At one time, when I was very, very sick, my sons would ask me about forty times a day "How do you feel?" At some point I began snarkily replying "I am going to start a website in both German and Spanish with my hourly, minutely updates on HOW I FEEL so that all this angsting will at least be educational."
We were homeschooling and one was studying German and the other was studying Spanish.
In addition to not really knowing any Spanish, the main joke there is I had zero technical proficiency for following through on that threat. It was ridiculous to think I would EVER start a website, and never mind that twenty some-odd years later I have a zillion of them.
Snarkily threatening to start a website did quickly break them of bleeding me for what little energy I had by asking me how I felt FORTY times a day because being extremely sarcastic convinced them "Mom is back to her old self! She will probably LIVE!" so it calmed them down and got them off my back.
Suffice it to say I never planned to become a blogger. The idea that I would ever run a website was ridiculous, so ridiculous my socially-challenged children could tell that was sarcasm.
My writing began being published online due to interest in my writing from other parents on a homeschooling list where I was active at the time. In fact, my first website wasn't mine at all.
It was a sub-site on the business site of my best friend. She was a Canadian lady who sold homeschooling products for twice exceptional kids and she liked one of my emails to TAGMAX so much she asked if she could publish it on her site.
When she could no longer keep up with updating my sub-site, she gifted it to me. I started my first site with HTML formatting she gifted to me and some technical help from my husband who was double majoring in History and Computer Science, so he was able to explain to me what in the heck FTP meant when it was time to migrate my site from her control to my own.
In spite of that backstory, my first site was not entirely focused on parenting and homeschooling. It was this weird amalgamation of MY interests, including parenting, homeschooling and urban planning -- because those go so well together on a website. Yah.
I really had NO idea what I was doing with regards to developing a website. I didn't even yet know any HTML and had put no real thought into the URL.
I had an email address of califmichele something something. It came with a free website under the same handle as my email address or maybe I bought the .com version of that or maybe both.
This was a super bad idea in part because it's hard to convey verbally. I also decided that although calif was short for California, I was risking the possibility that someone might mistake it for Khalif and have a big issue with that because I'm a woman and Khalifs are always male.
So I began becoming concerned that if I ever got any serious interest in my writing, this could go sideways in ways that I absolutely did not wish to deal with. Before picking a new URL, I actually did some research and brainstorming and tried to learn how to pick a decent name and URL for a site.
When I stopped having califmichele.com or whatever, I developed a site solely devoted to parenting and homeschooling topics called Kids Like Mine. Those are real words, easily conveyed verbally and did not have me having visions of religious types wanting my head on a platter.
The phrase Kids Like Mine came from my emails posted to the gifted homeschooler's list TAGMAX. My sons were never formally diagnosed as having Asperger's, but I was giving a lot of feedback to parents with kids with such diagnoses and remarking routinely on the similarities between their kids and mine and saying things like "kids like mine, who have sensory issues/whatever, benefit from...."
Both of my sons were what my aforementioned Canadian best friend politely called challenging children. One was assessed in kindergarten for ADHD and found to have "some sort of attention span issue, though not ADHD" and the other was one of five difficult children in his kindergarten class that qualified the class for a part-time aide to help the teacher cope.
This same friend once told me that kids like mine were fairly often beaten because their parents don't know how to cope with them. This shocked me and really made an impression on me.
I couldn't imagine beating my kids, even though I sometimes went and threw myself on my bed and had a good cry because I was at wit's end with them. But I'm the parent, so it's MY JOB to figure out how to handle it -- whatever it is -- and to do so humanely because abusing kids is not a best practice for raising future adults.
So this idea of me writing to help other parents deal with their challenging children -- because there seem to be inadequate resources for parents of twice exceptional kids and people were looking to me as some kind of "expert" back in the day -- goes back more than twenty years and persists in part because my best friend told me such kids are fairly often beaten.
Our children are our future. Children who are abused tend to not grow up to be flourishing contributing citizens meeting their full potential.
Instead, they tend to end up wasting a lot of time and energy on trying to fix what went wrong with their lives. If we want a better future, we need to do a better job with raising our children and that means parents with difficult kids need better information on how to best cope with children who have enormous potential, because they are gifted, yet who are often themselves enormously frustrated and tend to frustrate the people around them.
When my kids were growing up, we were a military family and I was a full-time wife and mom. After a brief stint in public school, which tended to not know how to cope with my kids, I pulled them both out to homeschool them.
As a consequence, for a time I did pro bono professional work for The TAG Project. I volunteered to be a moderator and after six weeks I was asked if I would become the lead moderator and a member of the board under the title Director of Community Life, an offer I accepted after thinking about it for a week or two.
When I was raising my sons, cell phones were relatively rare and the internet was "in its infancy." Social media was not a thing like it is now and most adults did not have cell phones, much less kids, so some of the parenting challenges that are going on today were not a part of my parenting experience.
Both of my sons were kind of hell on wheels because they are both twice exceptional. They received official labels through various channels for some things, like dysgraphia, but they have a lot of other issues that were never officially diagnosed.
Because I homeschooled them, I did not seek formal diagnoses for a lot of their issues because I simply did not need them. If your special-needs child is in school, you need official labels from proper authorities to put in their IEP (Individualized Education Program) in order to get accommodation for their needs, but if you homeschool, you can choose to be kind and supportive to your child just because you FEEL LIKE IT.
I took my parenting responsibilities very seriously. I took a series of free classes provided by one of the schools my oldest attended to help me better deal with him and for a time I ran an email list for discussing how neurological issues impact life in practical terms, as well as in terms of identity for the person experiencing such.
But, no, I don't have "professional" credentials for giving anyone parenting and homeschooling advice. I don't have a college degree in education or psychology or some such. Except for homeschooling my kids, which made me a teacher for a two-student private school under California law, I never worked professionally as an educator. Etc.
At one time, I knew the author of Hoagies' Gifted Education Page and I used to exchange emails with someone who was working at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and was acquainted with the authors of more than one homeschooling book. But life got in the way, I didn't keep in touch with those folks and, basically, I have no (formal) "credentials," no contacts anymore in that world and no one to vouch for me.
If you like some of my writing about parenting and homeschooling, coolios. Take what works for you and leave the rest (as we used to say on TAGMAX back in the day).
We were homeschooling and one was studying German and the other was studying Spanish.
In addition to not really knowing any Spanish, the main joke there is I had zero technical proficiency for following through on that threat. It was ridiculous to think I would EVER start a website, and never mind that twenty some-odd years later I have a zillion of them.
Snarkily threatening to start a website did quickly break them of bleeding me for what little energy I had by asking me how I felt FORTY times a day because being extremely sarcastic convinced them "Mom is back to her old self! She will probably LIVE!" so it calmed them down and got them off my back.
Suffice it to say I never planned to become a blogger. The idea that I would ever run a website was ridiculous, so ridiculous my socially-challenged children could tell that was sarcasm.
My writing began being published online due to interest in my writing from other parents on a homeschooling list where I was active at the time. In fact, my first website wasn't mine at all.
It was a sub-site on the business site of my best friend. She was a Canadian lady who sold homeschooling products for twice exceptional kids and she liked one of my emails to TAGMAX so much she asked if she could publish it on her site.
When she could no longer keep up with updating my sub-site, she gifted it to me. I started my first site with HTML formatting she gifted to me and some technical help from my husband who was double majoring in History and Computer Science, so he was able to explain to me what in the heck FTP meant when it was time to migrate my site from her control to my own.
In spite of that backstory, my first site was not entirely focused on parenting and homeschooling. It was this weird amalgamation of MY interests, including parenting, homeschooling and urban planning -- because those go so well together on a website. Yah.
I really had NO idea what I was doing with regards to developing a website. I didn't even yet know any HTML and had put no real thought into the URL.
I had an email address of califmichele something something. It came with a free website under the same handle as my email address or maybe I bought the .com version of that or maybe both.
This was a super bad idea in part because it's hard to convey verbally. I also decided that although calif was short for California, I was risking the possibility that someone might mistake it for Khalif and have a big issue with that because I'm a woman and Khalifs are always male.
So I began becoming concerned that if I ever got any serious interest in my writing, this could go sideways in ways that I absolutely did not wish to deal with. Before picking a new URL, I actually did some research and brainstorming and tried to learn how to pick a decent name and URL for a site.
When I stopped having califmichele.com or whatever, I developed a site solely devoted to parenting and homeschooling topics called Kids Like Mine. Those are real words, easily conveyed verbally and did not have me having visions of religious types wanting my head on a platter.
The phrase Kids Like Mine came from my emails posted to the gifted homeschooler's list TAGMAX. My sons were never formally diagnosed as having Asperger's, but I was giving a lot of feedback to parents with kids with such diagnoses and remarking routinely on the similarities between their kids and mine and saying things like "kids like mine, who have sensory issues/whatever, benefit from...."
Both of my sons were what my aforementioned Canadian best friend politely called challenging children. One was assessed in kindergarten for ADHD and found to have "some sort of attention span issue, though not ADHD" and the other was one of five difficult children in his kindergarten class that qualified the class for a part-time aide to help the teacher cope.
This same friend once told me that kids like mine were fairly often beaten because their parents don't know how to cope with them. This shocked me and really made an impression on me.
I couldn't imagine beating my kids, even though I sometimes went and threw myself on my bed and had a good cry because I was at wit's end with them. But I'm the parent, so it's MY JOB to figure out how to handle it -- whatever it is -- and to do so humanely because abusing kids is not a best practice for raising future adults.
So this idea of me writing to help other parents deal with their challenging children -- because there seem to be inadequate resources for parents of twice exceptional kids and people were looking to me as some kind of "expert" back in the day -- goes back more than twenty years and persists in part because my best friend told me such kids are fairly often beaten.
Our children are our future. Children who are abused tend to not grow up to be flourishing contributing citizens meeting their full potential.
Instead, they tend to end up wasting a lot of time and energy on trying to fix what went wrong with their lives. If we want a better future, we need to do a better job with raising our children and that means parents with difficult kids need better information on how to best cope with children who have enormous potential, because they are gifted, yet who are often themselves enormously frustrated and tend to frustrate the people around them.
When my kids were growing up, we were a military family and I was a full-time wife and mom. After a brief stint in public school, which tended to not know how to cope with my kids, I pulled them both out to homeschool them.
As a consequence, for a time I did pro bono professional work for The TAG Project. I volunteered to be a moderator and after six weeks I was asked if I would become the lead moderator and a member of the board under the title Director of Community Life, an offer I accepted after thinking about it for a week or two.
When I was raising my sons, cell phones were relatively rare and the internet was "in its infancy." Social media was not a thing like it is now and most adults did not have cell phones, much less kids, so some of the parenting challenges that are going on today were not a part of my parenting experience.
Both of my sons were kind of hell on wheels because they are both twice exceptional. They received official labels through various channels for some things, like dysgraphia, but they have a lot of other issues that were never officially diagnosed.
Because I homeschooled them, I did not seek formal diagnoses for a lot of their issues because I simply did not need them. If your special-needs child is in school, you need official labels from proper authorities to put in their IEP (Individualized Education Program) in order to get accommodation for their needs, but if you homeschool, you can choose to be kind and supportive to your child just because you FEEL LIKE IT.
All's fair in love and war. And this is love. -- Me, when changing the rules on board games to make my kids happyAs a military family, we also had some additional challenges. Among other things, we moved a lot and my husband was often simply elsewhere for long stretches. When he was home, he typically worked very long hours, so I was largely on my own with the kids much of the time.
I took my parenting responsibilities very seriously. I took a series of free classes provided by one of the schools my oldest attended to help me better deal with him and for a time I ran an email list for discussing how neurological issues impact life in practical terms, as well as in terms of identity for the person experiencing such.
But, no, I don't have "professional" credentials for giving anyone parenting and homeschooling advice. I don't have a college degree in education or psychology or some such. Except for homeschooling my kids, which made me a teacher for a two-student private school under California law, I never worked professionally as an educator. Etc.
At one time, I knew the author of Hoagies' Gifted Education Page and I used to exchange emails with someone who was working at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and was acquainted with the authors of more than one homeschooling book. But life got in the way, I didn't keep in touch with those folks and, basically, I have no (formal) "credentials," no contacts anymore in that world and no one to vouch for me.
If you like some of my writing about parenting and homeschooling, coolios. Take what works for you and leave the rest (as we used to say on TAGMAX back in the day).