dougwalk’s Neighborhood

Well, since my last blog regarding our annual town meeting here in Bethel, we have had two votes on the budget that haven't passed.  Each time the budget doesn't pass, the Board of Finance makes more cuts to the budgets which now total $933,000 cut from the Board of Education budget.
     After the town budget didn't pass last week, I went to the Board of Finance hoping to plead the case not to cut a ton more from the education budget.  Apparently at a "special session" public comments are not allowed, and I was not allowed to express my opinion when they decided to make the $415,000 dollar cut to the education budget that brought the total to $933,000.  And that I believe was when I got mad and decided this is ridiculous.
     So, it started with a letter to the editor of the regional paper, the Danbury News-Times.  In the letter I explained what the cuts so far to the town budget and the school budget mean. I also railed against the 70% of voters in town who didn't even show up to vote.
     There are two very frustrating things about this process.  First, if all the people who are against the budget, showed up at the first, or even the second budget meeting, they would have been able to pass the reductions they wanted and get the budget they wanted.  But what happens is that most of the anti-budget people don't show up, the parents who care show up and block proposed cuts, and then the vote fails and we do it all over again.
     Second, the First Selectman, Bob Burke, doesn't seem to want people to actually know what is going on and vote.  He actually told the Town Clerk not to purchase signs to let people know when the vote was.  I am not kidding!!!  The school Superintendent used the automated phone tree system for the school to let people know when the first budget was and all he has gotten for it is grief and accusations of the politics of it.  How about the town developing a system like that for the whole town, or even just put up signs.
     Needless to say, when we went to the town budget meeting last night I was prepared with a few comments for the board.  I honestly have never seen a meeting move so fast - which is really sad because we had a lot of new people at the meeting who didn't even understand the process of the town meeting.  When the moderator asked for discussion of the  town side of the  budget I  didn't even realize what they were talking about.  When I was  trying to figure out what they were asking for discussion for, someone moved to close the discussion  and move on.  I jumped up to speak and protested greatly that I should have the right to say my peace and ask my questions about the town budget.  I was shut down because I had not spoken up soon enough and they had moved on.  I was really mad!
     So, they moved onto the education budget and I got up and read my prepared statement  expressing my displeasure with the such a deep cut, as well as what decisions were made in the cuts in the actual budget.
As we are only allowed to cut things from the budget and not add to the budget, I really didn't have any motions to make, but at least I got to say what I was not allowed to say at the Board of Finance meeting.
      To understand how fast this meeting went and how confused people were, people who came in at 7:35 because their watches weren't synchronized to whatever clock the moderator was using completely missed discussion of the town side - and the meeting started at 7:30.  At one point during a vote, numerous people were asking what we were actually voting on. 
      When it came time to set a date for the vote, I once again, was the only one to stand up and make public comment.  (Am I the alter-ego of Billy Michaels, anti-tax guy? He wasn't there because of a gig.)  I thanked Lisa Bergh for prominently displaying the announcement of the Town meeting on the town website and then proceeded to let the Board of Selectmen know that it is not illegal for the town to promote as vigourously as possible that there is going to be a vote on July 1.  As long they as they are informing the public that there is a vote on the budget and not encouraging them to vote yes or no, they are just promoting good citizenship.
       After the meeting John and I were approached by many people to thank us for standing up and saying something.  The town clerk, Lisa Bergh, let me know that my pleas to promote the vote were not falling on deaf ears.  I also got cornered by the First Selectman, Bob Burke.  I will tell you, that conversation did not improve my opinion of the man.  He actually seemed more concerned that the Board of Education instituted pay-to-play sports than the fact that math, science and technology teachers.  He thinks they need to cut administrators.  Has he met teenagers these days?  I was rescued from him by a reporter from the News-Times who wanted to talk to me.  We were also invited to join a group of concerned parents down at the Putnam House restaurant to discuss how to get more people out to vote.  Oh, and before any of this happened, I was approached to help lead the PTO (PTA to Californians) at James' school in the fall (I'm already editor of the weekly newsletter for next year.)
     Where did all this political activism come from?  I blame Tim Russert - I loved watching him on Meet the Press.  Watching him got me interested in politics and it is so easy to get involved in a small town.  Go Bills!

Well, John and Iare now official New Englanders.  We have survived a full winter and our first town meeting.  Here in the towns of New England the town is run by a board of selectmen. The first selectman is kind of like the mayor, and then we have three other selectmen who also serve with him.  Many decisions are made by the board of selectmen, and the people of the town can go to their meetings and put their two cents in and call for motions and such things. But, one of the biggest things about living in a New England town that we vote on the annual budget.  Part of that is done at the annual town budget meeting.  So, last night John and I attended our first one here in Bethel.

We weren't really sure what to expect, but we really wanted to go.  So, months ago, I started trying to figure out when the annual meeting was.  I looked on the town meeting calendar - nothing.  I looked at the town charter and it said is would be during the first week of May.  Now, I thought maybe it would be Tuesday, since that is when the board of selectmen usually meet, but I still wasn't sure.  I e-mailed the town clerk. No response.  Then I discovered the minutes sections of the town website and pdf file with the notice of the town meeting saying it was Monday the 5th.  On Friday, I got an email from the school superintendent telling all the school parents about the meeting (it is in the superintendents interest to get school parents there to support the school budget).

Needless to say, I was a little annoyed by the lack of communication about the town meeting when we got there last night.  So, they read the notice telling us what we are going to discuss and vote on.  In Bethel, the town budget and the education budget are discussed and voted on separately.  This is the first year they have been separate items - they used to be combined in one vote.  The first to thing to discuss was the town budget. 

When they opened it up for comment the first person up was a man who, apparently, comes every year and says we are spending too much and our taxes are too high. (When we vote on the town budget, we are also basically voting to increase or lower (yeah, right) our property taxes.  After being told he couldn't discuss the education budget yet, he put forward a motion to remove a new position from the highway department which would cost the town $72,000. He also wanted it by secret ballot.  So, first we had to vote on whether to take the vote by secret ballot - that idea was soundly rejected.  Then the finance explained that the highway department had not had a new employee in 14 years when they lost 2 employees.  Then we stood to vote on whether the position should be cut.  The highway department got to keep their new employee.

Then someone got up and commented about the registrars, who had asked for a raise, not getting a raise of $3,000 each (totaling $6,000).  That ended up being mentioned a few times as people questioned just about every increase in the budget. 

After the registar comments I got up to have my say about the difficulty of finding out when the meeting was.  I mentioned that it took me half an hour searching on the town website to find it and that I had received  no response from the town clerk (who appears to be a nice woman by the way.)  The town clerk apologized and said she had never received the e-mail and blamed it on IT.I thanked her for her apology and said that if every person in town has to e-mail her to find out when the town meeting is going to be, she wouldn't be able to get her job done.  To that the first selectman turned to his collague and asked "It was posted in the paper,wasn't it?"  To which I responded, "I didn't realize my taxes included a subscription to the paper.  I haven't been getting that."  The he said that it had been posted on the board in the town hall.  So again I responded, "So, I have to take my two children to the town hall just to find out when the town meeting is?  All I am asking is that someone take the 15 minutes, and I've done this it only takes 15 minutes, to put on front page of the town website - Town Budget Meeting, May 5 at 7:30 at the Middle School."  To that,the people in the auditorium applauded and I sat down.  That was really fun.

We continued to discuss the town budget for most of the rest of the meeting, questioning every line.  My favorite was when they questioned the first selectman's raise.  There was a lot of comment, but no other motions on the town budget.  Then they moved on to the education budget.  I was actually surprised there was not more discussion, but the school budget only had an increase of 4%, and the largest increases were health insurance and fuel with no real new staff due to the fact that the board of selectmen and board of finance had already said the schools need to cut their proposed budget by $200,000 which will probably result in them not hiring 3.5 employees they wanted.  John asked how they got a significant decrease in one item of the education budget and what the change in enrollment would be.  The guy who likes to rail about the taxes and just cut the budgets did make a motion to cut the education budget by an additional $200,000, again by secret ballot.  The secret ballot was put down.  Now, on the motions, you vote by ayes or nays.  Normally you can tell by the sound which one passes.  So we voted on cutting the budget by $200,000 and the nays won.  But then, the ayes questioned how they determined that so we had to stand up for a head count. The ayes had like 12 people and the nays had the whole rest of the auditorium.  It was fun seeing the motion soundly quashed. 

Then we determined the date for the actual machine vote for the budget - May 20.  I then got up and requested that since it was a new date (Usually they would vote next week, but they have new machines so it will be the 20th), could they please post the new date clearly on the front page of the website.  Lisa (the town clerk) said she would have a sample of the ballot on the site. There were also requests for signs on the town square and such to let people know about the budget vote date.  I'm sure the superintendent will be sending out an e-mail about the new vote date to the school parents.

So, that was our town meeting.  It was actually fun!

Well, we went to the developmental pediatrician with Sam today and she does not think he has an Autism Spectrum Disorder.  She thinks that he has a language delay that is causing some delays in his social interactions because he has difficulty communicating and gets frustrated.  She said that if we don't see improvement in the next 6 - 8 months to come back and see her, but that we should take advantage of the extra services he qualifies through with birth to three without overloading him.  So, we will continue to work with his language skills (which we have been seeing a lotof improvement in in the last month) and keep an eye on his other areas of development.

Okay, okay!  I know it has been a while since there has been an update, so here it is.  Last time you tuned in I was singing the praises of the holiday eggnog latte.  We've been very busy since then.  So here it is.

In November, my papa passed away and all of us flew back to California for the week of Thanksgiving to spend time with family and friends and attend the memorial.  We flew back to Connecticut and were there for about 3 weeks before we flew back to California for our originally scheduled Christmas trip.  During that trip we took the train up to Klamath Falls to see John's parents.  We took a night train which was actually quite comfy and determined the train was really nice and we would definitely do it again.  Three days later we were in Reno to take the trainback, butthen ended up searching for a rental car.  The train was delayed by a storm so we ended up driving back to the Bay Area.  Maybe we won't take the train again.

We flew back to CT on New Years Day to finish enduring the cold winter.  Shortly after our return to to CT our world was turned topsy-turvy.  We figured out that me working was not actually helping us bring in any money and we were paying for me to work. Not much, but it certainly didn't make it worth 9 hours a day of day care for the boys.  So, I gave my two weeks notice.  About that same week, we went to see the pediatrician about some concerns and behavior issues we were having with James.  Armed with a note from his teacher with her observations, and questions of our own we talked with Dr. Cohen.  He said it was possible James was mildly autistic or had a PDD (pervasive developmental disorder), and referred us to a neurologist.

So, I just quit my job and now there might be something wrong with James.  So, my last day at work, I take the morning off to go with John and James to see this neurologist.  Then we wait for a month for the official report while we get him evaluated by the school district.  So, we get the report from the neurologist that says "shows signs of high functioning autism."  The school district testing and evaluating came to the conclusion that he is really smart and has some social issues that they will deal with when James comes for speech.  In the meantime, we had another appontment scheduled with a developmental pediatrician for a second opinion because we still felt like we didn't know if there was a problem really or not.  So, after a two hour session talking about the boys, James went on Friday for his evaluation.  He was totally himself and I think she got a really good picture of what he is like.  Her analysis of the situation?  He is gifted and big for his age.  He is within normal range, and while she could see how someone could possibly think he is autistic, she doesn't think so.  She thinks he just needs consistent, firm people around him and a little bit of extra explanation at times.  So, that is where we are with James.

In the meantime, Sam is growing like a weed.  He is as big as James was when he was 2 1/2 and he just turned 2.  In the midst of all this going on with James, I talked to Sam's birth-to-three provider Linda.  Linda is really great.  She comes to the house once a week and works with Sam on his speech and play skills.  As Linda kept working with Sam, and I kept researching autism in books and online at Autism Speaks  (they have a great video library showing red flags for autism vs. ordinary behavior), we started going through some  evaluation tools  for Sam.  We went through 3 different ones with the Birth-to-Three people and had a speech pathologist come out to evaluate him as well.  (By the way, in CT this all takes place with a monthly sliding scale fee of $70 a month for any services Sam needs, and they are so helpful.)  The result from Birth-to-Three?  The qualified on the last evaluation (the ADOS) for an education diagnosis of autism so he is now being transferred to their autism specific program and he qualifies for more services, like additional time for LInda to come over and work with him.  Educational diagnosis means that it is not a medical diagnosis of autism, but he is delayed in enough areas that he needs the extra services.  We have Sam's evaluation with the developmental pediatrician tomorrow, and then we will see if he has a medical diagnosis or not.  I can say that Sam is making progress since we started seeing Linda.  While he still loves anything to do with the alphabet (he can name all the letters and their sounds), he is expanding his choices of activities.  He loves playing with his cars, especially Lightning McQueen (kachow!) and with his dot paints.  His speech is really improving and he is beginning to use two word phrases and even the occasional short sentence.

Despite all these questions about the boys, the last few months have been really good.  In January, we also changed up things at our church.  We joined a new home group that is made up of us and 3 other couples and their kids.  The adults meet and talk, while the kids all run around, play and watch movies. We also switched from the Sunday night service (Core) to the Sunday 9:30 service now that Sam has outgrown the mid-morning nap.

I also started attending the women's Thursday morning group AM/FM (A Morning For Me) which has been really great with getting connected.  In March, I went on the church women's retreat which was really great.  They hold it at the Publick House in Massachussetts and it was really great despite a lot of rain.  Besides the speaking, my favorite part was one of Saturday afternoon elective activities - cake decorating!  We got to decorate our own cake to take home and bonded over frosting with another gal named Louise who signed up just so she could eat the frosting! That is my kind of gal.

We also introduced James and Sam to cross country skiing and snowshoeing this winter.  James loved it, Sam just wanted to sit and eat the snow.  Sam may be more into the snowshoeing next year though.

John is doing well at work. He carpools with a friends and oversees a team of 5 other guys.  He has yet to be sent to the Netherlands, but from what he has heard it is all work and no play, so he is okay with staying here for now. John also, built the boys a playground set for the backyard and they love it.  Sam LOVES the swing.  We put him in it and he says "Fun!"  James just loves to do anything outside - soccer, baseball, swing, slide, go on a safari.  Whatever as long as it is outside.

That's it.  All the news that fit to print!

Well, it is finally spring and people in the northeast are emerging from our winter hibernation.  Really, this isn't a joke.  The other night we sat out our neighbor's the Gonzales's back porch and talked for the first time since November.  It is nice to be out talking in the cul-de-sac in the evening with the neighbors as the kids run around.  Sam loves to ride around in his Big Red Car while James plays soccer or baseball with Peter.

The spring also means that I am now officially a soccer mom.  James had his first practice and game yesterday with the Bethel Youth Soccer.  He is in the rookie league for 4 1/2 to 6 year olds.  John is the assistant coach.  One of the first responsibilities as assistant coach is filling in when the head coach is not there - as John discovered this week.  John was a little nervous since the first week was rained out and he had never done anything with a soccer team before, but he did a great job filling in as head coach.  He even got one of the boys who didn't want to play to get out on the field.

James had an awesome time!  He loved it.  He paid attention and listened during the 45 minute drill time before the game.  As soon as the ball was loose in the game, he got it and ran with it for a goal.  Our proudest moment was actually when there were two other kids coming at him and HE PASSED THE BALL to one of his teammates!  He got knocked down a couple times (I think one of the other kids also plays hockey - he's got a good body check), but he got back in the game and had a lot of fun.

After the game he went to McD's for ice cream and then stopped by Target and picked up a soccer goal for the yard.  Now all he wants to do is play soccer!  It's awesome!

I was recently informed that it is officially Christmas season - at least at Starbucks!  Yes, that is right - the eggnog latte is back!  Upon learning this I packed up the boys and headed to my nearest Starbucks (which happens to be 5 miles away in the next town).  As I stood in line bouncing in joy and anticipation of one of favorite holiday treats (Complete in red cup), I amused the barista behind the counter.  Then, as I walked back to my car, it was snowing!  Not snow that sticks yet, but definitely the first snow of the season.  James was thrilled and couldn't wait to tell his teacher at school that it was snowing outside.  It didn't last long, just long enough for people to long for last winter when it didn't snow until February.  Me, I went to Target on my lunch and bought thermals and flannel sheets. 

Holiday_trio

Yesterday was a great day!  After a morning of puttering around the house and cleaning, we took the boys over to Blue Jay Orchards.  Only 5 minutes from our house, it is a local apple orchard where youcan pick your own apples.  Despite weather reports, it was a beautiful day and the boys loved it. 

Sam loves trees, so he really enjoyed getting a close look at the apple trees, and JAmes lvoed picking the apples right off the tree.  While walking through the orchard we enjoyed the breathtaking view of the leaves beginning to change colors on the surrounding hills. We love living in Connecticut - it is so beautiful! 

All we need now is our friends to come here too!

     Many people may think that there is not a lot to do in Bethel, CT, but every once in a while, we have some pretty fun stuff go on around here.  The current prime example, Oktoberfest at the Old Heidelberg Restaurant.  John and I frist ate at the Old Heidelberg when we came for our first weekend visit.  Our friend Sean came down from Boston and met us there.  We went there with no information about it - only that John and Sean found it online and thought German food sounded interesting.  It was terrific!  So, we are great fans of The Old Heidelberg.
     That said, when I drove by on my way to the grocery store Saturday and saw that this weekend was their Oktoberfest celebration, I thought "We must go!"  So, I got home at 3:00 from the grocery store,a nd called our faithful babysitter.  Luckily, she was available, so off we went.
      Due to Oktoberfest Celebration, the regular restaurant was closed and they had a large tent set up behind the restaurant.  John was quite excited to know that this was going to be an authentic experience.  We went in and got tickets for food and beer and got in line for the food.  (We could have just sat down and have a waitress serve us, but the line was short and we were already there.)  John got the pork shank and I got the Bratwurst platter.  Both were served with sauerkraut and German potato salad.  So far I had managed to go through life without eating any of these things, but last night I was truly adventurous.
    Then we got in the beer line.  They were serving 4 kinds of beer, but when you are at Oktoberfest, what other beer are you really going to have?  So, we got the Oktoberfest, which was very good.  We then proceeded to find a spot at the tables.  We arrived around 5:30 and the band was starting at 6:00, so we got there right before the rest of the crowd. An hour later, it was quite difficult to find open seats.
    John and I enjoyed the food and the beer, but the music really made the whole experience.  Before the band started they had recorded German songs being played.  I don't think there was any David Hasselhoff playing, but we had a lot of find trying to figure out what American songs they were covering in German.  The best was The City of New Orleans by Willie Nelson. 
    Then the band started.  It just made you want to start swinging your glass from side to side.  there was also a toast/cheer "Tiki Tocky, Tiki Tocky, Oi Oi Oi?"  Not sure of the significance, but you couldn't help but join in.  Other songs included were the chicken dance (John wouldn't let me join the kids, but was very entertained by me in my seat). the Hokey Pokey, and our favorite was the Sauerkraut Polka (much better in German that translatedinto English).  Unfortunately, John does not know how to polka, so we did not dance.  WE also learned from one of the band members that if you are a professional musician, one of the best bands ot be in is a polka band.  Very steady work!  Who would have thunk!
    Well, those were the highlights of Oktoberfest!  Next year, you will have to come visit and experience it yourself with us!
   

What was the last wedding you went to?  Were you in the wedding?

Michelle & Andy's wedding last April. Michelle is the daughter of some of our closest friends and it was wonderful time and no I was not in the wedding.