I hate daylight savings time. It’s a silly fiction. Okay, all human timekeeping systems are a fiction, but dammit, why can’t we just stay consistent with them instead of monkeying with them twice a year?
I want a subscription to this magazine. Really. I haven’t seen it on the shelves in any bookstores yet, though, and I don’t usually subscribe to anything sight unseen.
There are lots of changes coming in our lives.
The custody case continues slowly. We have a mediation session on May 16 and a hearing on May 20.
The guardian ad litem is supposed to visit the ex-wife’s place this week while the kids are there for spring break. real_pochacco has said that he wants to go live with his mother whether or not littlefirefae goes (he’d originally said he didn’t want to go without her). He’s 14, so legally he can go if he likes. We’re planning to just have the two girls living with us right after school lets out.
We really think he’ll come back here before too long, though. Obviously, we don’t want anything bad to happen, but we also don’t believe that his mother can or will provide a healthy home for him. What she will do is give him far more freedom than we do, and that is very enticing at that age. He’s very immature for his age and has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of responsibility that has dictated the rules we have in place. We just hope he doesn’t have to learn any life lessons the hard way there. It’s likely that he will, though—that seems to be the only way most people ever do learn them.
The custody battle is really about where littlefirefae will live. Her behavior continues to be very worrisome. We took her to a new psychiatrist last week, who added Risperdal to her medications and began tapering off her Paxil dosage. She’s already much calmer, so we think we’re on the right track. Her mother is very much against medication in general and this type of medication (antipsychotic) in particular. We can only hope she’s continuing to see that littlefirefae actually take her meds properly while she’s there. She has at least made statements that make it clear that she does know that stopping the medication suddenly can be dangerous.
She continues to behave in obsessive ways, though, stealing sharp objects and secreting them around the house. She’s absolutely fascinated with them and with fire. Her grades suck, no matter how much work we and her teacher do with her—we’re seeing 63s and 68s from her on a fairly consistent basis in all subjects. She’s extremely intelligent—she’s just not engaged.
We did get the process going to have real_pochacco and littlefirefae‘s ADHD and other issues documented with the school system and ask for any accommodations for which they may be eligible. That’s largely so that they’re a part of their permanent school records, which would be sent to any new schools. That way their mother cannot deny that there are issues if they do go live there, so they’ll have a chance of some kind of treatment.
I worry about shadowkatt because she tends to take on too much of an adult role. She watches littlefirefae and feels responsible for her. Some of that is normal, and some of it isn’t, and it’s hard to help her find the balance. It’s hard for me to even know where the balance is because in many ways I wasn’t ever a child.
Our lease here is up at the end of May. We have to give notice by May 1st that we’re moving. We considered extending it so that we’d have time past the court date (May 20) to see if we need a three- or four-bedroom house, but it probably isn’t worthwhile. Apparently, the only way the courts would keep real_pochacco from going to live with his mother is if she were blatantly running a crackhouse and brothel out of her apartment.
The ideal would be to find a house we can afford that has room for all of us, including the boy, so that if/when he moves back here it won’t be a big deal. I found a listing for such a house yesterday, but someone had just put down a deposit for it. And, of course, anything listed now is unlikely to be available by the time we are ready to actually move.
We are moving to the Cobb/Cherokee county side of town (we’re in Gwinnett now). I’m going back to school at Southern Polytechnic, and many of our friends and most of our homeschooling group’s activities are over there. My parents are extremely unhappy about the move (they’re here) and campaigning to get us to move closer to them instead. I don’t want to be further away from curiousmay9 and wordcandlemage but I think we’ll manage to stay close 😉
shadowkatt is working on a proposal to be given to the trustee for her educational trust fund, asking that it be used to fund her enrollment in Oak Meadow. That would allow her to interact with teachers who aren’t her parents, while still having the flexibility of homeschooling. I hope we can find a way to fund the same for littlefirefae, as their Waldorf-inspired curriculum is truly much more suitable for her than anything the public schools offer. (Yes, we want to take her out of school if she’s still here—and she very much wants us to do it.)
I began the process of applying for Social Security disability this week. I’ve avoided it for years, but now I fear that my pride is hurting my family. I cannot get health insurance through any other avenue, and this takes a long time, I know. So I’m trying.
The application process involves gathering the names and dates of every health professional who has treated me for any of the intertwined conditions I have, ever. Depression, PTSD, fibromyalgia, and arthritis. I have records going back to 1985, but they aren’t in very good order, and I know that they aren’t complete prior to 1988 or so. I’m slogging through them. That’s a LOT of paper. On the bright side, I’m reducing the amount of paper I’m actually keeping, getting rid of the second copies of things, and so on. I love throwing paper away. I feel lighter already!
Looking at the dollar amounts on the medical expenses, though, I’m seriously thinking I should have been itemizing expenses for tax purposes long ago. I’d assumed that since we don’t own a house, there wouldn’t be enough to matter. I was wrong.
We’re at the quality-checking part of our filing in general. 99.9% of the paper is in some file. We know, however, that some things were misfiled. And there are labels that need to be made up, and we have to check to see that things were filed so that both of us can easily find them (we think differently in these terms). The QA process should involve much throwing away of paper, though, as we find duplicates. Yay!
There are more changes as well, but they are sambear‘s to tell if he chooses to do so.
