Overcommitted Parents

Posted at 7:30 PM, Thursday, March 6, 2008

I have about one-third of a blog entry sitting in the draft box waiting for me to get around to finishing it. It talks all about the lovely weekend we had last week, in which we took in some of the very best of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, as well as the biannual Adelaide Festival of the Arts, which opened last Friday. I was planning to tell you all about a delightful street mime who encouraged and cajoled four unwilling volunteers into performing a dramatic, touching, and extremely silly play about a suitor and his beloved. I was going to talk about the cool laser projections on the stately stone buildings that line North Terrace, so that after 9:00 p.m. the buildings are transformed into works of art themselves. And I think (although I can't really remember) that I was going to share my own experience of being a Living Book at the State Library as part of the Festival and getting "borrowed" by four different curious patrons.

All the memories are fading now, because I've just been too busy to get the blog finished. While I'm not performing professional duties (and it has been a very busy week at the synagogue), I've been transporting kids to various activities. While I do not yet believe I have overprogrammed kids, I have definitely become an overprogrammed mother.

Yonatan and Nadav are currently involved in precisely three activities each during the school week. Both are in Scouts, both are taking swimming lessons, and both have started music lessons. The problem is that neither is in the same activity at the same time. Both Scout groups meet on Monday. Nadav's Joey Mob meets at 5:15, and the Cubs start at 6:30 p.m. This means three round-trips to the scout hall for us over the course of the evening. If one or the other of the groups has a special outing, we have to travel to where the outing is to drop off and pick up. Not that I'm complaining that much; it's still way more convenient than when we lived in Nailsworth and they had Scouts on a different night of the week.

For a while, Yonatan was enrolled in private swimming lessons immediately following Nadav's group swimming lesson at our local pool. This worked out well, because it meant Yonatan could swim for fun during Nadav's lesson, and vice versa. Unfortunately, he wasn't making any progress. The challenge of coordinating arms, legs, blowing bubbles, and breathing has just been too much for him. So yesterday, he started lessons at Child's Play--a hydrotherapy and learn-to-swim program directed by physical therapists at a hospital in North Adelaide. This is a wonderful program. We arrived for our lesson at about the same time as a girl with cerebral palsy. She carefully made her way to the pool with the aid of a walker and slowly descended the steps into the water. Then she swam lap after lap of backstroke, breaststroke, crawl, and even butterfly as the therapist encouraged her on. It was absolutely gorgeous to watch. Her proud mother said that she had been having lessons for two years, and clearly it's been fabulous. Yonatan thrashed around in the water as usual, but by the end of his lesson, his arm strokes were straighter and more purposeful, and he had actually attempted to swim across the pool while turning his head to breathe. He was immensely pleased with his progress and is disappointed the lessons are only every two weeks. We arrived home from his lesson at 6:40 p.m., and I jumped into the car at 7:00 p.m. to teach a 7:30 p.m. class at the synagogue.

Massada College offers private instrumental lessons during school hours for students who wish to take advantage of the service. Unfortunately, the piano teacher had only one opening for this year, and we gave it to Yonatan. Since Nadav is only seven, this wouldn't have been such a tragedy, were it not for the fact that Nadav is a musical genius. No--I'm serious! This is a child who sings bedtime songs in a different key so that he can experiment with how the different versions harmonize together. Yonatan brought home his piano book last Thursday, sat down at our little keyboard and proudly played through the two pieces he'd learned that day. Once he headed off to watch TV, Nadav sat down in front of the book and worked his way through the next six songs! Clearly, he wasn't prepared to sit back and wait another year to start learning an instrument. So tonight he and Bobby are sampling the Young Musician's course at our local branch of the Yamaha Music School. He is supposed to learn to read music, sing, start playing piano and probably work on rhythm. The lesson meets on Thursdays for an hour starting at 6:00 p.m. I finish tutoring at about 4:45 p.m. and teach a class at 7:30 p.m. Interesting! Looks like take-away food on Thursday at least until my class ends in four weeks or so.

One more wrench in the works is the tantalizing possibility of a social skills class for boys, which has been dangled in front of our noses by the organization Autism SA since before the start of the school year. Now we've been notified of a meeting to take place on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. "to discuss options for this group." I'm not sure if that means that the group is actually going to start up, or what exactly will happen, but I do know that I won't be attending. I have a funeral to perform at 3:30 p.m. and then need to get Nadav to swimming lessons by 5:30 p.m. So Bobby and Yonatan will go to this meeting in their car while I rush back to pick up Nadav and get him to the pool. How exactly did this happen to us?!

Quick update: Bobby took Nadav to the class, and reported that he had a great deal of difficulty participating in the class at that hour of the day. We'll probably see about signing him up for the second half of the year if the class time is easier on us!