Why Bees Should not Smoke Crack.

Alternatively titled: I think me and my girls are slightly high strung.

Ok first – watch.  turn the volume WAYYYYYYYY up. But not if you are at work or in any kind of environment where you need to stay quiet.

 

Now i’ll explain.

So – last nite, this crazy drunken bee meanders into our car via the sunroof. I try to swat it out – but its little crack-is-whack super sticky legs are like embedded into the felt and i’m not about to piss it off.

{Semi-random side story that has some bearing on why i am reluctant to beat said drunken honeybee out of my car: LAST WEEK on the way to dance, the worlds LARGEST YELLOWJACKET TRACKER JACKER FLYING BEAST OF CHAOS flies into the driver’s side window, and attaches itself to my ARM. Ok so i had a sweater on, but I could hear it VIBRATING when it rubbed its 8 inch long wings together. If you know me at all – you know I have an ungodly fear of flying things, things with wings, and things with wings that sting you.Also of deer, but that’s another story. Anyways – I was in the middle of a fricking forest preserve road (nowhere to stop for like 2 straight miles) so I get to the next stoplight and i’m all freaking out flinging my sweater around my head like a messed up Chinese fire-drill while some JA behind me is honking at me to pull up so he can turn and i’m like “it’s not MY responsibility to create a turn lane for your lazy {bottom} and i’m about to die of a bee sting!!!!!” And then the light turned green and i think the big thing flew away. At any rate, it stopped the earth shattering buzzing noise.}

Back to the present story – i was hesitant to piss this big bee off too much because I was not interested in getting stung. I also figured it would make it’s way out of the still open moon roof once the high wore off.

No dice.

I told the girls when we got home that the poor bee was probably dying and it was best to just  let it die in peace and we’d leave the windows open in the car and it would either die or fly out in the middle of the nite. So when Kealey reported that the bee was dead, I took her word for it. I had JUST opened the visor to make SURE it was dead when Kealey said “Karissa told me it was dead….” And the bee starts vigorously buzzing and crawling. This spawned a verbose reaction from my three oldest offspring in the backseat – and THAT is what i was trying to videotape – their whiney distrust of the inherent goodness of the bee and my ability to protect them from it’s stings. In the video you hear kealey going “but mommmmmmyyyyy – it’s not funnyyyyy!!!!”, as if I thought this was all a super fun joke. Which, it WAS funny – but not anything i was purposefully joking about.

Towards the end of the video, kaylen starts the screamfest, and karissa, kealey, and finally myself join in.

I was crying laughing watching the replay…. Like how I go from super cavalier videotaper to petrified “blair witch” participant?

 

So – that was one of the highlights of the day.

We also had Karissa’s neuropsych evaluation today. I get that neuropsych is a “new field” and relatively still trying to find it’s way in the navigation of the learning disability spectrum. Today’s appointment was basically just to go over some of the issues Karissa has been having academically, and see if there was concern of a learning disability, or if we just needed to tweak certain things about her learning style. She was referred to this doctor by the neurologist she saw after the MRI back in February (January? whenever – it’s been kind of a blur of the last few months!) Going in to this appointment, I had a lot of trepidation. I am not a huge fan of what I feel is the over-diagnosis of ADD/ADHD type issues, and i am CERTAINLY not a fan of medicating kids for behavioral issues that MAY have a basis solely in needing more parental involvement/follow-through/consistency. (Please hear that i am not saying every child with ADHD doesn’t need medication – I know a lot of kids who DO need it and for whom functional life would not happen without those meds. I just feel like our society in general has started to rely on meds to do our parenting for us. /rant. Off soapbox.) Anyways – I went to the appointment hoping he might have some good help for what is certainly frustrating in trying to get Karissa to get a wiggle on/keep up with her class/stay awake most days, but not really hoping for much.

And while i’m not really finished “processing” a lot of what he said, I can say that he thinks there is a problem, and that we can fix it. Or at least, we can hope to improve things for her enough that a lot of the other issues are brought under better control. We won’t really know more about what that plan is until a few other pieces of the puzzle are put together, including:

– the actual neuropsych testing. Kind of like ISAT tests that you take in school – but 6 hours worth. SIX. HOURS. The ONLY thing i’ve ever seen karissa do for six hours is dance. And sleep. I hope they are fun tests! They will be split up over a few days at least. But we are waiting for insurance approval for this part. (they approved 4 hours, but the dr thinks that won’t be quite enough.)

– Updated vision testing. Karissa has been becoming SUPER dependent on her glasses for everything (even though originally they were only supposed to help with reading the whiteboard at school, distance type things), and sometimes even saying that she still can’t see even with her glasses on. He was concerned about the rather drastic decline her eyesight has taken and wants the neurologist to go back over her MRI with a fine-toothed comb to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

– Updated Hearing tests – possibly an ABR. As part of what he feels her diagnosis is, he is concerned with “auditory processing” – but given her almost complete deafness the first couple years of her life with the repeated booth test failures and the recurrent ear infections and the speech delays – he wants to make sure there isn’t a “functional” issue on top of the processing.

– Pending a conference call with the ped and the neuro, he is thinking she needs a 24 hour ambulatory EEG to make sure she isn’t having seizures. I don’t think she is in any way – i call them zone outs or “brownouts” – but with this diagnosis, according to him, there is reduced blood flow to part of the brain (oversimplified explanation – she isn’t having brain cell necrosis or anything – it just doesn’t flow “good”, causes less neurons to fire, or more firing, or something – my eyes had glazed over by this point and i myself was in a “brownout”!) – but because of this, he wants to make sure she isn’t exhibiting ANY sign of it being electrical in nature. And when i say brownout – you ever have your computer just stop computing, and the little spinny wheel just spins and spins but nothing is happening in the background? It’s kind of like your computer has to catch up with everything you’ve just told it to do – THAT is what karissa does. She’ll be talking talking talking – every.single.thought.that.crosses.her.mind. – and then stop…..We all do it sometimes. She’s just been doing it a lot more lately. And even though she says she “likes to make her lip twitch” when it’s happening, i think it is probably a smart idea to get it checked out. Pain in the tookus for sure, along with everything else.

BUT – at the end of the day, if this helps us all understand and help support her a little better, it will be worth it.

This does not mean that we think she needs an “IEP” right now. We don’t know WHAT it means or what she will need. But we know it’s more than what she gets right now, so that’s what we are trying to figure out.  Once we have more information to work with, i’ll definitely put more info here. For now, we are working on ways to help her learn to be more indepently functional. She relies a lot on ME to get her cues for “what’s next”, and in my absence, she is heavily relying on Kealey. This is not fair to either of them – so we will start with some simple tasks for her/boardmaker type stuff to get her to understand her own schedule.

It is definitely a lot to process, try to sort through, try to wrap my mommy’s heart around. To me, she’s just Karissa: flighty, forgetful, chatterboxy-in-a-makes-no-logical-sense kind of way, beautiful princess dancer baby boogerton. I’ll never pigeonhole her or put her in a box. Try to understand what makes her tick a little better so i can watch her wings grow? You betcha. But never, ever, ever “labelled”.

But enough whining about this – we got surgery for the little one that requires an early morning drive. Which reminds me i have nowhere for the big girls to go yet – their bus doesn’t come til 8:30 and we need to leave by 7….dangit. Ok i’ll work on that! If you are the praying kind – please pray for little missy around noon-ish. Like I said last week – this is a pretty “simple” surgery, but still. I hate sitting in the waiting room by myself. I can’t distract myself good enough. So maybe leave me a comment here with a joke or a mind bender or something so i can read them tomorrow and not worry. I’m sure it’s not worry-worthy. It just never gets easier, handing your baby off to a bunch of men and women in OR scrubs, hoping the one they bring you back is a slightly improved version of the one you handed over, and that she wakes up in a normal way, not the drug-induced psycho-terror version of a Stephen King novel character.

So i’ll see you on the flipside party people.

Interesting side note – I was psychoanalyzed by the psychologist today. He noticed that I giggled a lot. Said that it was a coping mechanism for a chaotic life. I said “you’re either laughin’ or you’re cryin’”. He looked at me and said I was doing spectacular. I almost started crying. So I giggled again.

Hope you laugh watching the video above.

love and light~

(that’s for you PDL girlies!)

 

Terra