trials of a housewife

Cycling and petting for the disabled

~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

Don’t worry – it’s not that kind of blog, at least not yet, I will explain…….

Today I cycled into town. Before you get excited about this and start sending me information on Lycra and padded shorts and nutritional supplements to help me rehydrate/revitalise/recarb or reload protein or whatever you’re supposed to do; I am not about to threaten any government recommendations for getting fit just yet. Twice in a week is probably the most cycling I will ever manage and I can hardly lay claim to an energetic cycling style. In fact I suspect psyching myself up to do it burns almost as many calories as the cycling itself, and this is my main issue with exercise. Realising at half past midday that I hadn’t got any tuna for supper despite promising to do this, and having fully psyched myself to the max, I had to get a very quick lunch out of the fridge to give me enough time to cycle to and from town (and be back at the school gates, of course at 3:15 for the obligatory cake sale). I am sure this weekly extraction of money will pop up again in future posts, I digress. As my middle son is away on a school trip I realised I could could eat his carton of covent garden pea and ham soup (other liquidised green goo is available) and replace it before he got back. A whole carton – don’t pretend that half a carton is a serving, Covent Garden – has 270 calories. It’s positively skinny. So, how many calories do you burn cycling 10 km in total into and out of town along a very flat canal path? Well, mapmyride has 58 different bike ride options to select from when calculating this pressing issue, and thank god one of them is “hybrid cycling – shopping/errands”. It’s almost like they knew I was headed for Waitrose. Total estimated calories burned for a woman of a certain age (44) and weight is 329. I haven’t done the maths yet, but I’m pretty sure the white and milk chocolate chip brownie I ate as a result of being starving when I got home had slightly more than 59 calories in it. According to another site I found, if I keep up this level of cycling, (presumably without the brownies) I could get my BMI down by a couple of units into a more healthy zone in only one year. One year! I’m going to struggle to do this for more than one week. I’m not going to visit that site again.

So, once in town, I was intrigued to see a man outside Waitrose, standing by a Shetland pony shouting, “for local disabled kids”. Now, I wondered whether he had astutely realised (or read the metro on many occasions) that most people don’t give a monkey for disabled kids close to them, never mind ones far away; OR, that unless your disabled kid needed to be carried literally just round the corner and back, the pony wasn’t going to make it with those tiny legs. As a fully able person, the last time I tried to get on a Shetland pony as young (tall) girl, I half mounted, half stepped over it. The result was crumpled girl on the ground on the other side of a Shetland pony.

image

It turns out that this is a petting pony for disabled kids. Again, I have issues with this. Simply because you can raise money for something, stood next to a shrunken, fuzzy pet, it does not mean you should. Alternatively, at least work out what you are going to do with the money first. In reverse date order, my youngest disabled son has petted the following three animals in as many weeks:

1. Very flat, dead frog, found just outside the house. Begged me to take it home after showing it to all his friends at school and the teacher refused to keep its fragrant body in the classroom.

2. Slow worm in the garden: awepic (cross between awesome and epic). Conversation followed for hours about how much of a slow worm, or normal worm for that matter, you could cut off its owner before you got one or even possibly two slow worms to grow back.

3. A hissing cockroach at the zoo on the basis that it would probably feel nice, but in fact felt stickily and hissed (go figure).

My middle son, also disabled, pets our cat but drew the line at the hissing cockroach. He was probably hiding his disappointment that we had turned up hoping to see a scorpion and he was still waiting for an answer as to why snake skins, when shed, are not as colourful as the snakes they came from. Perhaps my sons have the wrong kind of disability for petting Shetland ponies? Perhaps you have to be wheelchair bound to feel a warm fuzzy glow from a warm fuzzy pony and have your world improved beyond measure for a brief moment. Now I know Shetland ponies are not the most expensive of horses to own (who’d have guessed? What did we do before Google), but I wonder how much net worth Mr shouty Shetland got for the kids today. He felt obliged to give me a sticker for capturing the photo above which I wore with pride, but this too must eat into some pretty meagre margins.

I can’t help thinking that Mr shouty Shetland could have spent the time helping every other disabled person I know fill out the appeal form for having their Disability Living Allowance benefit turned down, a lengthy process that takes 11 weeks for the Department of Works and Pensions simply to read your letter. Perhaps there’s something we don’t know about the reading age of DWP employees. It’s a great way of lowering the benefit budget, how long will it take to do something after they’ve read it I wonder? Anyway, helping with DLA admin may have been of some practical benefit, rather than roasting the poor animal in the sun for a few hours.

After all that I did check with my youngest son on the merits of petting a Shetland pony. It would be great he said, “better than a hissing cockroach”.

Back to school learning to be a parent

~ drjfernihough ~ 1 Comment

For those of you new to this page, I am going to explain why I have ended up in parenting classes weekly from now until mid-July this year. I have a charming seven year old son called Connor who has ADHD, you know, that syndrome that’s basically extra-naughty-and-we-should-discipline-him-more-disease. On top of this he has Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), which is medical speak for saying NO, all the time.  When he grows up (Ha!) this combination frequently ends up being labeled manic depressive or more accurately – bipolar. Now, the specific labels are really handy, because for ADHD it means that people can feel really much better about themselves as they look down on you for being a bad parent whilst reassuring me that my son will, of course, grow out of this (statistics show he won’t). The ODD is a great label for letting me know that really clinicians have no idea what to do with ODD.

So, as an example of what the ADHD/ODD combo can achieve;  I drop him off at holiday club, give him a kiss and cuddle good bye and ask for his especially awesome behaviour as I am planning a lunch meeting with a friend 70 miles away from home. One hour (and a daily £30 fee) later and I am being called by the manager to take him home. Connor has run off, and once the assistant caught up with him to stop him running into a building site, Connor kicked her and called her a fucking idiot. I am reassured by Connor that he learnt the swear word from a kid in Class 7, not us.

Fucking marvellous.

For especially awesome behaviour like this, on many occasions in the past, we have been referred to CAMHS (Child and Mental Health Services). A very well meaning woman at CAMHS has done two things for us:

1. Attended a meeting at the school for 3 hours where she did and said absolutely nothing at all apart from mentioning that she had never met Connor. (We haven’t seen her since)

2. Forgotten that she met Connor at a previous appointment when she took him away from Mark to ask him questions away from the presence of a parent.

To get a referral again to this amazing support service (but presumably with a firework up the proverbial from a consultant to do something slightly more constructive) we need to prove we have tried everything else first, hence parenting classes.  “The Incredible Years” program that is delivered for this purpose gets glowing reviews in America where it is run for 21 weeks. In the UK, there isn’t funding for the program that works, so here it lasts “only” 11 weeks, a schedule for which there is no statistical positive evidence of an effect. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many parents who complete the course express relief and become more confident, realising that their kids are normal. I have been warned this may not be the class for us. However, the first session was yesterday, so off I went, open mind and all that. As an aside, because the classes are held on the opposite side of town where the new Lidl is being built, I decided to combine this class with a renewed attempt to get fit so cycled over there; something I have not done for about three years. The only lasting impact of the first session is my arse hurts.

I digress……………… the class itself………………..

Apparently it’s really bad form to blog about a classroom filled with parents trying to do a better job. The concern is that anything stupid I say or do may be posted on Facebook – by someone else. I know, ironic. So despite so much great material and the suspicion that someone was texting the class live throughout the whole two hours I am going to have to stick with my observations from the book written by the woman who established this class in the States, Carolyn Webster-Stratton PhD. She has a whole chapter in her book on tangible rewards, incentives and celebrations. I quote from p63:

“Rewards should be given for positive behaviours after they have occurred. It is helpful to remember the “first-then” principle. That is, first you get the behaviour you want, then your child gets the reward.”

As I’m in the mood for it now, I shall refer you to another very valuable source of information on rewards and incentives, from Daniel Pink. Daniel Pink is described by Wikipedia as the author of five books about business, work, and management that have sold two million copies worldwide and have been translated into 34 languages. The quote below is from his book, “Drive” but also from a great TED lecture he gave that has been watched over 13 million times. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en
“These contingent motivators — if you do this, then you get that — work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.”
I can’t help but put two and two together here and think that if the circumstances under which “if/then” rewards work are the relatively simple situations encountered during the whole of early childhood, we really are doing an excellent job training a whole generation for the world of work:
if then

pernickety

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This blog is pretty much a shrine to pernickety, but today even more so. All I have done all day (9-3 for those of us enslaved to the school run) is set up this blog. So I am delighted that  Wordpress in its wisdom allows me to share this fact on Facebook with a seamless click of a wireless mouse. And yet…….. what gets posted is the generic “About” page found on a blank template. *sigh* If you were brave enough to click, find the real page AND come to here, well done.

The only interruption to my day of new blogging has been the postman who needed me to sign for a box marked “collection only”. Don’t even get me started.

In other news, after another 3 pages of HP photo paper and 12 images later, I think I may have a passable passport photo for my son and me. Time and £118 fee will tell.

New email. Simple. February 24th 2015

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Need a gmail account for my new company – simples – go to Google. Get half way through the interminably complicated procedure of demonstrating that I own my own domain and realise that I am actually going to have to host my web page somewhere to show that I own it. I build my web page and transfer hosting domain. In this process, I discover that a) I now have superior technical app development and software coding skills that I’m not sure I will ever use again until the moment I forget how to do this and b) my web hosting provider is cheaper than Google for a google email address. Buoyed by my new skills, I apply for a gmail account with my web hoster only to be told that Google still thinks I want this domain and has an account open for me, they can’t give me a second one. Enter the neverland of google app account deletion (I am now a jedi software manager) and receive an email to say I don’t exist. Brava. Log back on to web hoster and get the same message again that Google thinks I STILL have that domain, but they will refund payment, honest guv. Log back into Google with Bath gmail details to enter the neverland again, but can’t do that, because my Bath account isn’t an administrator account, I’ve deleted my company’s administrator account and don’t exist any more, yah boo sucks to you. This all started because I logged on to register for VAT and the form asked me for my company email address. Loving the paperwork vibe this week.

Things you learn whilst unemployed #53. January 22nd 2015

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So, the focus of my cleaning wrath this week is my oven and my weapon of choice in the pictures. I clean my oven regularly, on a strict schedule, once every redundancy, so twice in 10 years now. As you can see in the image, this oven cleaner says it cleans first time, no scrubbing, all implements provided and it is recommended by people who are actually GOOD housekeepers. What’s not to love. Well, let’s start with the bag for “a maximum of two racks”. Now I went wild and crazy in my youth and bought a double oven. With two shelves in each bit plus the racks down the side to support said shelves, I’ve got 8 of these things. “Tackles racks AND grills” and “only if you can choose your favourite 2/8 racks you want clean” doesn’t appear to me to be mutually compatible. So, six racks go into a bag filled with Alien blood, I’m not buying two of something that works first time. And believe me this is Alien blood, crossed with the fluid they used to dispose of bodies in Breaking Bad. It dissolved the first cloth I used, despite stating to apply “with a sponge/cloth”. They provide gloves thankfully, but once again, the first mention of these INSIDE the pack is “these are for convenience only, longer gloves are recommended”. Why didn’t they just be honest and say “these gloves are a bit shit but some bright spark in marketing said we wouldn’t be able to sell the pack unless it was an all in one solution and the guy in accounts said we could only spend 20p on the gloves. The slight burning sensation you will get on the skin of your right thumb after use of these gloves will subside.” The results? Not bad, I have to say. Six racks came out looking almost as good as new. I could make a colour chart of the stuff that will be left untouched by this product though, necessitating the purchase of a second pack. Fifty shades of brown – fine; black, forget it. The “no scrubbing required” also provides more hope than factual information, I am certainly nowhere near having a “sparkling clean” oven. So I would definitely question “unbeatable results”. On my rigorous schedule of oven cleaning, I intend to buy a new oven before cleaning this one again, and expect the new one to be MUCH cleaner. A more honest statement would perhaps be “unbeatable results if all you have is the £3 this cost on special offer”. Lesson ended.