I Still Have Time...

The Incredibles is one of my favorite movies. In the opening scenes, Mr. Incredible is on his way to a very important appointment when he is called into service as a super hero. Looking at his watch he says "I have time." One problem is solved and he is pressed into service again. "I still have time," he says. Oh, baby, can I relate.

I have gone to great lengths to organize my calendar, my to-do list, my goals and my priorities so that I can use my time in a more productive manner.

The results that I'm looking for can be measured by two words - efficient and effective. I desire to be efficiently effective. My priorities and goals and the gajillion things that I have to do to run this life and the lives of my family need to be managed efficiently and effectively.

To that end, I've employed a strategy called 'Tidy Up Day'. On Monday, I do all the laundry, all the housecleaning (with a little help from David - logged under life skills), menu-planning, shopping list creation and calendar planning so that I don't have to be concerned with the mundane but necessary responsibilities of running a household for the rest of the week. I tried it last Monday and it worked very well.

Today, however, has been a real struggle. As I've worked on my well-planned list of mundane necessities, I've been distracted by an overwhelming desire to immerse myself in Picasa and photo blogging and Beyond Wits' End blogging and any other blog I can find. I look at my list and I hear Mr. Incredible speak in that unforgettable voice and tone saying, "I still have time." And, there I go, away from my plan and into hyperfocus land.

Here's the question. Does effectiveness have to be efficient? What if I pick off a task every two hours between long stretches of totally unnecessary self indulgence? That may negate my efficiency but, in the end, it won't impact my effectiveness, right? It's still Monday, right? Until I go to bed at about midnight, it's still Tidy Up Day. I still have time...

Cheers,

leapinlily

World Math Day - March 1

Thought I would post this for all you homeschoolers out there. This is a global event. I cut the following paragraph from the About page of the web site:

Students play at home and at school against other students around the world in live games of mental arithmetic. Each game lasts for 60 seconds and students can play up to 100 games, earning points for their personal tally. Students can play beyond 100 games during the event, but points will only count to the World Maths Day Mathometer, not their personal point score. The students who answer the most questions correctly will appear on the Hall of Fame. There are 5 levels of play, 20 games on each level.

Once registered, your child/children can begin practicing right now. David was practicing last night with students from Australia and Portugal, which he thought was awesomely cool!

World Math Day

Best regards,

leapinlily

Progress...

That! is my kitchen table. Those people are David and the other children that make up our Tuesday School. They are working on a unit study on Zombie Fire Ants that I acquired from The Old Schoolhouse Store. This is progress...

...and Work Your Plan...

This is my kitchen table. It is minus the camera with which I took this picture. Before taking the picture, the camera with which I took this picture was on the kitchen table, along with all the rest of that junk. Really?

This is the way I live and it has become downright ridiculous.

In addition to the kitchen table, I have a desk in my bedroom that is much smaller but looks very much the same.

 Then, there's the office downstairs.In my defense, whatever I have in the office that I share with my husband and belongs to me is in neat piles. Three of them. That's after doing an hour of filing...

I never intended for this blog to be a rant but I guess I'm going to cave right now and rant on. In the last few weeks I have experienced a slow and dawning realization that I am up against the wall of my own ADD. The wall has always been there. I've always been up against it. For most of my life, I have been able to manage. Not to the level that I would like but just enough. I rarely finish what I start. There are always too many irons in the fire. I've managed, sort of. But, I'm getting pretty sick of it. Sick of the mess, the confusion, the planning my work - at which I'm pretty good - and not really working the plan - at which I excel. Same struggles, different day. I can no longer seem to manage in spite of the wall. Familiar frustration!

The latest issue of ADDitude Magazine has an article entitled Stand Up to Symptoms. In the article, author Katy Rollins speaks of "the minutia of daily life." In speaking to non-ADHDers she says:

"Understand that the mundane details mean more to us than they do you. These are the devils that regularly frustrate us. You may not think these are real chores for us, but that's the point. It is in the nature of ADHD, and its impact of people's lives, that the small things are difficult, that we must approach them mechanically... ADHD isn't about the big disruptive things that people do. It's best defined by the little things that shouldn't be so hard."

I never saw it in those terms. And, yet, that is exactly the way it is and always has been.

sigh...

As I have circled around the thought of trying to figure out yet another way to get it together so that I can home school the boy, have a life and stay sane, one thing has become quite apparent. I am resisting the planning of my work because I know in my heart of hearts that I will not be able to carry it out. My kitchen table does not change, no matter how hard I try to make it different.

It's time to turn to treatment process to myself.

I shall see my doctor about meds and I shall look into a coach of some sort for myself. I've often joked that an ADD mom homeschooling her ADHD child is like the blind leading the blind. It's become not so funny.

That's my plan...

Cheers,

leapinlily

Unschooling - So Far, So Good

Just one month ago, we reformatted our home school to an unschool. Gone are the math and grammar books, and a structure to rival boot camp. In their place are robotics and classics such as Gulliver's Travels. We're doing a unit study on Zombie Fire Ants with another home school family and we call it Tuesday School. How is it going? Not too bad.

When we first started this experiment, David had the idea that unschool was synonymous to self-indulgence, ie. doing whatever he wanted however he wanted to do it and whenever he felt like it. LOL, right? I've read some great blogs about unschooling and the wonderful things that kids with a working executive function are doing. This will not be the case with a boy who would be supremely content to play video games all day. For our unschool to work, it is necessary to build in parameters lest the entire day, week, month and life fritter away before our very eyes. There are limits on video games, limits on television, bedtimes and morning alarms. Without some structure and expectations, the possiblities for never moving past the 7th grade would be enormous. 

So, once again, how's it going? Not too bad. He has built 25 Lego NXT robots in the last 30 days. At this very moment, he is testing an electronic measuring tape. He measured a large box and is converting the metric measurements of the NXT to compare them to the standard measurements of our Stanley measuring tape. The only thing I've done was to google the conversion table and tell him that 1 inch equals 2.54 cm. He is testing the accuracy of the NXT measuring tape. Results? It's accurate.

The Lego NXT robotics kit has consumed most of his waking time. He is learning how to follow intricate construction instructions and programming basics. More than that, he has been learning frustration tolerance from an instructor and a methodology that I could never in a million years implement. There are a hundred things that can go wrong when building and programming a robot. When it doesn't work, he has to retrace his steps and look for the errors. When he was first starting, he made many errors and became quickly overwhelmed with frustration and anger. I would simply encourage him to go back through the steps and find what he had missed. In many cases, it was something simple and, once fixed, it worked. In the past, he allowed his frustration to overwhelm him and things ended up broken from being pounded on or bitten. This is a common ADHD response to frustration.

However, he is not been willing to take his frustration out on an item for which he worked so long and so hard to get and would be so hard to replace. Now, he takes a deep breath and begins to retrace his steps to find the error. He's learning to control his frustration, not let it control him. Without me! It's a beautiful win-win!!

In the beginning, I had to keep telling myself to relax and trust the process. And, in fact, we are still early in the process. The only thing he's been interested in is the NXT and, at times, I've allowed myself to be a bit too concerned about it. But, then, something like this will transpire and I know that I should just relax: we were reading an item together and a reference was made to the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government. Since we haven't had too much American history or political science, I wasn't sure what he knew about it and decided on an impromptu quiz.

"So, what is the judicial branch of the United States government?" I asked.

"The Supreme Court," he said.

"What is the legislative branch?"

"Uh, Congress?" he answered rather hesitantly.

"Very good, David! And, what is the executive branch?" I asked.

"The President!" he triumphantly replied.

"How do you know this?" I wondered.

"I don't know, Mom. I think it's because I watch the news with you and Dad."

So far, so good!

Cheers,

leapinlily