In Which Squirrelboy Stands Up for His Faith and I Realize How Many Awesome People We Know

Even though I know many families for whom an education at a religious school has been a great fit and I don't disparage it as a choice, I never seriously considered sending my children to a Christian school. Even when I was homeschooling Squirrelboy for middle school I used very little Christian specific curriculum (and modified what I did use) and purposely joined a homeschool coop that, unlike the majority in our town, welcomes anyone and is not tied into a particular religion, let alone a particular expression of Christianity.

So my kids have spent their entire educational careers either in public school or in a homeschool environment that was purposely diverse in terms of the worldviews of the families involved. Despite the fear I encountered from some of the Christian homeschooling families I got to know during my homeschooling years, neither their teachers nor the curriculum they have been taught have been opposed in any way to our beliefs. In fact, both kids have had some amazing teachers in the public schools who were Christians who specifically believed they were called by God to teach in the public schools. They've also had plenty of great teachers who don't share our faith but have not in any way tried to denigrate it.

That was all absolutely true until last week in Squirrelboy's biology class. Since his high school classes mostly operate on a semester schedule he started some new classes in January. In science, he moved from physics to biology. He had met the biology teacher before, and even interviewed him about the climate strike that he helped organize early in the school year, and had a good impression of him.

Squirrelboy still likes the teacher overall, but he was both annoyed an taken aback by the way the teacher chose to introduce the idea of what is and what is not scientifically verifiable. He put, in the category of scientifically verifiable, Earthquakes, and, in the category of not scientifically verifiable, Angels. Point taken. Angels are part of my cosmology, but I agree that they're not scientifically verifiable. I can think of several less controversial things the teacher could have used given that he lives in the Bible belt, but whatever. If he had stopped there, Squirrelboy would have been only slightly annoyed.

The biology teacher went on to speak against all religion as not scientifically verifiable and therefore wrong. He specifically said the the Bible cannot be believed because it is based only on witness testimony. He apparently even went so far to deny the existence of Jesus as a historical figure. Throughout the class period, Squirrelboy respectfully pushed back against these ideas. The teacher gave no credence to his arguments.

That afternoon, Squirrelboy got into the car feeling pretty angry. We talked it through, and he decided he wanted to write a paper detailing the evidence for at least parts of the Bible being historically verifiable and give it to the teacher, just to show how strongly he feels about this issue. 

I wrote a Facebook post about Squirrelboy's experience, and I was amazed by how many people came out the woodwork to support Squirrelboy and his courage in standing up for his beliefs as well as to disagree with the way the teacher presented this issue. I got everything from comments from Christian friends cheering me on for raising a child with a strong faith to comments from Atheist friends who were appalled that an educator would bring his own religious biases into the classroom in this way. All were supportive.

In addition, many people reached out both to me and directly to Squirrelboy with suggestions for resources Squirrelboy can use for the paper he wants to write. Christian, Jewish, and Atheist friends all suggested resources. That Friday Squirrelboy went to a conference with our church's youth group. One of the adult chaperones came up to him and said, "I have all kinds of thoughts and resources to share with you this weekend." Squirrelboy had set up a meeting with our pastor, and the pastor's wife (who was another chaperone) told me she and her husband were listening to a podcast and at one point he said, "Oh, that's a great thing to bring up during my meeting with Squirrelboy!" (though of course he called him by his real name).

Squirrelboy had his meeting with our pastor yesterday, and he said it was very helpful. Kittygirl and I waited out in the van during the meeting, and the pastor came out with Squirrelboy afterward to summarize what they'd talked about. He also ordered a book for Squirrelboy which will be delivered directly to our house. Who does that?

I'm incredibly proud of Squirrelboy for standing up for his beliefs. It's further proof that, so far, I have managed to do a a pretty good job with Squirrelboy despite the evidence to the contrary I might have decided to take from last week's phone misuse affair. I'm particularly heartened by the fact that I've managed to raise a kid who is learning to own the faith he's being raised in for himself. Due to my own upbringing (which I may, or then again may not, write about another day), I have often felt like I'm stumbling through the dark when it comes to what it means to raise children in a Christian home. Last week's evidence is just the latest piece to suggest that I'm doing a good job after all. 

Trust me, it's not because I'm totally awesome and super spiritual. I give all the credit to God for this one.

In Which My Tween and My Teen Aren't as Responsible as Adults (But For Some Reason that Surprises Me)

News flash: 8 year olds and 14 year olds aren't adults. You would think I would know this, and I do of course in theory, but sometimes I still find myself expecting my kids to act like adults when it comes to their decision-making ability. That came up in different ways for both kids this week.

Though I've gotten better about not compulsively checking my Dexcom share app, I do still often take a peak shortly before her lunchtime and sometime in the afternoon (her lunch period, for some unfathomable reason, falls at 10:35am). When I checked before lunch her bg was coasting in the 80's, which is a totally awesome number to be at right before a meal. I figured she might actually stay in range for the whole school day, which isn't super common and would be totally awesome.

When I looked again shortly after noon, her bg was nearly 300 and still climbing. I could not for the life of me figure out how that could have happened. I'd allowed her to switch from greek yogurt tubes to gogurt tubes, which have a little more sugar. Could that have made such a big difference? We'd had an issue with a bad pump site a few days earlier. Could it have been happening again?

There was nothing I could do until I picked her up at 2:45. I checked her pump as soon as we left the building, intending to look through the history and try to figure out what happened before giving a correction. I didn't need to go that far, however, her pump was still on the "confirm bolus" screen from lunch, which means that she did not deliver any insulin for the lunch she ate.

To my credit, I learned a lesson after I reduced her to tears for not bolusing for her snack at Girls on the Run in the fall. I didn't get angry. I told her what I saw, explained that I was relieved there was such a simple explanation for her high blood sugar, then gave her a correction and sent her on her way.

Internally, however, I was pretty annoyed both that a) she forgot to complete a process she does EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. and b) the teacher didn't notice. When I reflected on it, though, I realized that it's actually expecting a lot to give my still relatively young child responsibility (even very part time) to take over for one of her organs that stopped doing part of its job. Under normal circumstances, kids without allergies can just eat without thinking about it. It's not as if she willfully sat down and ate her lunch without pulling out her insulin pump. She entered the information. She just forgot to deliver the insulin.

Diabetes, as much as I hate this fact, is a marathon, not a sprint. Barring a cure (which I don't think will happen until Kittygirl is a young adult, best case scenario), Kittygirl will have to deal with this disease her entire life, long after I'm done raising her and having at least some responsibility for her actions. My job is to teach her to manage her diabetes as well as I can, and to try to do so gently so as to either make burnout as a teen or young adult unlikely or something she has the tools to overcome.

In another venue altogether, Squirrelboy reminded us this week that he's still not completely responsible. Monday night he was caught using his phone in an unapproved way later at night than he's allowed to use his phone for anything other than listening to books before falling asleep. He wasn't accessing anything objectionable, but he was breaking hard and fast rules nonetheless, and the phone history showed it wasn't the first time.

Understandably, Mr. Engineer was pretty upset when he caught him. I was already in bed when it happened, but I heard about it in the morning. Squirrelboy had lost his phone for the day, and he came into the living room in the morning crying. I thought he was crying about losing the phone, but it turns out that what really upset him was that he had disappointed his dad and he was afraid Mr. Engineer would never trust him again.

I assured him that that wasn't the case, but he didn't stop being stressed and nervous until he and Mr. Engineer had had a talk about the incident after dinner. This reaction actually made me happy, because it shows we're doing a pretty good job as parents. If our teenager breaks a rule and his main cause of distress is having possibly lost his dad's trust, I call that a parenting win.

New rules have been set, including the phone charger being moved to our bedroom and the phone being plugged in to charge before bedtime and not moving until the morning. Perhaps we should have done this to begin with, but, as a general rule, we prefer to let our kids have a good amount of responsibility unless and until they show they aren't ready for it.

That applies to both diabetes responsibilities and general life responsibilities. Sometimes it turns out well. Other times it doesn't, but the way we react to those times (like, say, not freaking out about a high blood sugar caused by user error but rather using it as a teaching moment) has the potential to teach our kids a lot.

In Which It's Hard to Be the Best

I took a long break from blogging while traveling for the holidays, but now I'm back and I intend to start posting once or twice a week again. We'll see whether my goals to intentionally exercise and to devote time to writing my own fiction and being part of a critique group combined with my extra work because we're getting new carpet this month actually allow me to do so. At the least I'll be sure to carve out a regular time for blogging when the house is back in order sometime in February :).

On to today's subject. As you've probably picked up by now, Kittygirl's diabetes has not seemed to impact her schoolwork in the least. Ever since she started school, schoolwork has come relatively easily to her. She's not perfect at everything every time, but shes performs better in everything in elementary school than her brother did while expending less effort.

Don't take that last sentence above to mean Kittygirl doesn't care about school and is lazy. She loves school and always does her best work. The difference is that doing so isn't difficult for her in the way it is for her brother. He often takes at least three times longer to do his homework than his teachers intended for it to take, whereas it's not unusual for Kittygirl to complete her work in half the time the teacher thought it would take. Standardized tests were always really stressful for Squirrelboy and I remember both of us feeling stressed in his third grade year as he faced his first set of state tests. Kittygirl, on the other hand, is super excited about the tests coming up in the spring and wishes she could speed up time so she could go ahead and take them.

Kittygirl also excels in athletic endeavors more often than not. During the two seasons she played soccer, her coach said she was the best girl of her age he had ever coached. She was never the best in her ballet class, but she never struggled greatly to catch onto the steps either. She moved up to the intermediate class in gymnastics two months after starting in the beginning class.

For most of her life, most things have come really easily for Kittygirl. I have joked before that she got diabetes because otherwise parenting her would have been way too easy. However, this post isn't really about bragging on Kittygirl's great competence. It's about how that competence can actually be a weakness on occasion.

Every once in awhile, Kittygirl runs into something that actually challenges her. One example is the game Ticket to Ride, which Mr. Engineer loves to play and is very good at. Kittygirl has started playing it fairly often during the past six months. She's improving, but she's still not as good as her dad and she only sometimes equals her brother. This really bothers her. In fact, she'll sometimes throw a little fit and refuse to play because she "can never win." It doesn't occur to her that her skills are growing and she will eventually win a game, quite possibly in the near future. It just bothers her that she wasn't the best to begin with. The board below is a game my kids and one of their cousins played with Mr. Engineer on our Christmas travels. They all beat him, which is pretty astounding. However, Kittygirl was still upset because she didn't get first place and she "never wins anything," which is manifestly untrue.

Later during the same trip we went to a roller rink with cousins. The cousins have their own roller blades and are very good. Kittygirl has skated a few times at our local rink and is decent on regular skates, but she decided she wanted to rent roller blades to be like her cousins. It took her a long time before she was at all confident, and she hated it until the very end. She kept skating (or blading?) up and complaining about how horrible she was and how much faster everyone else was going. Pointing out that everyone else had probably been blading for more than an hour total in their lives did not help. She expected to be good right away. By the end she had gained a little confidence and she even asked for roller blades for her birthday, which is coming up at the end of the month.

I can't really blame Kittygirl for her expectations to be good at everything. She comes by them honestly. I'm a lot like that too. School was always super easy for me. I hated my sophomore honors English teacher for years because she had the audacity to give me B+ in the first quarter. I didn't have Kittygirl's natural athletic ability, but I did have her expectation to be good at the athletic endeavors I tried. That meant that I was frustrated when I did try sports and never put in the effort it would have taken me to be, if not excellent, at least decent. I eventually gave up on sports altogether. The exception was horseback riding, but I never had an interested in competing in that, so it didn't really matter if my seat wasn't perfect or I was terrified of jumps.

I've seen this tendency in myself as I've recently begun to take my writing seriously. I was critiquing someone else's novel manuscript and I expressed to Mr. Engineer that I was jealous because I didn't think I could write anything that good. He basically told me to get over myself and stop comparing my writing unfavorably to the writing of others, especially to the writing of other unpublished authors. As long as I know I'm doing my best work, it shouldn't matter if I think someone else's work is better. There's room in the world for a lot of different books.

And if, ultimately, my writing isn't good enough to be published (other than on this blog :)) or simply isn't the right style at the right time, that's okay too. My self worth doesn't need to be bound up in that. There are plenty of things I'm good at whether or not I ever have a novel on bookstore shelves.

 I've even seen the tendency to expect perfection crop up in Squirrelboy as he's gotten serious about his filmmaking endeavors. He critiques other students who don't understand as much as he does or who think making a film is easy. He also looks back at his own past efforts and heavily critiques them. I try to gently point out that a) not everyone cares about quality filmmaking in the same way he does and b) his past efforts aren't necessarily bad, their flaws just show how much he's grown.

What I need to remind myself of and impart to my kids is the fact that, just because some things are easy for us doesn't mean a) they're easy for everyone or b) every single thing we ever do will be easy for us. The fact is, lots of things in life take hard work, determination, and a lot of time to master. That's okay. That's actually good. Life would be pretty boring if we were automatically excellent at everything the first time. There would be no room to appreciate those who had mastered those things and there would be nothing to challenge us and compel us to work hard.

Keeping these things in sight will be useful to me both as I try to find my own way in the world and as I prepare my kids to do so.