I’m almost done with my special education Odyssey. This afternoon, I have to go to special ed camp expo for area summer camps that teach kids social skills, and tomorrow, I meet with a consultant to make sure I haven’t missed anything. So, almost done, but not quite.
I visited a really fabulous school that is geared to kids with high functioning autism and anxiety disorders on Tuesday. An 11 million dollar building with bright and shiny equipment and a safe and loving philosophy. However, it’s an hour away from our home. Maybe it would be an hour and a half during morning traffic. Would that commute be horrible for my kid?
I spend a good part of every day making mental pros and cons charts. The next step is taking Ian to intake sessions. Intake. Sounds like he’s going to get strip searched for prison. Hopefully, it will be more pleasant.
With all the driving around, visiting, composing mental pros and con charts, and recovering with multiple glasses of wine in the evening, things have been far from normal around here. But life goes on, and I have to keep this ship on course.
One of the challenges is making sure that I have dinner on the table every night. That task is made more challenging by the fact that my family is plowing through vast amounts of food every night. Teenage boys sure eat a lot.
On Tuesday, I made a big meal with the plan of having a repeat meal on Wednesday. I cooked up one package of Italian sausages, one package of German sausage, one pound of egg noodles with a container of fresh mushrooms, a head of broccoli, some leftover grilled asparagus, and a salad. Sounds like two nights worth of food, right? Nope. It was enough for one dinner, my lunch, and Jonah’s first dinner (he eats two right now). I had to run out to the supermarket for chicken and a box of Mac n Cheese. On Sunday, we almost decimated an entire pot of chili.
I have entered into a brave new world of dinner. I haven’t figured out how to plan around feeding locusts yet. I think I need to multiply my normal cooking amounts by three.
When things get stressful, one must also keep the ship on course by maintaining one’s own sanity. So, I’m forgoing the laundry and squeezing in a mani-pedi this afternoon. We’ll hang out with friends and family over the weekend. I’ll make time to catch up on the blogs and twitter to remember that there’s a whole world outside of mental charts and intakes and IEPs.
Apt. 11d 
How does the commute happen? In a minivan, with his mom driving and facing an hour back after dropping him and having driven an hour to get him before pickup? In a creepy bus full of bullies? In a nice bus with his new friends and they are all playing around with screens and making fart jokes?
If screens and fart jokes, I’d say go for it.
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I can’t imagine a scenario in which an hour commute would be worth it for the child. That sounds so stressful that it must offset many of the benefits of the school. I’m totally projecting here because I hate commuting but that situation sounds awful for both him and you.
On the food front: Totino’s pizzas prepared in a toaster oven are a cheap and easy snack. Not the healthiest of course, but at this stage they really just need calories and you can get the healthy stuff in at mealtimes. Also, buy a ton of day old bagels and freeze them. Toasted with peanut butter they are a very filling snack.
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Does the school provide transportation or would you have to do it? I can’t imagine considering it if I had to do that amount of driving even ONCE a day. For just him, though… my kids have occasionally had 45-minute bus rides to get to their schools less than a mile away because of lots of stops and funny routing patterns. (They opted to walk instead of course!) So if he doesn’t usually mind that sort of thing it might not be a dealbreaker.
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The school would provide transportation. He would be the only kid in a small car. If he got sick, I would have to get him. 2-3 hours of driving back and forth. Teacher meetings and all that. I wouldn’t be able to work from home in a regular predictable manner.
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. . .we almost decimated an entire pot of chili.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
You have written before about making several (5-6?) side dishes for your family for dinner. I always think, as long as it’s something most of your eaters like, why not make, for example, a huge serving of broccoli and a huge serving of squash, and save prep and clean up time over making the same amount of veggies spread out over four varieties. Just wondering.
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So hard to do all the balancing.
I enjoy the stories about feeding hungry boys, though. You’ve said that you would be the one who cooks for the crowd in the dystopian future where we live in complexes to survive, so it’ll be interesting to hear your experiments on feeding a crowd of two bottomless stomachs.
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“we almost decimated an entire pot of chili. ”
There’s the killing of chili, but, if they eat 90% of the chilli, wouldn’t that be decimation, “to reduce drastically”? I guess there’s the issue that decimation seems like it’s usually used for numerable objects rather than volume, but that usage has clearly broadened to include “decimating” industries or cities.
Or are we talking the archaic usage of kill 1 in in every 10 men, randomly?
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Chile con cuerpo.
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From the way you write about the school, I’d say you should go for it.
I know people who’ve endured 1.5 hour one-way school commutes. There was sometimes, but not always, a potential carpool involved. School-provided transportation would have been a dream. It’s a killer when a parent has to drive 4 hours every day just to drop off and pick up at school.
To put it in perspective, in this state, a school must provide an in-town child with a bus route lasting 45 minutes or less. An hour is only 15 minutes longer, and it sounds as if this might be Ian’s “just-right” school.
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I feel like your lists are more likely better than my musings but I thought of a few problem-solving type things. We pay one of the aftercare teachers at my younger son’s daycare to pick up my older son at his school and drive him to daycare so that we have one pickup (and it’s a good programme). I work over an hour away from our home and my husband spends 1-2 days a week 1.5 hrs away. At first I thought wow, this will fall apart. But in 2 years, I’ve only had to intervene once. I don’t know what the teacher meeting requirements are or how flexible there are but is it possible to do every other one over the phone/Skype/Google Hangout?
I don’t know how often Ian gets sick. My older kid hasn’t much, but one solution we have is fellow parents at the school. I got to know a few and there’s one who is fine with me using her if there’s an emergency; we discussed it pretty business-like that I would pay her so that I don’t feel like I’m imposing. This has never actually happened.
For me the big question would be what can happen during the drive too. Is the driver willing to put on audiobooks if that’s something Ian would be into, or can Ian listen to something he really likes, or do homework in the car? Some kids can and some can’t. A lot of parents I know with long commutes (and me too, to work) like the time to listen to stories.
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I thought I’d do some data analysis, and looked at commute distance for my kids’ school. Parents drive, though there is access to carpools, but the commute isn’t just the child.
I used google map driving times (I’m suspicious of the google map driving times, ’cause my perception is that it can take a lot longer, especially since you have to drive during school commute times, but it’s the only data I have, though I’m working up data for my own commute, using the iPhone app Speedtracker). I recommend the app — if knowing exactly how long the commute is, on a day to day basis is useful info for you.
The furthest distance anyone drives to our school is 30 miles, and that’s a teacher-parent. In general, the maximum commute times are 40 minutes or so (though this is just a google time). There’s at least one hour+ commute (involving a ferry, so it’s not actually the longest distance).
My kiddo once did a 1 hour+ commute for basketball (but only once/week). That was crazy, and I am glad we are not doing it anymore. It was useful on a short term basis and grandparents did the driving (and didn’t mind spending time with kiddo that way). But, not a choice I would recommend for anyone — just one that worked for us for a short period of time.
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If the commute is ok with him — how is he in cars? — then it sounds like a good solution. Not as good if you end up driving it often. Does transportation work for after school activities, or are those back in the neighborhood?
Yes, sending the boy off to college — where they feed him? Worth that crazy tuition…
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Are you able to move or would that mess up Jonah’s school placement?
We lived a 75-90 minute public transportation commute from my husband’s work for two years and I don’t think we’ll ever do it again.
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There are a great many “I” statements in the second half of this post. To what extent does your husband contribute to keeping the ship on course? Is he doing half of all this cooking, or some other setup which means he contributes in a meaningful way to the domestic work? Will he be sharing (I don’t say “helping” in the case of fathers and domestic work, because that frames the work as owned by the woman). Sorry if I’m projecting here – since my youngest started high school, mine seems to want to wind down his parenting activities, which is laudable in a way, but sometimes it seems less about teaching the kid independence and more about increasing his own downtime.
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Keeping the ship on course is entirely my job. My husband spends 10 hours in front of a computer and 2 to 2-1/2 on a train. When he comes home, we eat dinner, he cleans the kitchen, does a load of laundry, helps put Ian to bed, and gets an hour downtime. He doesn’t get any personal days, so he can’t go to any of these school tours. He might use a vacation day later this spring to check out the final decision for the veto vote. It’s not an ideal situation, but that’s the way it is right now. We’re both working so hard and just breaking even financially. In three years, we might have to make some adjustments.
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My husband spends 10 hours in front of a computer…
Has he gotten to the Ender Dragon yet?
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After many, many years I have learned that jumping in with my advice in complicated situations about which I do not have personal expertise or experience to offer (i.e. I have never had cancer, never tried to look for a school in NJ, never won the lottery (or had my startup purchased for 20 million dollars), . . . .) is not helpful.
I appreciate learning about these situations when people face them, so, I hope, Laura, that you will draw your lines on comments wherever you want them to be.
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BTW, I now have 3 speedtracker measurements for my commute to pick up the kids. It ranges from 25-35 minutes, one way, with the time difference on the three measurements being time spent in the pickup lane to get the kids (and not traffic, though traffic can get bad, it hasn’t been in the afternoon pickup). If we did the driving both ways, our kid school commute time would be about 2+ hours each day, which if I thought about it too much, would question. It’s not as bad as that, ’cause we do carpool, so we’re not spending 10 hours/day driving to school.
The conversation (and the cite in your other post), made me remember how very much I hate long commutes. On the other hand, I find plenty of people have no problem with the time they spend in the car. It really does seem to be an individual preference.
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I’m one of those people whose instinct is to avoid any and all life situations that involve long commutes, and for the most part, my kids and I are rarely ever in the car during the week.
Having said all of that, Laura, this school sounds really special. I would ask yourself whether you’d regret not at least giving it a try. Unless your son gets car sick easily or otherwise has a hard time during car rides, I think I would go for it. The selfish part of me also thinks about how much longer of a work day you would have when Ian has a longer commute.
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