My son Lawrence started kindergarten last year. It was kind of tough on him. The class was three hours long, and they only had a short, ten minute recess about halfway through. And unlike pre-school, there was a curriculum that had to be completed by the end of the year. Goodbye Show and Tell, hello learning by rote. His teacher was wonderful and very patient, but it eventually became clear that he was having trouble. Nearly every day he got a time-out for talking in class. His teacher worked with him on these issues, but after all, there were nineteen other children in the class. So she was very concerned that the first grade teachers would be less tolerant than she was, and that his self esteem would suffer from constant discipline and being made to feel like a bad kid. His grades were good, and everyone found him very personable, but he was definitely disruptive.
Archive for » October, 2009 «
Over the years, since I started my depression site, I’ve heard (read) many people say that they want to treat their depression “but without antidepressants.” I always think, “Why?” It’s just incomprehensible to me that some people have that knee-jerk reaction to medication.
Oddly enough, I have to include myself in this group. At least initially, I refused to take medication for my depression. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was first diagnosed with depression, I was in a pretty bad way. I had had two major depressive episodes in the past, without knowing what they were, but this third one was the worst, and so far, of the longest duration. By chance I read a book that helped me to recognize that what I was going through, and I promptly made an appointment with a doctor at the mental health clinic attached to the local hospital.
I know, I know, it's a total writer's cliche, but I procrastinated when I really should have been writing this SharePost. I played Lord of the Rings Online for half an hour, using the excuse that since my son and husband were watching tv, I wouldn't be able to concentrate anyway. When the tv went off, I stared at the screen for thirty seconds, and then remembered that I really needed to put a load of laundry in. Granted, I really did need to do laundry, but for some reason that didn't occur to me when I was playing LOTRO.
It's amazing how when you're procrastinating, all of a sudden the other things that you've been putting off get prioritized really high. “I can't believe that I haven't gotten around to mixing the coyote urine,” I said to myself virtuously a few minutes ago. (Yes, I said coyote urine. If you live somewhere that we do, where deer get really hungry in the summer due to lack of rain and you happen to have some tasty plants, you probably know what I mean. The only thing I've found that works is coyote urine. The deer think that a coyote's marked the territory, so they leave it alone.)
