Right now I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of Homeschooling the Challenging Child by Christine Field to my door by UPS. Frankly, it cannot come fast enough.

A couple days ago the "challenges" with which we have dealt with on a daily basis from one of our children finally (again) reached a critical mass. Andy and I finally decided that maybe we would try removing dairy from this particular child's diet, and then gluten, to see if it made a difference, the way it is supposed to. As expected, getting this child to give up dairy products is a monumental struggle. I was trying to replace the dairy with soy, and then I found out that kids who are sensitive to dairy are 50-60% likely to be sensitive to soy as well. So there goes that idea.

I have a homeschooling friend whose son has many allergies and also a problem with attention and mood swings. She has been telling me what a difference removing allergenic foods from his diet has made in his overall attitude and concentration. We don't have problems with concentration in my house. We have the other problems. I've been thinking about this diet thing for a long time, but it has always sounded so hard (and I knew that my routine-based kid would fight dietary changes tooth and nail), that we decided to try practically everything else first. So... now we are trying to do the diet. And Child X is, predictably, fighting it tooth and nail.

And it is hard. And I am thinking we are going to have to try the no-casein/no-gluten thing to see if it makes a difference, and that is even harder than just trying to find subsitutes for yogurt smoothies and milk. Not, thank God, as hard as the Feingold Diet. I am not even thinking about the Feingold Diet at this point. I have a hard enough time putting hot dogs on the table some nights.

I'm hoping that the Christine Field book will be different than some of the other special needs books on the market, because it sounded different in the blurb on Powells.com. It sounded almost like a support manual, a been-there-done-that guide to life in the field. Except not so much a "guide". I don't like instruction books. I don't like books that tell me what to do and how to think. I like it when authors lay out their own experiences and what they've learned from those experiences instead of setting themselves up as "experts". I like a cozy feel to a book.

This is probably too much to expect from one book, but I've read a couple of Christine Field's other books (Life Skills for Kids, Help for the Harried Homeschooler) and enjoyed them, so I'm hoping that this book follows in that vein.

Or maybe I'm just going to have to write the book I'm looking for, who knows. But after I finish banging my head against chapter 5. I have an inner slacker that keeps wondering why I don't just leave it the way it is, but then my inner perfectionist gets all huffy, and -- anyway, it's not pretty. I did a paragraph or two today, typed in a scene yesterday, wrote 5 longhand pages on Saturday, but I tossed all but four.

Calgon, take me away!

(But, hey, tomorrow is another day ;-) The new version of Lone Star Stories goes live soon, and I have the pleasure of sharing a TOC with the likes of Sarah Prineas and Pam McNew. Now that's a shiny, happy feeling.)