I am so grateful Noah didn’t travel for work when the big kids were small. They were much harder babies. This baby can fall asleep while nursing and then be transferred to the swing and sleep for another hour.

This is a miracle previously unseen in this house.

I am ecstatic.

I can make food. I can run around and do chores. I can feel productive. It’s glorious.

EC and I are continuing to have a hard time with reminders and nagging and such. We both have executive functioning issues. (Reading books about this is hilarious because we are overlapping but not identical in where we fall down.) Trying to figure out how to manage hers and manage mine and not parentify her for my issues as I’m trying to manage them both while teaching her to manage herself…

gah.

It’s a good thing we like each other so much or this would just be unbearable.

We both struggle with focus and sticking with a task but I’m an old person who has more practice bringing my attention back around. That’s the only reason I do slightly better. I suspect I was worse than she is when I was 9/10.

…. maybe. As I think about it… no. I was already making checklists of how to do shit for my mom before then. Ok I wasn’t worse than EC. But I had a non-functioning parent and that’s different.

Sometimes I stop and feel kind of choked up when I think about the fact that part of my children’s problems is that I help too much. When I’m being an asshole and telling a friend that they should stop helping their child so much because it is infantilizing… I SEE THE BIG HOLE I MADE IN MY OWN GLASS HOUSE AS I THREW THAT ROCK, OK?

I think I am intensely an asshole when I give advice I shouldn’t give partially because I know I’m fucking up exactly like that and I’m yelling at other people hoping the advice will sink into my own thick skull.

I do that way more often than might be apparent. Boss other people as a means of trying to give myself good advice.

Side note: Noah had a minor emergency as he traveled. He communicated with me via IM and when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the toilet I found his messages and fixed his problem. I am awesome. Now my honey can eat.

Back to executive functioning stuff. (Listing out so I can organize my own brain.)

Focus really is a rough one for EC. MC doesn’t have quite the same difficulty with this one. MC can tune out distractions. EC sees a shiny and can’t keep her mind on her task. I mostly manage focus because I scare myself with the consequences of distraction. I also periodically get loud and mean and scary telling everyone to leave me the fuck alone or I can’t focus. There were days of tile lay out where I could not have anyone in the room or I wouldn’t make progress. So yeah. Focus is tough. I suspect but don’t know for sure that this is harder for Noah than it is for me but it’s hecka hard to evaluate. I can focus through distractions more easily than he can. But I think of that partially as being temperament: I’m a teacher; he’s an engineer. I like a loud busy room and he wants silence and being alone.

Deciding what is important. This is… not easy but I wouldn’t put it in the top three problems for any of us. None of us tend to get sidetracked into truly stupid projects. *pat all of us on the back*

Set goals. I think if there is a bright shining executive function skill that we all knock out of the park… this is it. This is the cherry on top of our hill to slide down. Can I bring in a few more unrelated silly metaphors? We like setting goals. I WANT TO SAY I AM THE BEST AT THIS BECAUSE I AM A VAIN MOTHERFUCKER. But that may or may not be true. MC isn’t being tested on this one very much yet. EC had some serious push for this over the last school year and she did really well. Noah’s goal setting makes me dreamy and shmoopy. He’s good at goal setting. *deep sigh of joy*

(For the record I am going through the book The Impulsive, Disorganized Child by James Forgan and Mary Anne Richey.)

Use prior knowledge. You know… this one is hard for me to evaluate. I think that the degree to which I look for repeats of old patterns is maybe too rigid and a problem. I am nothing near under functioning in this department but I seem to be over functioning in a way that might be bad. It’s hard for me to evaluate my family members on this. With Noah…if I have ever had a bad day and exploded at him for something minor he will be ginger around that topic forever. Which is… also kind of over performing on this one. It’s so complicated. He’s trying so hard. He wants to never trigger me. The horrible thing is that in order to make that happen you need to just kill me. He doesn’t want that. So we muddle through and I get set off and he feels bad and to blame even though it truly isn’t his fault. Sigh. I feel like I’m fucking this up for the kids too. I’m trying to change. They are trying to learn from experience and benefit from making a mistake and not make it again. But next time… I might need something different from them. I don’t know how to evaluate this metric at all.

Initiate action. Once again I’m a fucking rock star. *cough* (A humble one.) I can’t say I’m better than Noah though. He’s really really good at this too. It’s one of the things that caught my eye about him. Other folks will be hanging back not sure what to do and he’s already moving to get something going. He always has possible plans on offer. God I love that about him. It is so hawt. Our kids have less experience than us but I wouldn’t say they are slouches. Ok, not an area to work on. I’ve been starting to talk to my newly minted 10 year old about waiting to act so you can read the room. So I’m kind of actively working to slow this one down because we are so effective. More over functioning.

Manage time. This one is a mixed bag. I am fanatical about managing time. (Years of therapy followed by being a teacher means I’m sensitive to stuff going 3 minutes too long.) No one else in my house is good at it. Noah has worked really hard to improve and he has learned how to use technology to fill in the gaps in his natural ability. We are trying to get the kids to start learning his hacks but it is hard. Neither of them have my internal clock. My internal clock is so strong that it is commented on by other people constantly. This is a huge thing for me. If I have 55 minutes for my appointment I will be wrapping up starting at 52 minutes because I will not go over. This made me a terrible stage manager because I cannot wait five minutes until the audience finishes arriving. Motherfucker the curtain is supposed to go up at 8? We will be in place and rising that motherfucker at 7:59:45. I have issues. And I absolutely can bully a whole crowd through arriving on time. I’ve done it.

Self monitor performance. Ok I suck at this. I think almost everything I do is shit. I’m not more attached to the bathroom because I could tell you how much I fucked up and I should have done a-x differently and better and… Perfectionism sucks. My kids constantly ask me to evaluate them and I try not to. I ask them to evaluate themselves. So this is one where I suspect I am teaching it better than I am capable of doing it. I think the kids do pretty well. Noah seems from this angle to be excellent at this skill.

Use self restraint. Sigh. Depends on what it is. I am all over the map on this skill. Sometimes I am good to an unholy level because I’m very good at denying myself things as punishment. That’s not actually positive. But it is a skill. If I do not perceive myself as needing punishment… whoa this is hard. Hard. Hard, Hard, Hard, Hard, Hard, Hard. I fail a lot. Don’t ask me how many fucking donuts I’ve eaten this week. (I’m 2 lbs under my pre-pregnancy weight. Don’t judge me.) I would say my kids are not so great at this. Noah appears to be pretty damn good at this most of the time with occasional lapses.

Remain flexible. Meh. Mixed bag. My kids are good at this. I can be if I am sleeping/eating/exercising enough. If those metrics are out of whack I will absolutely flip out at the most minor change. It’s absurd and childish. I’ve improved over the years… but I still struggle. Noah needs a few seconds/minutes to process but he’s cheerful about this in general. Good thing because I’m an asshole who completely reorganizes his stuff in the house all the time.

After writing this out…. focus stands out as the area with a problem. I mean, other than my overweening vanity we are ok in most areas. Not perfect but ok. But focus is where we all drift with the currents.

I’m glad I sat down to write this out. Knowing that even if it is hard we do ok with most executive functioning. We just really fall down on focus. That makes it seem like a much more solvable problem. Everyone has stuff they suck at. If there’s one big area… we can work on that. We can do research and see what the experts say about focus. I’ll finish reading this book. Next is a book for kids with ADHD and strategies they can employ. I will focus (haha) on the focus sections.

It makes it a lot easier to frame the problem with laughter in my head. “Despite all of this being harder than it might otherwise be… we do pretty well in most ways. But we are a pack of squirrels when it comes to attention.”

heh. This kind of thing is why I ask places like Stanford to evaluate us. This is where I’m failing.

IT WOULD MAKE MY LIFE EASIER IF SOMEONE WANTED TO WATCH ME AND FIGURE OUT WHEN AND HOW I’M FUCKING UP AND TELL ME HOW TO CORRECT IT SO I DON’T HAVE TO DO SO MUCH DAMN WORK.

But that has never happened. *le sigh*

Why in the fuck am I sighing so much today? That’s weird.

I just told our gardener that September is his last month. He’s been working for us for over ten years.

This is really happening. Within five months our house will be on the market. We will be ready to start the next leg of our journey.

I’m telling everyone I know that if they have a friend who would appreciate an art house… come to me! Houses in my neighborhood are going for $1.2 or $1.3 million. I don’t need all that. This is the absolute once in a lifetime chance to get a bay area house at a discount.

Coooooooome to me art lovers….