The start of this winter was fabulous for me. Couldn't have been better. November kicked off with the joy of watching Florida light up blue as the nation elected Barack Obama, and remained fantastic through Thanksgiving, the most pleasant and relaxing Thanksgiving I've had in probably 20 years. December's pre-holiday stress was minimal, and Christmas itself came with the gift of incredibly warm weather and fun family times. And even though I'd worried that we'd spend a sad and sullen New Year's Eve at home with the television, we wound up attending a superlative party at an insanely gorgeous mansion on the beach.
But January? January sucked balls.
Maybe it wouldn't have seemed so bad if the start of the winter hadn't been so great, but the contrast between the amount of fun I had in December and the amount of fun I had in January was startling. Let's put it this way: I'm looking back on the month of January, and the most fun I had was playing Wii Billiards with my husband... and I lost approximately 80% of those games. That's sad, people. That is a serious fun deficit.
Today is the first day of February, and I'm freaking out that it's going to be as rotten a month as January.
I'm fretting about my foot, because I am SO SICK of being on crutches, I can't even express it. I had an MRI done yesterday, and tomorrow I'll head back to the podiatrist to find out just what's going on inside my foot. The best case scenario is that the bone's in good enough shape for me to start walking, and I'll just have to deal with a few more months of lingering pain and weirdness as the nerve heals. The less good, but still likely, scenario would mean me spending a few more weeks on crutches. Or it could be something unlikely and terrifying, like the discovery that there's something really awful going on in my foot that would require surgery to fix, or maybe that my foot has become a portal to an evil dimension and must be amputated immediately in order to prevent the demise of our civilization. To be honest, I think the first option is the most likely, and I'll be given the green light to start walking and driving again... and yet I'll also admit that I'm concerned that the MRI will show that there never was any damage to the bone to begin with, and that I've been suffering on these *&^@#$ crutches for naught. But I think that's unlikely, too. I do think my foot was seriously messed up, and is healing. So my foot is not the biggest of my worries.
No. The prize for biggest worry -- soundly beating even tough competition like "why is my house in DC still not rented out, OMG, we are pissing away $2000 every month it sits empty" -- goes to my son and his educational future.
Right now my son is attending the local public school, and it's... okay. Completely unobjectionable. It has great facilities and lots of technology and his teacher is clearly intelligent, experienced, and insightful. But my son is spending the bulk of his day doing worksheets torn from a standardized Grade 1 workbook, and my son? He is not standard. He reads way above grade level, and yet he has to read "stories" like "Sam is a cat. Sam likes to nap. Sam likes to nap in the sun." At home, he'll quickly zip through 30 or 40 pages of a book about the cat's history as a human companion, and then he'll astound the waitress at our favorite sushi restaurant when he explains that the cat statue on the bar is called a manikineko, and the gold color means money, and the way the paw is raised means "luck from far away."
I want more for him than just worksheets.
Last week my husband and I went to tour a magnet school for the gifted, and oh, it was an academic paradise. It was like a little college that admits second graders. We got to visit some of the second and third grade classes, and hear the kids talk about the projects they're doing, and see the in-depth way the teachers are presenting the subjects. Impressive, but what made the biggest impression on me is that all of the children looked happy and engaged, that they were eager to speak up and talk about what they are learning. I looked around and thought that my son would fit in perfectly. It's a school that would encourage his curiosity and understand his (sometimes wacky) imagination. I want him to go there. I want him to go there so badly, I'd stay on crutches for a year if that was the sacrifice I had to make. (Seriously. The tour alone was a challenge; I was "walking" on crutches for more than two hours straight, when even a single block of walking exhausts me. But there was NO WAY I was going to miss even a moment of the tour.) In previous years, the school has had a high enough demand that there was a lottery, but we've been told that the population of our county has dropped enough (thank you, crappy economy!) that they no longer have to hold lotteries. All he has to do is meet the eligibility criteria, and he's in.
The assessment process starts with an IQ test, and if the child meets the minimum IQ level of 130, a school psychologist will do a more in-depth academic and social assessment to make sure that the kid would be well-served by the school. I am not concerned about the second part of the assessment; I know my kid, he does well at school and gets good grades, and I know that anyone who sits down and talks to him will quickly see that he's clever and creative and confident. But the IQ test? Freaks. Me. Out. It's not that I don't think he's smart enough; I know that he's smart, but I worry about the process of quantifying smart. It's a test, a cut and dried test, and that can so easily be thrown off by many factors. He could blow it if he decides to be funny and give the wrong answers, or if he didn't sleep well, or if he's sick, or if he tries to work too fast and doesn't read the instructions properly. He could blow it just by deciding that he doesn't feel like doing it.
He's being tested tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday. I wouldn't even have been told when his test was if I hadn't emailed the appropriate person at his school to ask, which annoys me. And guess what? He's sick, with a low fever, runny nose and nasty cough -- though apparently he wasn't sick enough for his father to decide to keep him home today. Instead he took him out bowling this morning, because one of his friends was taking his stepchildren bowling. Whatever. I wasn't sitting around a bowling alley with my sad little crutches beside me, I'll tell you that much, so I stayed home. My son's been sick since last weekend, and I can't tell at this point if he still has the same cold or a new one. And maybe it's the cold, maybe it's because I'm an ineffective mother on one foot, maybe it's something else entirely, but the boy has been a total pain in the ass lately. His latest trick is to not listen. I'll ask him a question and get no response. I'll ask him again. Nothing. I'll yell his name once or twice, and finally he'll look up and say "huh?" I'd think he was deaf, except he hears me just fine once I've gotten his attention. It's bad enough that it's making me worry that he's got something diagnosibly wrong with him, but it's also just infuriating. It doesn't make me think he's stupid, at least; he is often reading or seemingly just so engrossed in his own thoughts that he doesn't hear us talking to him. But it does worry me, at a time when I'm already stressed about what label strangers are going to put on his box.
So am I having fun yet in February? In a nutshell, no.
