Just When You Think You've had a Bad Day...

P had friends over today - I was babysitting for my friend C who so often watches P and D. I had all three of hers, which works fine when we're at her house. Here it was something like pandemonium. P wanted to play games that were way over the kids' heads, then tried to order them around with regard to legos. It was raining most of the morning, so they couldn't go outside. We made cookies, but only the girls were into that (H and S are 8 and 3, so that took a lot of supervision). Once the rain finally took a break, they dried off the slide and swings and set to playing outside, only P wanted to order things around again and abandoned the group. Staying outside with the kids, I got to witness as A took off after the dog with a baseball bat, and when I admonished him, he walked right in front of where H was swinging vigorously, and H kicked him in the head.

As I gathered him up, I was feeling like the world's worst babysitter. These kids are all so nice at C's house and they have a dog and what was that? C arrived not long after A got hurt (he was fine -- shook it off if you can believe that) and she was really freaked about him chasing the dog with a bat and nervous that she'd be heading to E.R. with A, then thankful that it wasn't necessary.

C is one of the best friends I've ever had. She gets me, she gets my kids, she doesn't judge at all. Honestly, she's just amazing. I really want to be a better babysitter than that. And it seemed to me that I'm so used to gifted household that I've no idea how to entertain relatively ordinary boredom. Also, how on earth do you feed five children and have them all like the meal? I got out pineapple for H because she said she loved it and knew I had it. I've sent it over for my kids at least once. Then I discovered that H is a minority. Neither her sister nor brother would eat it. And her sister wouldn't eat ANYTHING. This is a kid that normally eats any snack I have. I'm telling you, I was batting zero.

After C left, I felt like I'd really failed. I went on Gifted Homeschool Forum and posted about it and when that didn't help me feel better about the situation, I called just to make sure A was still okay. That's when I found out my day had nothing on C's.  She left my house and went to the pharmacy to get her meds where she had to wait AGAIN, this time with three kids in tow. When she got home she had no power. No heat, no lights, a gas stove with all electric ignition and digital controls so no oven. She has a fireplace at her new digs but all the wood they have (not much) was outside and not yet covered and it's been raining all day, snowing up there.  Poor thing. She was going to call Edison and see what was up at that point.

When I heard from C again, she was practically sobbing. Her house was a chilly 54 degrees and dropping. She couldn't get a fire going, couldn't get any heat from the oven, Edison had said they were not going to able to turn things back on again until tomorrow (yeah, turned off by mistake that she might have corrected earlier if only she'd been home). C's still living out of boxes so the most she could find for candles were tea lights. It took me another few minutes to think of making newspaper logs. She had told Edison that she had three kids in the house, so while I offered to let everyone camp out here, she was hoping they'd find someone to turn it back on again and so she was stuck there for an hour. I loaded up D in the car (P and his daddy were at scouts) with every newspaper I could find, some scrap wood from the garage, matches and candles and was halfway to Yucaipa when she called and said Edison had come through. She was feeling completely wrung out by then and seemed surprised that I had been on my way. After all the times she's come through for me, watching both kids for endless dentist appointments and rescuing the kids from the ER after my car accident, I guess she never expected me to put her so high on my priority list. I think I've done a bad job of showing her how important she is to my life.

My bad day was nothing. Her bad day was a doosey.

Blrgleshnurp

My kids are gifted. Okay, well one is confirmed, the other is showing all the signs. Specifically, my older boy is a 2E/HG kid, and the younger is, well, demonstrating unusual-ness (knows his whole alphabet, can escape from anything, insist he should learn to read at 23 months). Now if all the acronyms there are confusing you, you obviously don't spend time in the gifted community and don't know that gifted isn't always as great as it sounds. Yes, P is likely to do great things someday, assuming someone doesn't kill him for mouthing off to them (total strangers of course). He lacks all filters and is literally exhausting. In the past two weeks I've read loads of normal people badmouthing moms like me for calling our kids gifted. Dude, we did not coin the phrase. We're the ones who call our kids temperamental, stubborn, absolutely inflexible, and "doctor, is this really normal for him?" The term gifted not only lacks imagination, it doesn't begin to cover the whole confusing picture. And then, if you say you have a Highly Gifted kid, they (the uninitiated) assume you're bragging. "Oh, so he's not just supposedly more special than my kid, he's "highly" more special than my kid." Yes, that's right. And you want to know what the fact that he's "highly" more special than your kid means? It means he's been kicked out of public school or nearly so. It means he can't seem to get along with peers his own age. It means that I'm seriously worried about the day he knows more than me, and that it might come before he reaches adolescence. It means that every parenting book out there is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. It means I've actually cried with him because he doesn't fit and can't.

Since the term "gifted" does not tell the whole story, I'm officially coining my own. Yep, my kids are blrgleshnurp. Doesn't sound like a nice Latin-based word? That's cause it isn't. That would be normal. It's not Greek or Anglo either, nor any foreign language you can think of.  I like blrgleshnurp because it sounds sort of funny, doesn't give me any clues to what it means, and won't make any parent of a kid who can go to sleepovers huffy. Blrgleshnurp is as unexplainable and difficult as my kid is. It's even hard to spell.