painting, but it was a big thing for her to agree to send all of her paintings to someone she didn't know. So I'd like to think a little bit of the kindness lesson sunk in for her!
Here's a picture she painted of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger standing under a tree!

Meanwhile, Monkeyboy has still been driving me completely crazy! Its especially frustrating because in his mind he truly believes that I am torturing him and neglecting him and being just plain mean.
For nstance... this afternoon while Monkeyboy was still at his friend's house, I decided I was going to take the kids to the McDonald's Playland. I called up Monkeyboy and said, would he rather we waited for him to get home, so he could go too? Monkeyboy replied, "No, just go without me." So I took the girls to McDonalds, they had a late lunch, Little Bear and Pufferfish played, etc, etc, etc.
shortly after we got home, Monkeyboy walked into the kitchen and asked if I would drive to McDonalds and get him some dinner. I told him I didn't want to go back out, but that there was plenty of food to eat for dinner in the house. I suggested he make a sandwich. He said, "The sandwich will be too small, and I'll just want to eat another and another and another and I won't get full!" I offered to make him something. I said I'd  make him frozen lasagna, macaroni and cheese, Spaghetti-O's... (yeah we eat a lot of pasta in this house!!!) But in the middle of my digging through the cabinets and fridge to come up with ideas for what he could eat, Monkeyboy turned and stormed off to his room. Later, he returned glumly to the kitchen, got a loaf of bread and a jar of peanutbutter, and announced that he was just going to eat bread and peanutbutter in his room!
When the little girls saw Monkeyboy eating peanutbutter, they wanted some too, so I made them each a piece of bread with peanutbutter. Shortly thereafter I heard Monkeyboy screaming at Pufferfish, "Get out, Pufferfish! Get out!" I went to see what was wrong, and to tell Monkeyboy not to shout at the baby like that. The big problem? He didn't want her eating peanutbutter in his room.
They may seem like little things, but its like everything is a constant battle with Monkeyboy! He is so angry about everything. He percieves that the world is out to get him. When his Ipod stops working, it is my fault because I don't know how to fix it. When he is tired, he is upset with me because he doesn't want to have to do any chores. When I do not want to give him and his friends a ride somewhere because I have a house full of small children, I am being horribly unfair to him. He feels he owns certain foods, such as orange juice or cereal, and gets angry at me when he thinks any of the other kids touched his groceries. When I try to discipline Little Bear for anything, he steps in and tries to comfort her, tries to take her out of Time Out, tries to tell me that I am not being fair.
I don't have a lot of experience with adolescents, so can anyone give me any advice? It is heartbreaking to me that he is so angry at me all the time now and that I have to fight him on everything. After all, he was my first baby... the first one whose diapers I changed, who I gave baths to, who I fed, who I laid next to and read stories to at night as I tried to coax him to sleep. For the first eight years of his life, he was my little buddy... and then it started to go downhill. I do not know how to relate with this new, large, angry version o my little Monkeyboy!

On a lighter note, here is a quick picture of Little Bear and Pufferfish with one of their dogs, at their grandma's house yesterday. What a cute trio they make, huh?

Its Not Like I Knew Her Really Well...

Like a lot of other people I know, I've been getting kind of addicted to Facebook. I have Myspace, but it seems like more people I know now are on Facebook, and I don't get any random friend requests from bands, businesses, etc. Facebook is a smaller world than Myspace. Its like moving from a large suburb into a small town where everyone knows each other personally.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago this girl Veronica sent me a friend request. I knew Veronica from junior high. I didn't know her really well. We weren't really friends. In junior high, I didn't really have many friends. But Veronica was one of the people I would have chosen to be friends with, if I could have. She was one of the people who didn't tease me, and even stuck up for me sometimes. In junior high we switched classes, but stuck with the same two groups of kids throughout almost all of our classes. So I'd have several classes with one group of kids, several more classes with another group of kids, and then "enrichments" with totally random kids from all different groups. (I think the groups were called "sections.") I had just about all of my classes with Veronica, including three that were with the same teacher, out in the portable classroom.
The portable classroom was a wild place. First of all, at the beginning of the school year, the thing wasnt' even built yet. So we met for all our classes in the meeting room of the library. A month or two into the school year, we got to move to the portable, and it was a really big thing for us. We were sort of our own separate planet out there. Then our teacher got ill and had to leave for several months, so we had a sub for all of that time, which added to the "anything goes" feeling of the portable. Even though I still got teased and ignored by the kids in the portable, in my memory it wasn't as bad as usual. We were together all the time and got pretty close... even kids like me, who were always on the margins of everything.
The one thing I remember the most about Veronica is a time when our teacher in the portable first left, and a steady sub hadn't been secured. We had a sub for one day who didn't seem to know what she was doing. The portable was chaos. I don't remember what I was doing... probably roaming around the room, bouncing from the walls, as I often tended to do when things were chaotic... but I didn't notice that a bunch of kids had gained up on my friend Chung... another girl who was on the margins fo everything... and were teasing her. She finally ran out of the portable in tears. Veronica ran after her, found her, and comforted her.
Anyway. So Veronica had friended me on Facebook, and I had accepted her request, but I didn't send a little note or anything else like I might have done if I was "friended" by someone I was actually good friends with... like Diana, or someone.
On Facebook, every time you log in, you can see a list of your friends who have updated your statuses. Basically, in one glance, you can see what everyone is up to. Well, Tuesday night, when I logged on, Veronica's name was followed by a blurb that said, "Veronica tragically died on 12/31/08."
Talk about stopping you in your tracks! At first I thought it was some sort of joke. For one thing, I couldn't find anything about it in the news  or the obituaries or anything. But then I kept checking around, checking her page, and finally emailed the person (another former classmate) who had taken over her pages and turned them into memorials. He emailed me back and replied that, yes, Veronica was dead. She died of a heroin overdose on New Year's Eve, leaving behind a ten-year-old son.
I can't get Veronica off my mind. Its not like I knew her really well... but she was someone in my life once, someone who I had recently reconnected with, someone I probably could have been friends with. Sometime during the night, when I was having fun at Jimmy's sister's house, Veronica was dying.
I feel like the Grim Reaper just brushed my sleeve.

I Love Little Bear!

I probably blog a lot about Little Bear being very active, funny, sometimes weird, and often having trouble listening. But she's also one of the most sweet and sensitive little kids you'll ever meet.
Little Bear is a preschooler who is known for saying things like, "So, what makes you happy in life?" and then really listening because, spontaneously, she wonders what makes a person tick.
One time, the day Monkeyboy found a toad on the walking path and I made him leave it behind because we have bad luck trying to keep pets alive when we yank them straight out of nature, Monkeyboy was listening to music and looking out the window of the car.
From the back seat, Little Bear piped up, "Monkeyboy, I know you're sad. I can tell because your eyes aren't smiling."
Monkeyboy was confused and said, "How can my eyes be smiling?"
Little Bear had trouble explaining what she meant. But you know, right? Sometimes people's eyes just aren't smiling.
And last night, I was feeling sad about something, and probably had a similar look on my face like Monkeyboy had the day he had to leave his toad behind.
Little Bear: "Nicki, you're crying!"
Me: "No I'm not, sugar." (I wasn't!)
Little Bear: "Yes, you are!"
Me: "No, I'm not crying. Come sit with me. What was your best thing about today?"
Little Bear: "Snuggling with you right now."
Me: "Me too!"
Little Bear: "Lets just hold each other forever."