Life in the Country

People have asked me several times in the last few months, "What's it like for a hard boiled city gal to move out to the country?" with the followup question "Do you hate it?"

And I just start laughing. We have never been happier than we are with this decision to move out into the wild. Here are things we don't miss about the city:

• listening to drunk people shout their way home from the bars
• cleaning up the flower pots that drunk people knocked over on their way home from the bars
• smelling the pee in every alley from drunk people on their way home from the bars
• panhandlers on *EVERY* corner
• that guy with the persian rug over his shoulders shouting at everyone that HE IS THE CHIEF
• um... let's see... drunk people ringing our doorbell at midnight, insisting that they live in our house
• rats
• rats
• rats
• the smell of the neighbors cigarette smoke wafting through our walls
• noise
• traffic
• ravens fans
• produce from the grocery store that just *isn't quite right*
• city water

seriously that should be enough to live in a permanent state of ecstasy, here are the new 'problems' we have in the country:

• traffic jams of deer in the driveway
• too many choices of excellent grocery stores with fresh seafood, miles-long organic food sections and amazing produce
• we sometimes can't find hamslice because he is outside playing
• the neighbors are so friendly that we don't know when or if we are offending them
• the school is proactive and teaching at lightening speed
• we love everyone we have met here so far (we can't identify any jerks)

and so on.

So you can see now how I will miss the city, but .. um... not really. Buh Bye.

Oh the Lies. Karma has Caught Me At Last

When I was about 7 years old, I told the biggest gossip in Dad's church that my Mom drank alcohol to such excess that she would start hiccuping and slurring her words. I thought it was hilarious. Subsequently Mom had a rough couple of months, trying to explain that she was not, in reality, a raging alcoholic.

Apparently this is a genetic trait. My dear angelic (cough cough) Hamslice has been telling whoppers about me at school. The first whopper entailed me punching the kids of our friends whenever they came over to our house. The newest one is that I refuse to feed him.

These fibs have led to some rather awkward conversations with Hamslice's school administration. Most of them come off like that fictional court interrogation where the attorney asks "So, Mrs. Johnson, when did you stop beating your child."

*sigh*

I know somewhere up there Mom is laughing her ass off.

Let the Re-evaluations begin

So we had our group meeting at school today. Teacher, Vice principal, Psychologist, Occupational Therapist, Student Liaison and Student Teacher. And me and Hambone. The meeting was much more productive than other similar meetings we have had, and ultimately we are optimistic.

The upshot is that we will begin evaluations for Hamslice within the MD public school system so his results will be normalized across the state. The evaluation is for fine motor and sensory issues, which will get to the root of what's really happening with his SPD. The OT at the school sort of poo pooed our other OT, after we had started poo pooing the SPD treatment we had received. The school's OT was more in line with our understanding of how to diagnose and manage SPD than the old OT. We liked that.

But it was the same kind of gang-up that we've grown accustomed to, where the group has papers to toss at us and a series of episodes that happened in class to blindside us with. We were ready with our papers to toss back at them and our questions right back. We are on to them.

His teacher was less than thrilled that Hamslice was trilling his lips and making noises during class time. She said his drawing and handwriting was juvenile. She also was trying to get a handle on his organizational system, which right now consists of having items scattered about every nook and cranny in the school. Pencils everywhere, papers everywhere. Aie yie yie. And she said he had just had a little spaz out THAT VERY DAY.

However, since the first day of school, Hamslice has had only two really bad episodes so Hambone and I were thinking this was a win for us.

Someday we will have a meeting where only good things are said about Hamslice. Someday.