I Will Not Die On This Hill

I try really hard to choose my battles, especially when it comes to my girls and on social media.

Sometimes I fail at this.

Which is fine; I'm a human being, and failure happens.

What I won't do is deliberately make my life and my children's lives harder by shooting myself in the foot (just to expand the military metaphor).

I've written about this before, but here's the thing; I don't want to attach negative associations to things that should be lifelong positives.

Learning for its own sake, music and other arts, physical and mental health... these things should be positives, rather than obligations. And figuring out how to phrase things/assign family tasks/where to push and where not to... it's a very fine line and a balancing act on that line.

Even in the best of times, which these are not, scholastically speaking.

Example - generally these things are accommodated, and very well, in Lizzy's IEP. We know what she is capable of at school, how far she can be pushed out of her comfort zone depending on several factors both autistic and adolescent, and that routine is key. And they are doing an awesome job translating that to the distance learning model. But there's also only so much we can manage at home without the risk of her learning to resent things she actually likes, and that I want her to keep liking, like science for the fun of it and music and Feudal Japan.

We've gotten at-home accommodations as well - thank you Lizzy's middle school IEP team - and it's going pretty well. But she seems unable to wrap her brain around attendance in one class and doesn't see the point in optional Zoom cooking classes and also has issues with Zoom piano lessons, though her piano teacher is the most patient person on the planet. I don't want to force her to do these things the school way (because again, I want her to keep liking them instead of seeing them as a chore), so I work around the issues by saying things like, "If you can't find the attendance check-in for that class, email the teacher," or, "Okay, let's do some cooking at home," or, "For today, just do the scales and chords." In general, this works, and I know a few of you will think I'm letting her call the shots. I'm not; she still has to do the things; we're just accommodating for her (and my, as I don't want to have a shouting match every day) specific needs.

The idea is to start the day at Green

Based on conversations with assorted educational and mental health folks here lately and the chart over there, we have determined that most of the time in the Before Times, Lizzy would start the day at Yellow. After breakfast she'd be at Green and generally stay between Green and Yellow for the rest of the school day, depending on the circumstances.

Now, in the Dark Spring of 2020, we've decided that almost everyone is a shade (see what I did there?) more anxious than we would normally be. This also means we can go from yellow-green to dark red in an eyeblink, over something as minor as "let me help you find the check-in so you don't have to email Ms. K every week."

And nobody wants that.