An Octopus's Garden By the Sea

Sea Life Aquarium, Carlsbad, California

This summer we were meant to go to a water park. I'd cut a deal with the dear girl: if she attended a couple of computer animation workshops she could go to a water park. Water parks are her idea of summer heaven. I'm much less enthusiastic, especially after the wrenched toe incident of 2007 and a series of online reviews featuring human waste.

But still, a deal is a deal, and I was bracing myself for a day of sliding down inclines of various sorts in all kinds of questionable water.

Happily for me, we didn't wind up at a water park. Our girl, you know the one — the one who is described as inflexible and rigid — changed her plans. 

Here's how that happened.  

When we checked into our hotel in San Diego, our girl caught a glimpse of the siteseeing brochures that lined a case in the lobby.* One of them was for the La Jolla Caves Kayak Tour. We've missed kayaking on the Hudson this summer after the sewage treatment plant fire that leaked untreated waste into the river during the hottest days of July.

I took this hotel-lobby-brochure opportunity to introduce the kayaking possibility.

"Hey Sweet M, what would you think about going on a kayaking tour of underwater caves?

"Underwater caves?" she asked, with mounting excitement.

"Yes, underwater caves."

"Well," she said, "When you're in a new place it is important to see the sites."

"So you'd be game to go to the underwater caves instead of a waterpark?"

"Oh yeah, underwater caves sound good."

And that was that. A plan was changed. A deal was renegotiated. Our girl's longtime inflexibility is giving way to a willingness to try something new.

La Jolla Kayaking Tour at La Jolla Caves
 (photo: courtesy Yelp)

Her dad and I were a bit nervous about the kayaking tour. Her swimming skills are not great, and there was the matter of walking across the sand to the shore line since she still freaks out when her feet hit the sand. And then there was the hurdle of her making her way through the surf line out to the open water.

True to form, our girl started to freak out when her bare feet hit the sand

Ewwwwee.  It's sand.  It's scratchy.  Oh, NOOOO, there's an insect.  Did you see the insect?

Other people on the tour started to stare.

Fortunately, the folks at La Jolla Kayak were awesome. They put our girl in a kayak with Tommy, a seasoned former lifeguard, so she was in incredibly competent hands.

I told our girl to take some slow deep breaths because pretty soon her feet would be in the kayak and there would be no sand.

And that's what she did — she headed right out through the surf line with Tommy.  She was terrified, but she did it.  And once she was safely past the breaking waves, she was full of questions for the guides: what are these pink things on this kelp? (sea anenomes that attached to the kelp because the water has been so cold); are those sand sharks camouflaged? (yes); where are the sea lions? (it's too overcast for them to hang out on the rocks today).

We couldn't have been more proud of our inquisitive seafaring kayaking girl.

Pelly's Mini-Golf Course in Del Mar

The next day we hit Pelly's mini-golf course in Del Mar and the Octopus's Garden by the Sea exhibit at the Sea Life Aquarium in Carlsbad, which has my vote for best aquarium ever because it's just such a perfect scale for kids and families. They have all sorts of multisensory experiences: tide pools for petting starfish, tactile displays of shark skin, whale skin and eel skin, and the huge underwater tunnel with sharks and rays swimming above.

It was a perfect day of mini-golf and underwater creatures, sans water park slides and slimey waters.  Since that afternoon, I haven't been able to get the Beatles tune out of my head  . . .

I'd like to be, under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade
[. . .]

Oh what a joy for every girl and boy
Knowing they're happy and they're safe
We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden with you . . .
In an octopus' garden with you . . .
In an octopus' garden with you . . .

Our world may never be as safe and easygoing as Ringo Starr's Octopus' Garden in the shade, where no one tells us what to do.  And none of us will ever be as flexible as our octopus friends.  But I think I can say we're stretching every day.

*I was in San Diego for the Blogher 2011 Special Needs Mini Conference. More on that soon! 

Socially Appropriate Behavior 85% of the Time

Last night we heard a squeal coming from the bathroom -- sounded like a squeal of happiness, but we weren't certain, so I hollered, "Bunny, you alright?"

"Yeah," she called back, "I'm just thinking about Pokémon Black and White. It's a whole new Pokémon. It's so exciting."

The best advice from the world of self-help literature and poetry alike is "love what you love." Part of a poem by Mary Oliver ("Wild Geese") comes to mind:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

And our girl does. She loves what she loves: Pokémon, ice cream, Saturdays (because they mean no school and ice cream), Bar and Bat Mitzvahs (because all the kids dress up and have a party without the grown-ups and ice cream is often involved), Christmas (ornaments, cookies, gifts, and no school -- what could be better?), cute little dogs, her iPhone, snow days, any half-days at school, and summer vacation.

I wish Mary Oliver were right -- that all she has to do is love what she loves. So far it hasn't proven to be the case in every setting.

When she's at school she also has to "be good." Of course the language of an IEP doesn't say, "be good." It says something like "Increase her awareness of socially appropriate behavior and demonstrate this awareness 85% of the time."

Earlier this year there was a lot of socially inappropriate behavior at school. There was loud hand waving -- couldn't wait to be called on and still can't. There was crumbling up paper in frustration and grinding pencils into the desk until they broke. There was screaming and shouting that she had to have her turn. There was uncontrollable crying -- sobbing over not being called on, missing a turn, or any number of unfortunate and frequent classroom events.

Things were hard. Very hard. The doctor we adore who has seen her for years helped. We adjusted her medications. We implemented a behavior plan to help the teachers understand that the aforementioned behavior wasn't voluntary -- for some reason the fantasy of volition still has most people enthralled, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now we have our easier-going girl back, mostly, I think, thanks to the meds. She still raises her hand frantically to be called on. But she doesn't scream when it doesn't happen. And she squeals with delight about the premiere of a new Pokémon show. Whether that is socially appropriate for a 13-year-old girl we'll have to consider another day.