Woodstone Prairie

Do you remember that song? (from the 80′s? 90′s?) I think Queen did it.

 It’s been running through my head for days.

 I’m cranky and getting ready to fire another therapist. He’s the one with the intensive in-home team our county mental health organization has been sending out.

I used to like him.

But he really blew it when he was out on Wednesday and I don’t think I have the energy to try and fix what’s wrong and make it work.

He started the visit by talking about certain (inappropriate) behaviors that are “almost inevitable” in boys like M, once they hit adolescence. He said this in front of M, which floored me… talk about giving a kid “permission” to do something inappropriate! Maybe it IS very common behavior, maybe it IS almost inevitable, but you don’t say that in front of the child in question! It’s like telling a typical teen that it’s inevitable that they are going to mess around with drugs… No sense even trying to stop the behavior because it’s almost inevitable! Anyway (my anger is still close to boiling over, can you tell?!) that started the appointment on a bad note. Then the therapist went on to say that he’d been thinking about the possible change in M’s diagnosis, thinking about what that might mean for M’s and our future, and we should probably talk about that. (Ummm… no. I’ve got enough to think about right now.) The final nail in the coffin of his involvement with our family was when he, three separate times, corrected M for not responding quickly enough to something I’d told him to do.

You know… I don’t expect instant obedience from my kids, this therapist was not at my house to address obedience issues, and the therapist… as a guest in my home… had no right to overstep the boundaries in terms of the parent/child relationship.

In short it was none of his business.

So I’m done with him.

I know that none of these things are terrible or insurmountable problems, but this therapist has been coming to our house for a couple of months now with little to no direction to the sessions, he seems to think the situation is hopeless anyway, and I don’t want to take a chance with him giving M messages that I don’t want him to give.

 I’m hoping we can keep our case manager when I fire the therapist… I really like her. (At least I think I do, I seem to be a rather poor judge of character lately…)

 We made it through Halloween pretty well. The morning was rough because both kids were so tired (M was up and down all night, and R was up for the day by 2:30 am), but the afternoon was much better. We went for lunch with some friends from the homeschool group then went to the homeschool group Halloween party. We spent a quiet evening eating candy and watching a movie… our only trick or treaters were the grandkids who stopped by to show us their beautiful (granddaughter) and scary (grandson) costumes.

Here is R, last week, carving her jack-o-lantern…

M and R ready to go to the party. They were 50′s kids, I even had M’s hair slicked back. Well… slicked back as much as possible with all his cowlicks!

R at the party wrapping her friend “B” as a mummy.  R and B have known each other since they were babies… B’s mom came to the first FAS support group meeting we held (back in Jan of ’96) and continued to be an active part of the group for the entire 10 years we met! B has recently begun homeschooling again (after several years in school) and joined our group. R is in heaven! The girls could almost be twins, they like the same things, and have that comfortable familiarity of friends who can’t remember a time they didn’t know each other…

We’ve spent the past couple of days just settling back into a regular routine… it’s been very nice.

I’ve got a couple more pictures I want to post but they’ll have to wait, quiet time is almost over… (so I’d better run!)