We've reached the stage where people have no idea what to make of Oli. He doesn't talk intelligibly--or at least not the way that a boy just weeks prior to his fifth birthday should. He doesn't maintain eye contact, engage, or ask questions. His play is repetitive, often little more than the imitation of a routine act like tying his shoes. He doesn't understand the concept of personal space. Sometimes, he stares blankly into the air, and even when you call his name he doesn't snap from wherever he is back to the reality of now.
This makes people--children, adults-- uncomfortable. They ask him questions, wait for answers, then fidget and look slightly embarrassed when nothing comes. They smile at him and seem slightly put off when he does not immediately smile back. They finally tend to look just past him, or avert their eyes altogether and settle on one of the children who seems able to meet these minimum human standards.
People don't know what to do with folks like Oli who just don't fit into our notion of what it is to be a man, woman, or child of a certain age, or certain standing. Mental illness, cognitive difficulties, processing disorders ... these things make the general populace squirm, I have found.
The funny thing is, animals have no such qualms. If I had a dime for every puppy that bounded a ten feet out of its way to throw itself into Oli's lap, or every horse that patiently let my little man nuzzle into its neck, or every rabbit that stood stock still to let Oli stroke its long back ... well, I'd be rich.
Oli is gentle with animals. He connects with them on a simple, mutual level. There is an ease about him when something small and fuzzy settles into his lap. It's not something that I see when he mashes his play-doh in frustration, trying so, so hard to mold it into the same ball he sees Mani mastering with ease. It is something else. Something instinctual and yet profound.
With animals, Oli can simply be. They don't ask him questions that he can't answer, or rate his performance based on a set of skills he can't comprehend. They don't look at him funny when he flaps his arms or covers his head and shrieks for no reason. All they ask is that he doesn't tug too hard at their vulnerable spots, or squeeze in places that hurt. If he does either of these things, they will shy and he will be left empty-handed. No more stroking of velvet fur. No more warm, sweet snuggles. No more rough tongue lapping at your wrist.
Oli gets this.
And the animals get him.
It's good to be accepted and loved, no matter how small the creature offering you its trust.
(Written as Jo was about to turn 11, Atticus was 8 and a half, Logan was 6 and a half, and everyone else was a blessing we'd not yet met.)
Apostle Paul, meet Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, meet the Apostle Paul.
No doubt you read this post's title and began asking yourself if MG has finally gone so far off her rocker as to be certifiably insane. I regret to inform you that I have actually been certifiable for quite some time, and am now working in my PhD in the area. I'll let you know when the sheepskin arrives.
My children have fallen into a nasty little habit as of late. Of course, I am ashamed to admit that it's gotten to the stage of "habit"; in order for something like that to develop, it has to grow from a tiny little seed, be allowed to blossom and then finally entrench itself. Clearly, I missed quite a few character training moments in this particular area. Most likely, I cruised past the warning signs with my eyes eagerly trained on something I saw as more important. I do that sometimes, I'm sorry to say.
This particular habit I see my children manifesting is one that's a particular hurt to my mothering heart: tearing Logan down. Igh. Just seeing that in writing makes me cringe. I mean, how do you miss something like that?
The fact is, it's been coming for years. And while I've been trying to navigate the choppy waters of sibling relationships, I'm afraid I completely missed the boat on this one.
The seeds were sewn back when Logan was a toddler. For some reason, each consecutive child in my life has spoken intelligibly at a later date than the one before. Jo was spouting fully-formed, grammatically correct sentences with multiple, appropriate adjectives by one year of age. "Mommy, may I have the fuzzy, yellow duckling, please?" That was Jo. Atticus was somewhat slower to the draw. What set him apart was his vocabulary--apparently, falling asleep to me reading to him from Whitman's Leaves of Grass made an impression. "It's ominous!" he said of an approaching storm one afternoon shortly before his second birthday.
Logan did not speak at one year of age. He muttered little more than his own Logan-speak even as he approached his second birthday. At 30 mos., I sat down with him and made a list of every word he had ever even tried to say. The list stopped at 21 words and consisted mainly of sounds more than
words: "duh" for "ball" and the like. I decided to pursue professional evaluation.
After six months of therapy, some intensive home intervention and a little maturing, Logan began to speak with fair intelligibility. It wouldn't be until he turned five, however, that I would say his speech issues became a moot point.
During those first years, his siblings learned that unless Mom was around, understanding Logan was a fairly taxing exercise. As siblings are wont to do, they often decided that this was a little more involved than they really wanted to be, so they began blocking him out altogether. Logan's response? In true Logan fashion, the reasoning came down like this: "Well, if you're not going to listen to me when I'm nice, I'll make you listen to me when I'm mean!"
I work on this with my older kids to this day. It's not an every day thing at this point, but it's still something I keep my feelers out for. Four years of, "Are you listening to your brother?" Four years of, "Try again, Logan." Four years of, "He's talking to you, Jo."
((sigh))
So that's where this all started. Logan gets ignored. Which has now been translated into, "What Logan says is probably wrong."
Now this jump I really don't get. I suspect that it comes from the fact that I have one very intelligent, dominant firstborn (that would be Jo) and one super-grandé intelligent oldest male (Atticus). And of course, anything they say is, by definition, right. And the opposite of right is ... (follow along with me here!) WRONG.
So if Logan disagrees, he's wrong. The problem is that Logan is no dummy. He's actually just as full of factoids and general knowledge as Jo, though clearly less obsessively detail-oriented as Atticus. As Logan has come into his own and is now a big old first grader, he not only wants to be heard, he wants to be HEARD. But what he gets is often this:
Logan: "If the next president serves two terms, I'll be almost 15 when he leaves office."Jo: "Two terms is eight years."Atticus: "You'll be 14."Logan: "I know! I said almost 15, because the inauguration is in January and my birthday's in May."
Did you catch that? It's really subtle to the casual on-looker. Logan must be wrong, because he is Logan. That's the upshot here.
I know that some people will dismiss this as part and parcel of being a little brother. I'm sorry, but I can't swallow that. It's rude, it's wrong, and above all, it's completely disrespectful. I expect more from my children.
This morning, after hearing the above exchange and watching Logan hunch down in his chair and generally lose a bit of his morning sparkle, I snapped.
"Everyone up!" I announced. The kids looked at me like I was a crazy woman. Didn't I know that there was hot food on the table? This was breakfast time, by golly. A sacred hour in my house. Who gets up at breakfast time?
"Out to the gameroom! I want each of you to build me a Lego wall. Make it 4 big bricks wide and ten bricks tall."
Their eyes still wide, Jo, Atticus and Logan marched out to the gameroom. Ten minutes later, they were back, each carrying a little Lego creation. I instructed them to put the walls in front of their plates and to listen very closely.
"My children, you have fallen into an ugly habit," I began. "The Bible says that a house divided against itself will not stand. And yet, here we are, dividing against ourselves. My children are doing to one another exactly what the world does: pick and pull and hurt. And it's got to stop."
I read to my children from 1 Corinthians 8: We know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. We talked about what we know, what we think we know, and what other people know.
Then we moved on to 1 Thessalonians 5:11: Therefore encourage one another and build one another up. Which would be where our lovely Lego walls come in: today, whenever someone uses their words to correct someone else in any way that uses their knowledge but is ultimately undermining, they will have to physically remove one of that person's bricks. In other words, the intangible from your lips will be made tangible. You will see how you are breaking others down.
I finished up by pointing out that each one of us really and truly is a little wall of Legos. We are our own little structure ... but at the whim of others. The things that break us down can slide so easily off of the tongue as to be almost unnoticed. And there it goes ... another brick from the wall, leaving us less sound, less sure, and less encouraged.
I'll report back on the results ...
I had no intention of posting these, but a friend recently asked where I had come up with the ideas I'd used for decorating for Seven's first birthday party. I told her about the hours I'd spent scanning blogs and noting my favorite ideas. Then she asked why I hadn't returned the favor and posted my own pics to serve as inspiration to other Mommas. Ummmmm ... because it hadn't occurred to me?
To remedy my bloggy faux pas, I present ... the BIRDday Party.
The entrance
We live in a townhouse with a narrow front walkway. Since balloons or cute yard signs or anything of that nature wouldn't have been seen from the street by our guests anyway, I commissioned Jo and her best friend to set the stage in chalk.
The cupcakes
With the number of kids in attendance, cupcakes were the way to go. Easier to serve and, given that we'd be outside, no plates would be needed unless someone was just feeling particularly neat and tidy. I saw these sweet bird's nests, but decided that snipping marshmallows and whatnot was probably less fun than spending my time enjoying the birthday girl. So I simply saved a bag of robin's eggs candies back at Easter time, pulled them out of the freezer in September and, voila! Cute little nests!
The highchair banner
I really, really wanted to do a highchair banner. I have no idea why, but I saw some on etsy and fell in love and, well ... I just had to do it. So I did.
Seven's was a two-evening project for Jo and me. I bought coordinating scrapbook paper from the craft store, a few embellishments to sprinkle here and there, and we set to work.
I drew out a pattern for a fat little birdie, then we cut out a bunch of bodies and wings and had fun mixing and matching. It really was a fun, no-rules craft. And I liked the results so much that I'm keeping the banner to reuse when Miss Seven turns 2.
The serving area
Since the actual party was outside, we just needed a staging area in the house. So I pushed my kitchen table against the wall, and used it as a buffet. I went with all kid-friendly and loosely bird-themed nibbles.
There were twigs (pretzel sticks), flowers (fruit kebobs), suet cakes (rice crispie treats), and birdseed (sunflower seeds). Jo and I made these markers while we working on the banner.
Located on the wall above the serving area was what turned out to be everyone's favorite part of the party: the year in pictures.
This was so, so easy and yet so sweet and fun. I simply took one photo from each month of Seven's life, printed it as a 5x7, and hung it on a color-coordinated ribbon with a mini clothespin. To anchor the ends in a classier fashion, I covered the tips of my pushpins with yet another cutout of a paper bird.
To label each month of this amazing last year, I printed out a free template and used leftover scrapbooking paper from the high chair banner. My handwriting isn't as fancy as some of my computer's fonts. I let it do the pretty part: I printed out "birth" through "11" on white paper, then glued it on to the little tags. Mr. Blandings loved this so much that he moved it to the wall in Seven's bedroom, where I get to enjoy it every day. And Jo (who is going through a teen phase of valuing originality above mere imitation) is convinced that she's going to be seeing this particular decoration "copied" at every little one's birthday she attends for years. Really--it was that cute!
To cement the theme, I put together a playlist of all bird-related songs ... but since we spent 90% of the party out on the back hill, I'm fairly certain no one noticed "Bye Bye Blackbird," "And Your Bird Can Sing," "Three Little Birds," "Blackbird," and the like. But I knew it was there. :-)
Turns out, not only was I nominated for the Best Special Needs Homeschooling Blog category-- I was nominated in Favorite Homeschool Mom Blog, as well as Best Photos Blog. I didn't notice because frankly, I didn't look under such vaunted headings. I'm sure that says something about me on a very deep emotional level, but right now, I'm not interested in psychoanalyzing the whole thing. Instead, I'm just going to sit here and say, "Wow!" and try not to sound like Sally Fields too awfully much. :-)
It is no small thing to put your son on a plane and send him halfway around the world.
It is no small thing to watch him collect his belongings, listen to him dream over what God has in store for him while he is abroad.
It is no small thing, too, to see him cast a glance over his shoulder as he walks through the massive, sliding doors of the airport and search for you--one last time-- to offer a reassuring smile.
I'm going now. I'm off! Can you believe it, Mom? I'm doing it! I'm really doing it. Just like you always said I would ...
Five years ago, I wondered and worried and prayed over the spectre of fear and defeat that threatened to swallow Atticus. Night after night, I would pray with him, asking God to cut his anxieties down to size, to give him victory, to help him claim the steadfast heart that Jesus wanted for him as a young man of God. More often than not, Mr. Blandings and I would slip into his bedroom just before we turned in for the night and pray once more; this time, it was Joshua 1:9. Every night, over and over, we prayed this verse:
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.
We recited it by day light, when the worries appeared. Over math that seemed too difficult. Over words that seemed too hurtful. Over fears about the future. Over questions that seemed too deep. Over a heart that seemed destined to cower.
Years later, I can tell you that the roots of this Scripture are so deep in my son's spirit that I have seen him whispering it to himself as he prepares to walk into a crowded room of people he doesn't know.
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.
Today, Yahweh walked alongside Atticus as he took one small leap from boyhood to manhood. The God who hung the stars in the sky stood nearby as Atticus and Mr. Blandings made their way through security, found their gate, and settled in to wait a while. Then, it was Yahweh who carried my beaming boy on to a gigantic Airbus. Right now, the three of them are hurtling through the sky en route to Nepal and whatever adventures and blessings await them there.
Five years ago, none of this would have been remotely possible. Five years ago, it was a struggle for Atticus to strap into the car for a ride across the mountains without mentally steeling himself for the fiery death he knew was lurking just around every bend. Yet today, with God's help and to God's glory, this same young man kissed me fiercely as I prepared to leave him at the airport. His hands were not clammy, his face was not pale, his heart was not racing.
I must have held on a little too long for our last hug. The truth is, my heart breaks just a little bit with each day that I am away from any of my children, and knowing that it will be two weeks before this gawky man-boy is laughing at my side brings a hard lump into my throat. I was pondering this, holding on tight, as Atticus started to pull away. Sensing my hesitation, he leaned in just a tad closer, found my ear, and whispered.
"Joshua 1:9, Mom. 'Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.'"
I cried just the tiniest bit as I let him go, even though really, it would have taken nothing for me to break into full-fledged sobs. But to what end? Has God not commanded me? I will be strong and courageous. I will not tremble, nor be dismayed, for the Lord my God is with my son ... wherever he goes.
If you look on my sidebar thingy, you'll see that I'm honored to say that this blog has been nominated multiple times in the Homeschool Blog Awards. Each time, it's been a shock-- and a delight-- to see that someone, somewhere, thought enough of what they read here to go to a website and put in a nomination.
This year is no different. But somehow, this year is even better.
For the first time, BOOKS and BAIRNS has been nominated in the Special Needs Homeschooling Blog category. And I am speechless.
See, I never wanted to be a special needs homeschooler. Unlike some people who know deep down that they are called to love and parent a child who faces challenges, I blundered into this whole SN parenting gig. And truth be known, it wasn't even a blunder that brought me to SN homeschooling. It was more like a slow, dawning awareness that what was going on down at the preschool while I was diligently tending the educational fire at home was in no way serving my precious son. Even then, I struggled to come to terms with that most basic of facts: God chose me to be Oli's Momma. And part of being a momma, in this family at least, is teaching.
I'm not a perfect teacher. Not for my neurotypical children, and not for the little one who has patiently sat by as I've learned what "special needs" really means. Some days I'm completely unable to hit on the right presentation for a new skill. Other days, I'm dead-on in the creative department, and feel a surge of confidence as I see the lights go on in a child's eyes. Then, of course, are all the in-between days, when I simply plod through and pray that this little bit I'm offering can fall into God's hands and be used for so much more in the lives of my children.
I'm honored to find the name of this blog among the others nominated in the special needs category. Such distinguished company makes a person blush. But the real gift of this nomination has been the realization that God has, yet again, opened a door for ministry through the circumstances of our family, our lives, and our homeschool.
Oli didn't ask to have FAS. He didn't choose to have to fight to learn his name, how to swallow his food, or how to tell the difference between hot and cold. Truth be told, he didn't choose to be in our family, either. Oli didn't have any control over any of this ... but God did. Seeing how God has used, is using, and will continue to use this one special, precious, beloved little man for HIS glory, well ... that's an honor. There's no badge for that, no award. But for me, at least, there's the gift of Oli. And really, that's enough.
Mr. Blandings and Atticus are in the throes of packing for their journey to Kathmandu. We've got travel-sized shampoos, lots of granola bars (Atticus is not a fan of spicy dal bhat), and the three-volume set of LoTR. There are also mounds and mounds of fleece hats, thick tights, and warm scarves ready to envelop the beautiful boys and girls at the children's home.
Tucked in amongst the necessities and the niceties are some papers. Some potentially very important papers.
Bee's latest visa request.
If you ever needed proof that the Blandings clan is willing to persevere in spite of repeated, emphatic "that's impossible" statements, well ... here it is.
Visa try, round four.
Honestly, we were reluctant to even consider approaching the embassy again. The last attempt to get Bee's visa was such an utter failure that we wondered if the time, effort, and yes, money, was simply a distraction from our bigger goal of moving to Nepal as missionaries. Bee, however, was eager to try one more time. In spite of the odds. In spite of the hassle. In spite of the very real possibility that this could be another heartache in the making.
Which proves that she's a Blandings, in case that was ever in doubt.
I humbly ask you to be in prayer for my family over the next two weeks. My guys leave November 12 and return Thanksgiving Day. Specifically, prayers are needed for:
- Bee's visa application--that God would place a sympathetic ear at the visa window, maybe even a Christian!
- Health for Mr. Blandings and Atticus--who have both been exposed to a yucky cold that might make such a long airplane journey quite uncomfortable.
- Things here at Casa Blandings to be boring. No illness, no attitude issues, no rocked boats.
- Safe travel for my menfolk and, God willing, my girl, too.
- A time of spiritual feast for me, that I would use the empty evenings to draw nearer to God and to listen to Him more closely than I can in my busy day-to-day routine.
