Month: February 2007

As part of preparation for parent/teacher conferences, Kiki was asked to write a letter to her parents. It made me laugh. With her permission I am entering it here. I’m leaving the original spellings and grammar intact.

Kiki’s Letter:

Mom, I was thinking since I am almost 12 and becoming a young lady, I think I deserve someting. Like more personal space, and to be exact my own room.

Firstly, I deserve my own room because I am going to Junoir-High in August and will need a lot more space. I will need privacy, and way way more space for my stuff. I refuse to throw out stuff because I like all my stuff. Also I will need more, way more closet space.

Secondly, I’ve been nice to Gleek and we haven’t goten into any really bad arguments over nothing recently. I haven’t yelled at Gleek because she drops stuff onto my bed…yet. If I am going to have friends over to play I will need to have my own room to impress them.

Lastly, I’ve been good and recently done my homework happily and the Twili Poster incident is the cause for most of my homework unhappieness.

In conclusion, I have been a good girl. Take pity on your pre-teen. Gleek and I haven’t fought in a while; I need more space, so please. From the bottom of my heart, please? If not a room than a hacky sack.

She got the hackey sack.

One day I had Kiki along with me when I had to wait for a prescription. We sat right in front of shelves full of shiny knick-knacks. Kiki loves that sort of thing, and I agree that many of them were beautiful. I could just see her starting to build up a desire to save all her money and buy everything on the shelf. Then she would go look at the prices and wail because of the impossibility of the task. In order to head off the pending emotional upset, I leaned over to Kiki and said “If I had the money, I’d buy you that unicorn right there.” Kiki smiled and studied the shelves with renewed interest to pick out something that she would buy for me if she had the money. We continued to exchange virtual gifts until the prescription was ready. Then we left the store completely happy and satisfied.

Sometimes we can only give thoughts even though we’d like to be able to give more. Tomorrow is Howard’s birthday. I have a list of things that I would dearly love to be able to give him, but which we can’t afford.

Howard, If I had the money, I’d give you a digital camera so that you could take good pictures of your minis (this one.) I’d buy piles more minis for you to paint. I’d replace all your over-large bottles of paint with smaller ones so that more stuff could fit into your kit. I’d get you a big screen, flat panel tv. I’d buy you your new glasses. I’d give you a microwave with a turn table. And I would raid your wishlist until it was empty.

There are so many things I wish I could give. I love you.

For the past couple of days Kiki has been sleeping 12-14 hours per day. She’ll get up, drag around for awhile, then head back to bed. This wouldn’t be too alarming except that she has been complaining of fatigue for more than a week. Factor in the fact that a close friend has been diagnosed with Mono, and we were off to the doctor for a blood test. (It was negative.)

The appointment was at 3 pm, which apparently is the busiest hour of the day for the doctor. I usually schedule for first thing in the morning because the wait times are shorter and I have to take fewer children along. Today I had all four kids and a significant wait. Fortunately they were pretty good. Patches only circled the waiting room table 23 times before he climbed all over the chairs and jumped off. Gleek bounced around a little bit, then settled to draw a picture and read a book. Kiki and Link both read quietly. Then we crammed all of us into one little exam room. After the finger poke and negative test for Mono, the doctor suggested we draw blood to do some other tests. He made very clear that what she has is probably a viral thing that she’ll get over, but if it was something more serious, knowing sooner is much better than later. So we drew blood which will be tested for white blood count, anemia, thyroid disorder, diabetes, and strep. If all that is negative and she still doesn’t get better, we’ll be off to see a specialist of some kind.

My money is on Kiki just getting better without any medical intervention. That is usually the result when I spend money for medical tests.

EDIT March 6, 2007: Kiki got better within two days. She was enjoying her first day back at school when the doctor’s office finally called me to tell me all the blood work was normal. Too bad I didn’t actually lay down any money. I would have won.

Tonight I again took time to listen to Gleek at bedtime. She told me that she wanted to talk about “mad and school and stuff” so that she could have good dreams. I was so glad that she recognized that the talking helped her yesterday. We then had another rambling conversation. Mostly it concerned her mishmash of feelings for Bestfriend. I was surprised at the clarity of detail that Gleek could give to incidents which happened over two years ago. Apparently she’d never dealt with some of the emotions caused by those events and was just now trying to come to terms with them. She is getting in touch with her feelings instead of repressing them or running away from them and that is marvelous.

We talked about how everyone feels mad and that there is nothing bad about feeling mad. The problem comes in when we hold on to the anger. I explained that that was called a grudge. Gleek’s eyes widened with realization and she said “I’ve been having bad dreams because I’ve been holding on to my mads!” I believe she is right. I can’t believe how brilliant she is to arrive at that conclusion on her own. All the unresolved conflicts and emotions of the day come back to haunt her at night. Now she plans to let all the mads go out into space where they won’t trouble her anymore.

I listened to her talking and making connections and working through feelings. It was amazing. As I listened I came to a realization of my own. Gleek has turned one of those developmental corners which suddenly opens whole new worlds of thought. Her brain has gotten suddenly bigger and it is going to take her awhile to sort it all out. Until she does, I suspect that we’ll be having many more long bedtime conversations. I can see how much happier and relaxed she is after all the talking.

I watch her talk and her face is alive with character. Her thoughts outrace her words and so one topic segues into the next with hardly a pause for breath. I study her face, it is so small and beautiful. I could dance with joy that she is finally capable of talking through all these complex emotions that have driven her behaviors for years. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe it would come, but here we are. I cry for the joy of it.

Gleek has been having bad dreams lately. Lots of them. They cause her to call out in the night and snuggle in bed with Howard because that makes her feel safe. I’ve tried talking to her about the dreams in the morning, but that doesn’t work. In the mornings she has escaped the night’s dreams and doesn’t want to go back there. This means that the best time to talk about her dreams is before bed. This is when she is faced with a long dark night ahead and wants to do anything to keep me from leaving her. This means that she’ll discuss her dreams quite thoroughly. Unfortunately I’m usually trying to hustle multiple kids into bed and so I don’t stay to listen.

Tonight I decided to listen to Gleek for however long she needed. I had no idea how much she needed to talk. She prattled on for more than an hour with me sitting and listening. First she talked about the dreams themselves which were primarily composed of pieces of movies that she had seen. Then she lamented the fact that all movies have scary parts in them. Then she tried to convince me to let her watch a couple of movies before she went to bed because she was used to those movies and they wouldn’t scare her. She described exactly which parts of the movies she liked and why. After that we segued into her telling me that she is never ever going to play with her best friend again. She is filled with anger for this Bestfriend. Only, when I mentioned that Bestfriend was sick, Gleek was ready to write a cheerful note and mail it so that Bestfriend wouldn’t be sad. We discussed the depth of her anger for Bestfriend, but Gleek could not explain why she was angry, only that she was. Then Gleek began to talk about how a boy at school had punched her in the stomach. I got all the details on that one, including reactions from the teacher. A female classmate was mentioned with a smile. Gleek described how she taught Classmate to climb down from the jungle gym. Classmate is obviously special to Gleek. That is when it came out that Gleek had made friends with Classmate and then Bestfriend had too. Gleek worried that Classmate would go off to be friends with Bestfriend and leave Gleek alone. Gleek made a whole plan where she could have Classmate to herself. But then that left Bestfriend without anyone and Gleek didn’t want Bestfriend to be sad, so she decided that Bestfriend could have Othergirl.

We talked around this triangle for a long time. I tried to plant the idea that it was possible for Classmate to have more than one friend, but I’m not sure that the idea took root. There were additional digressions to explain why Gleek threw a crayon at Annoyingboy and how she likes having a first grader desk all to herself because now she doesn’t have to sit at a table with people who annoy her.

Eventually she was winding down. I could tell that she could continue talking, but that the need to unload was much less. I asked her to lie down quietly while I went to tuck Link into bed. I promised to come back to talk to her some more as soon as I was done. I did come back, but by then she was so peacefully sleepy that she didn’t feel like talking. I bet she has better dreams tonight.

I need to take time to listen to her at bedtime. She doesn’t talk about this stuff during the day and it has to vent somewhere. My other kids could benefit from talking time too. It is hard for me to be a good listener when what I really want to do is shove them all into bed and go be with Howard. But they need it, so I need to do it.