On This Date in 1998

I woke up at 4:30 this morning to the sound of rain, which has continued unabated throughout the day. It’s not a drizzle, but a steady, drenching rain that has plenty of dry earth to soak into. Up until yesterday evening, the texture of our back yard resembled concrete. I could have cut a two-inch-square chunk of soil out of the ground, thrown it against a hard surface, and watched it shatter into a million pieces. The hardness of the soil and the lack of precipitation – it’s been very dry here during the past month – has resulted in a slowdown of the lawn repair I initiated earlier this year. I’m still trying to get the grass to bounce back from the trampling it received during our Bastille Day party. Only a couple additional efforts at reseeding and a daily watering has kept a section of the back yard from returning to the big, ugly patch of bare earth that taunted me at the beginning of spring.

After a call from Eddie’s teacher and a visit to his pediatrician last Friday, JoAnna and I decided to have Eddie take the drug Ritalin as a way to control his behavior. He’s already been sent to the principal’s office twice this year, and I’ve had two phone conversations with Mrs. Magnuson, his teacher, about how things have been going in the classroom. She reports that Eddie has had good days and bad days, occurring in no predictable pattern. On bad days, he cannot control his impulses. On Friday during recess he hit someone with a stick. Rom her perspective, Mrs. Magnuson did not think it was deliberately malicious. His teacher is also concerned about Eddie missing a lot of work at school due to his inability to focus. He finds, as she phrased it, a lot of things stimulating in the environment. In other words, he’s easily distracted.

JoAnna and I are starting to see more frequent examples of Eddie’s impulsiveness, his ability to become easily frustrated, and his contrariness at home. At soccer practice, too. When I picked him up Sunday evening, I learned that he had refused to run a lap with the rest of his team at the conclusion of the practice.

If you recall, Eddie and his teachers (not just classroom but art, gym, music, as well as his special reading class) participated in a 4-week-long Ritalin blind test this past May. One week he took the drug, the following week a placebo. Only the doctor knew which was which. Based on his review of the results, he said that Ritalin had a very obvious stabilizing effect on Eddie’s behavior. When the doctor asked Eddie is he would mind taking the drug, he answered, “No, ‘cause I won’t get in so much trouble.”

Eddie will start taking Ritalin next week. His teachers will start to keep a record of his behavior this week, which will be used as a base line for measuring any changes that take place during the drug therapy. I hope that this will not turn out to be the long-term solution for Eddie’s difficulties in school. One of the fulltime staff members at the library told me that her son was on Ritalin for 9 years, from 4th grade through high school. I’m hoping that’s not the path that Eddie will have to take. Yesterday I placed a hold on a book that might offer some alternatives to Ritalin: The Myth of the A.D.D. Child: 50 ways to improve your child’s behavior and attention span without drugs, labels, or coercion. It’s not that I’m questioning our pediatrician’s diagnosis. He certainly hasn’t pushed us into taking this route, but I’d still like to investigate the options that might be available to us. At the same time, I won’t be accepting at face value everything I read about the alternatives to drug therapy. A lot of nonsense manages to worm its way into print. It is obvious to the doctor, as well as to JoAnna and me, that Eddie has some ongoing problems that are not related to (or cannot be blamed on) the different personalities of his teachers. The impulsive and other behaviors that Eddie has demonstrated consistently throughout kindergarten, first, and now second grade point to a deeper problem. We’re just thankful that Eddie has been able to maintain a very positive attitude about school. It would be an especially onerous situation if we had to struggle to get Eddie out of the house each morning, if attending school was an activity he was determined to eliminate from his life like a bad dream. Yesterday after I dropped the boys off – rainy day taxi service – I parked the car in the school lot and walked to Eddie’s class to deliver the behavior monitoring form to his teacher. When I returned to the car, I found a mother standing between her van and my car gently coaxing her distraught daughter, who looked to be a first- or second-grader, to leave the passenger’s seat. I caught a glimpse of the girl’s face and saw a mask of sorrow, eyes reddened by crying. The open door of the van was position in such a way that I was unable to get into the driver’s seat of the Saturn. The women immediately noticed this and, closing her door slightly to give me access, said almost apologetically, “We might be here for awhile.” Both Andy and Eddie have always been enthusiastic about attending school. It has sometimes been a struggle getting them off in the morning, but that’s never been a ploy to avoid school.

We celebrated Andy’s birthday yesterday. Meaghan joined us for dinner: lasagna, tossed salad, garlic bread, and a white cake (with those little rainbow color bursts in the batter) with cherry (!) frosting for dessert, a menu selected by the birth boys himself. Andy loves the basketball pants. In fact, he tried on a pair on Saturday afternoon when I took him shopping for new jeans. He was disappointed when I vetoed the purchase, but he was very mature about hearing the word “No” for a change of pace. No whining. No pleading. If he had persisted, I might have blurted out something like, “You can’t get them because that’s what Grandma and Grandpa got you!” But I was able to preserve the element of surprise. We got him a Packer jersey (Antonio Freeman) with a white turtleneck and a long-sleeve navy blue shirt that JoAnna thought would look especially good on him.

In spite of the relentless rain today, Andy’s football practice wasn’t cancelled. I picked up the boys a little bit earlier than usual, their coach not being a sadist. I covered the upholstery of the Saturn with blankets and towels, which was good planning on my part. Otherwise, the interior of the car would have become a disaster area. The boys – Andy, Drew, Cole, and Riley – were thoroughly drenched, a bit muddy (not as much as I expected, fortunately), and slightly chilled, but were in surprisingly high spirits. In spite of the weather, they seemed to have enjoyed themselves. It was a chance to slop around with compunction.

On Saturday evening, JoAnna and I attended a reception at Music Hall on the UW campus, which was followed by a preview of an opera-in-progress, based on a controversial 1954 film that was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. (Neither JoAnna nor I have seen it, but I did place a reserve on the video version that the Madison Public Library owns.) The story deals with the anti-Hispanic racial strife that occurs in a New Mexico zinc mine when union workers organize a strike. Most of the singing is in English, although some of the lyrics are in Spanish. The program was made up of selected scenes from the opera, so the story the audience heard was quite disjointed. The voices of the UW students who made up the cast were outstanding and made the evening worthwhile.

And what about the boys when we were gone? Andy is now our designated babysitter. JoAnna and I were gone from 6:45 until nearly 10:00. When we returned home, everything was as we left it. We told Andy that if everything goes smoothly we would pay him $3 an hour, below the market rate for a regular sitter but not a bad starting rate for someone just shy of his 11th birthday.

On This Date in 1998

With the new school year more than a week underway and Labor Day still around the corner, it seems as though we’ve been given a bonus week on the calendar. We’re still enjoying summery weather of the most pleasant sort. Warm, dry days that keep the sweat glands from overworking; cool, comfortably nights that provide ideal conditions for sleeping.

The boys’ casual attitude in getting ready for school on Monday morning resulted in a family meeting that evening. JoAnna generally leaves for work around 7:00, which leaves me on my own to get the boys in gear. It took a lot of prodding on my part. I practically had to drag Andy out of bed. Repeated requests to make their beds and brush their teeth went unheeded. The boys conducted a search of the house for their shoes. Andy ended up riding his bike to school, but I had to drive Eddie since there wasn’t enough time for him to walk there. By the end of the day, the boys had received some hard and fast ground rules for the next nine months. No TV on school nights, a rule that had already been in place. Lay out the clothes you are going to wear to school the next day before going to bed. Lights out at 9:00. Get out of bed no later than 7:00. Get dressed and make y our bed. Have some breakfast, a meal that Andy would rather skip if given the chance. Make sure you have everything you need for school, i.e. gym clothes, band instrument (for Andy – he’s taking up the trumpet this year), homework assignments, papers that need a parent’s signature. Get to school on your own power, unless it happens to be raining or severely cold. Two days later, the boys have shaken off their morning lethargy – Monday morning they were sitting around the living room like it was a Saturday – but still try to slide by with a minimum of effort. Their beds weren’t made this morning, a fact that I didn’t notice until I was out of the shower and the boys were off to school.

I had a big surprise waiting for me when I went home for lunch yesterday. I walked in the side door and found JoAnna in the family room, watching an old movie on TV, just like it was a Saturday or something.

“I quit my job,” she informed me. “I just can’t work with Hal anymore.”

They’d had a big disagreement over the phone earlier in the day. Hal has to be in control of every bit of business that takes place within the office. He definitely is a micro-manager, where JoAnna trusts her staff enough to delegate assignments and expect that they’ll get done on time. JoAnna and Hal have had arguments about this before, but yesterday JoAnna reaching the breaking point. She was obviously having second thoughts about walking out, though, but certainly not on account of Hal. Her biggest concerns were letting down her staff and her clients. She made a couple phone calls to her most trusted staff members and then had a long, close to an hour, phone conversation with Hal. Since I had a meeting in the morning and was working the reference desk in the evening, I had decided to work a split day. Stretched out on the couch in the family room while reading a book, I couldn’t help but overhear much of JoAnna’s end of the conversation. She wasn’t giving Hal an inch. She didn’t have to ask for her job back because I don’t think Hal ever thought that she’d really leave, but JoAnna was not shy about letting him know what she felt was the most productive working environment.

When JoAnna first hit me with the news of her quitting, though, I mentally started to tight the family belt immediately. Let’s see, we’ll have to get Eddie out of After School. We don’t need the Maids to do our housecleaning anymore. (Did I mention that JoAnna hired a cleaning service to come in and do general housework every two weeks?) Before I could answer the question, Am I going to have enough money in my payment to take care of the mortgage and all the other bills, I decided that I didn’t want to think about the possibility of becoming a one-income family anymore.

But now everything is back to normal. Or at least I still think it is. I haven’t heard anything to the contrary. I do think that JoAnna will be looking for another job at the beginning of the year. Hal’s a very hard person to work for. If I had someone like him on my library board, I’d probably go bonkers.

Andy is practicing football three days a week – Monday, Tuesday, and Friday – and has games scheduled on Saturday. Just a scrimmage this week. Even though he’s only in 5th grade, he looks like he belongs in a football uniform. At least Saturday’s scrimmage, he played well on both offense (tight end) and defense (tackle). We’ve worked out a car-pooling arrangement with a group of parents; otherwise, I’d be making three 14-mile round-trips to Cross Plains per week. With our cooperative delivery and pickup schedule, I have the Monday and Friday after-practice taxi service. You’d think the boys would be tired out after a two-hour football practice, but I had a carload of 4 very wired boys on the trip back to Middleton. By 9 o’clock, though, Andy is usually just a eyelash from sleep. At least since school has started, once he gets ready for bed, it doesn’t take him long to crash. Eddie still takes awhile, but now that he has a tape of early Beatles songs to serenade him to sleep, he’ll stay in his bed instead of walking back and forth between his room and the bathroom or his room and the living room or his room and Andy’s room.

It’s time to pick up Eddie at After School. I might add a postscript later.

On This Date in 1998

This may seem like an odd thing to say, but I can’t believe that August isn’t over with yet. And that’s not meant to be a complaint. Four weeks ago, Andy was playing in a baseball tournament in Reedsburg, JoAnna and Eddie were at the Richard family reunion, and the boys and I were a day away from our trip to Pennsylvania. It just seems like so much has happened this month, much more than what should logically fit into a 31-day period. Actually, this entire summer has been a most enjoyable and expansive experience, one that has had an unusually carefree aspect to it, as if the passage of time was of no concern to me. That description could easily fit my summer between 4th and 5th grades.

The boys were on their own during the day for the 2½ weeks before the start of school. The day camp program we enrolled them in this summer ended in August 7th, and we didn’t make any other arrangements for child care. So JoAnna and I decided to put our faith in Andy’s sense of responsibility. The library being only 5 blocks from the house certainly helped to make our decision an easier one. After their first day alone, we had to reinforce some guidelines, such as keeping their activities to the kitchen and family room side of the house. When I came home for lunch, I discovered that they had spent some time in every room of the house. They left behind visible signs of their presence everywhere – a rumpled comforter in their parents’ bedroom, pillow laid out in a baseball diamond in the living room, to cite two examples. Throughout the 2½ weeks, I had to constantly remind the boys to clean up their debris – toys, dishes, clothes – every parent’s losing battle. Overall, though, it was a successful experiment. For the most part, the boys got along very well together. Andy has a tendency to pick on his little brother, but it’s never anything malicious or hurtful.

Right now JoAnna and I are enjoying a quiet afternoon. I just spent about an hour organizing a couple hundred loose postage stamps into a stock book, stamps that date mostly from the 1920s and 1930s and were a gift to me from my Grandma Luthgren. (I’ve managed to hold onto them all these years.) JoAnna’s watching this sappy movie on TV, My Six Loves, starring Debbie Reynolds and Cliff Robertson (not to mention supporting roles by Eileen Heckart, David Janssen, and even a bit role by the actress who played the nosy neighbor on Bewitched and the kid actor who played the adopted brother on My Three Sons.) The boys and four other neighborhood tykes were playing in the garage. Andy had asked us if they could play Hide-and-Go-Seek in the house. I let out a shudder before responding with a firm “No!”

“It’s too nice of a day to play indoors,” I explained further. And indeed it is a gorgeous day – bright sunshine, hardly a cloud in the sky, temperature in the mid-70s with no trace of the uncomfortable humidity we’ve been experiencing lately. It makes me wonder why I’m sitting in front of the computer right now. 

Today’s weather is a carbon copy of yesterday’s. Andy’s football team played a series of 15-minute scrimmages between 1 and 3 p.m. They’d run a series offensive plays until it was time to play against another team. Then they’d be on defense. They didn’t play a single game against one opponent, more like a patchwork of 6 quarters against different opponents. It felt so different watching Andy in full gear playing football as opposed to watching him play soccer or football. He really seems to enjoy football and looks very confident, like he really knows what he’s doing on the field. Since our return from Pennsylvania, he’s had 12 practices, or 4 per week. Next week, with school in session, they’ll practice on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday evenings, from 5:00 to 6:45. His first game is scheduled for Saturday, September 12. The season runs for 7 weeks.

Eddie is playing soccer again this fall. He’s had three practices already, with another one scheduled for later this afternoon. Most of his games are scheduled on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so there will be a conflict on the weekends with Andy’s games.

Two days into the school year, Eddie had his first trip to the principal’s office. His class had a picnic on Friday, and he started throwing food around. His teacher told him that this wasn’t an appropriate behavior, and that he’d have to go inside if he did the same thing again. A few minutes later, she observed Eddie bent over and shaking his booty in front of some of his classmates’ faces, “as if he were mooning them”, as she describe it to me when I returned her telephone call. After this second incident, Eddie had a chat with Mr. Mavrolis, Elm Lawn’s principal. During my phone conversation with Eddie’s teacher, she mentioned that from the hallway she could observe Eddie walking around the classroom while the rest of her students remained seated at their desks. Based on his kindergarten and 1st grade experiences, this is typical Eddie behavior. As a result of Eddie’s misbehavior, I made an appointment with his pediatrician, as we had never followed up with him about the Ritalin blind test that was administered during the last quarter of this past school year. Obviously, we are going to continue to have some behavioral problems with Eddie this year. I hope that the special reading program he is participating in will have some positive result before the end of the year. I know a part of Eddie’s frustration in school has to do with his inability to read. But I also think he has a “class clown” personality. He likes to be “on” and enjoys the attention he receives from his classmates. 

We were very proud to discover that one of Eddie’s artworks, one that was exhibited in a schoolwide art show last spring, is featured in this year’s school calendar – on the September page, no less. I think extra copies of the calendar are available at the school distinct office, so I’ll s top by tomorrow and pick up a copy to accompany this letter.

We’ve been serenaded by a barking dog this weekend, both Friday and Saturday nights as well as during the day, but it’s the nighttime noise, of course, that is the more irritating. Our neighbor, the single guy who works for CUNA, recently bought himself a boat and he and his new boyfriend are away somewhere this weekend on a christening cruise. The dog, a brown Akita, has been left on his own, and he’s not very happy about it. I actually called the police this afternoon, if for no other reason than to make sure they’d have a record of this disturbance. Someone who leaves a dog on its own for 48 hours doesn’t know much about taking care of animals. The dog almost succeeded in digging an escape route under the wooden fence next to the garage. The devil in me was tempted to unlatch the gate and let the dog escape. Those of us who lost sleep over the weekend wonder how someone who’s always been a good neighbor since he moved here 5-6 years ago could be so inconsiderate of his neighbors all of a sudden. This morning I woke up shortly after 2:00, the quiet soon shattered by the dog’s sometime hysterical barks. Trying to escape the noise, I moved myself to the family room, closed all the windows, turned the fan to the medium setting to provide some white noise, and wished I had a pair of ear plugs. Fortunately, I was able to fall back asleep within a half hour.

How are things going with you? Have you made any plans for this winter? We plan to visit my folks during the Christmas holiday, but we haven’t decided on the exact dates of our trip yet. I have a weird feeling that this may be my dad’s last Christmas.

We’re all doing well and keeping busy here. (So what else is new?!)

On This Date in 1998

Artwork by Eddie

The first week of the boys being home alone proved to be a successful experiment. We didn’t regret our decision and now feel confident that Andy is mature enough to care for his younger brother. No more babysitters! The boys still have lots of room for improvement, though. JoAnna and I had to tell them – repeatedly – that our bedroom was off limited. Why they need to watch TV there when we have two other TVs in the house I can’t understand. We also had to remind them – again repeatedly – that the kitchen is the only room in the house where they can eat. It’s very easy to learn whether or not they’ve broken this rule. They’re not very good at cleaning up after themselves, scattered pieces of popcorn and cracker crumbs giving away their habit of grazing throughout the house. This rule, I’m afraid, is one that will need much reinforcement.

Andy survived his first week of football practice with ease. In fact, he very much enjoyed it. His team is already learning plays. On Thursday, he brought home a sheet with the diagrams of more than a dozen different offensive plays. I think he was supposed to study the over the weekend, but the piece of paper remained in the car until Sunday afternoon when I hand-delivered it to him and suggested he might want to prepare for Monday’s practice.

“I will, Dad,” he said, somewhat impatiently.

The sheet remained on the kitchen counter for the rest of the day.

I traveled to La Crosse on Friday for a Wisconsin Library Association board meeting at the Radisson Hotel. The August board meting is always held at the site of the next year’s conference. As a safety precaution, Andy checks in with me by phone twice a day at the library, so JoAnna reminded him, as I did numerous times Thursday evening, that I would be out of town all day when she left for work. La Crosse being a 2½-hour drive from Middleton, I left the house at 6:45, before the boys were out of bed. I figured that if anything was going to go wrong with this independent arrangement, this would be the day. Around two o’clock, the boys left the house and walked the two blocks to Walgreen’s to buy some candy. How do I know this? I found their empty bag with the sales receipt inside. Two Three Musketeers bars. Two packages of Starburst. (There’s something to be said for computer systems that can itemize individual purchases.) They had finished a bag of Chips Ahoy Thursday evening and needed something to satisfy their craving for sweets.

When they returned home, they found the front screen door locked. (My fault, I think. The only key Andy has is to the front inside door. (They would have exited the house by the side door. (Using good sense, the boys walked across the street to a neighbor’s house and called JoAnna at work. She drove home to let them in. I was pleased that the boys handled this situation so calmly.

Friday evening, JoAnna and I attended a catered picnic at Lakeview Park. This informal gathering provided an opportunity for council members and department heads to meet with the two candidates for the position of Middleton City Administrator. (The previous administrator retired last month.) Earlier in the summer, I had pushed for an opportunity for department heads to have some input in the hiring process. I succeeded, but unfortunately, a series of rotating interviews involving department heads was scheduled for this past Friday, when I was in La Crosse. Just so they would get some exposure to the library, I had a staff member give each candidate a tour. I learned from one of the council members on Saturday afternoon that the candidate I preferred was offered the position.

Saturday morning, the family did a “lit drop” for Rick Phelps, “our” candidate for the 2nd congressional district, delivering a campaign brochure to every residence in the 1st aldermanic district in Middleton. The boys, wearing their rollerblades, joined us during the first hour of this volunteer task. Eddie took a hard tumble on a cracked sidewalk, and though he was able to shake it off, he wanted to go home once we finished the area north of University Avenue. JoAnna and I took another hour to complete the area south of University, including a 10-minute rest stop at the Bavaria Restaurant, so she could have a cup of coffee. I quenched my thirst with a large glass of grapefruit juice.

As a reward for our efforts, JoAnna took us out to lunch at Pasqual’s, a restaurant that specializes in southwestern cuisine. Tired or ordering my usual chicken fajita burrito, I tried the beef quesadilla and think I may have found a new favorite. JoAnna usually orders a chicken taco salad when we eat here and didn’t change her ways on Saturday. Andy is partial to the double beef and bean taco. Eddie is happy with a hot dog off the kid’s menu.

During the afternoon, I sat on the bench along the south side of the house and read 50 pages of Cloudsplitter, the latest book by Russell Banks, who will be giving the keynote address at this year’s WLA conference, and enjoyed the scenery, something I rarely get to do. Due to our busy schedules, the bench is usually nothing more than a decorative touch. The boys alternated between watching TV and rollerblading. JoAnna napped and then finished up a couple of small, isolated neighborhoods that we had missed during the morning.

The boys were rollerblading fiends this past weekend. Not only were they outside a lot, but they also lobbied for a trip Saturday evening to Fast Forward, a indoor skating rink, but JoAnna said she was too tired for rollerblading and I’m too wobbly to venture out onto hard, slippery floor where kids are speeding around in circles. We ended up going bowling at the Sport Bowl, located two blocks from where we live. We rolled two games, no bumper pads this time. Nobody set the lanes on fire.

Although I had been keeping a tight grip on my wallet, I agreed with the rest of the family that we would go out to eat afterwards. After some debate, we agreed on Old Chicago, a pizza and pasta place, one of our regular haunts. Barb would have liked our waiter; he looked like Andre Agassi before he lost his hair and got pudgy. Once we returned home, we played 5/6s of a round of Trivial Pursuit, the blue-izers against the brown-izers. By 10:30 we were all ready for bed, and it would have taken us another half hour to finish the game. The brown-izers won.

The nighttime calm didn’t last too long. Eddie woke up in the middle of the night, crying hysterically. JoAnna got out of bed first.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him pleadingly.

“I don’t know,” he said repeatedly, whenever we tried to get at what was bothering him. Did he have a nightmare? Was he sick? He wouldn’t tell us anything.

In exasperation, unable to calm him down, we just left him alone. I returned to the bedroom and JoAnna sacked out on the couch in the family room. Andy, if I recall, slept through all this hubbub. When I got out of bed at 7:30, after a very restless sleep, I found Eddie in his own bed, a rare occurrence lately. Everyone else was still sleeping. I retrieved the Sunday papers from the front stoop and stretched out on the living room couch and read. Eddie was the first to stir; he had to go to the bathroom. I intercepted him as she started to walk across the living room and guided him back to his bedroom. I talked to him about what happened during the night and emphasized the fact Mom and Dad become worried if he can’t tell us what is wrong when he is upset. I thought he should get some more sleep, which he did. He didn’t get up for good until after 9:00.

Sunday was a day to catch up on chores around (inside and outside) the house. Laundry, cleaning, shopping, yard work. As they did on Saturday, the boys either watched TV or rollerbladed, their destination being Elm Lawn School, where they usually ran into friends of Andy’s. I think they went through this cycle at least four times. They were always home within an hour of one of their departures, though. They spent most of the early evening at a neighbor’s house playing with a boy Eddie’s age. Surprisingly, because of their proximity, Eddie and Adam don’t get together that often but always seem to get along well when they do.

We’re all in good health. The boys seem increasingly eager for school to start. I think they are getting a little bored living an unstructured life.