No, Honey They Are DIRections!

We have an ongoing project in the backyard. My husband is building a wooden play structure for the kids. We bought it for three hundred dollars below cost and it's brand new. It is also very involved and the instruction booklet has been essential. Frequently my husband has said "Where are my directions?" and we all search the house until we find the big 8 1/2" by 11" novella so he can continue his assembly. Once we only found the Spanish version, but he can speak and read Espanol, so that worked out okay.

It said that it would take 5-10 hours to build the play set, which I felt was a bad omen. If the instructions say that it will take twice as long as you expect, that's not a good sign. My husband had to alter a few things to get it to fit in the right location and added a few extra goodies, like a balance beam off to the side.

Now, for the good stuff. Our five year old knew the routine of helping find the DIRections for the play set, so that when he saw them laying on the counter, he got really excited. "Daddy, Daddy, I found your erections!" Oh, what a difference a few letters make!

Organic Ras"pppp"berries

My darling child used to use spitting as an attention getting device. Not "ptooey" but the raspberries of monumental proportions. He sometimes would fuel the spew with a swig of water to maximize the moisture impact. He was under five years old when this behavior was in practice and the most memorable distribution of a spit shower was in a Trader Joe's store in California. Enlightened people shop at stores like that. People who seek for freedom from dyes, pesticides and tyrannical grocery chains. They buy organic couscous and Tamari roasted almonds (love them!), soy cheese and tofu, sorbet and dark chocolate.

One unsuspecting customer got a free organic raspberry. Ben fueled it with a fresh chugging of water and aimed directly in her face as she approached us on the whole grains aisle. As the projectile precipitation hit her masterfully in the face she recoiled from the shock with closed eyes, flailing arms and a gasp of shock. I apologized profusely and high-tailed my children from the store with determined speed. It was mortifying. That poor lady probably had OPSD (organic produce spitting disorder) for months. I wouldn't be surprised if her therapist had to go shopping with her to help alleviate her trauma. Although I did avoid that store for a few months until I felt safe to return again, I have since decided that this was a hilarious moment in the life of parenting an Autistic child with a sense of humor all of his own.

Now that this behavior is being revisited, I am delving a little deeper to find the humor. Humor is like a seed, it needs to be nourished and cultivated so that it can grow and giggle. It wouldn't hurt to add a little water either, but only a little, and not on the whole grains aisle.




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Assault and "Buttery"

I know that there are all these warnings about the "terrible twos." I have four other children, so you would think that I would be a seasoned veteran by now. But, NO! This current terrorizing toddler is absolute hellfire! Just ask my neighbor who was helping clean up at my house after a church meeting.

We had a chef come and talk to our ladies group about using herbs and spices and he brought a variety of whipped herb butters for us to try. So my little guy decided to climb up and dip both of his hands in some whipped butter. When my sweet neighbor tried to get him out of it, he used his head like a battering ram and split her bottom lip clear open. She bled like a son of a gun and eventually cried. Later she said that it had made her feel nauseated and dizzy. I was a wee bit embarrassed that I hadn't thought to warn her about my son being a deadly weapon, but who knew that he was going to commit assault and "buttery" on her that night. She knew he threw temper tantrums, but not cranial attacks. Three days later, her lip still looked very painful.

He is using his head quite a bit lately for demolition and tantrums, which wouldn't be such a big deal if he didn't have the family blessing/curse of having a huge dome.

Oh the joys of child rearing! Never a dull moment.

All this talk of butter makes me want some toast. Strange how the brain works, isn't it?

The Sting of Laundry

I don't know what those construction guys were thinking when they built our laundry room, but they were not definitely not deep thinkers. We have a three car garage, operating on the theory that if you want one car to park in the garage, you get a double bay and two cars, you get a third bay. That is how real life works. Well, our builder must not add the third bay very often, because the finished product is a testimony of that ignorance. A typical ducting is run through the wall and outside with a minimum of turns to help prevent the lint from clogging. Logical, right? Our ducting runs into the wall, up the wall and outside through a vent on the ROOF of the third car garage! Hello, idiots! So our dryer is very inefficient due to the lame-brained confusing configuration of dumb ducting. True story.

We have purchased all of the necessary parts, hoses, clamps, etc., to reroute the ducting out of the house on the ground level. We have left all of those components in the trunk of the car in the hopes that the repair will complete itself. Not a very good plan, but that is how it works with five kids, a husband in full-time college and my oldest son gone 15+ hours a week for football. Did I mention that I work three nights a week? I was bored and needed a job to keep me busy (yeah, right).

Benjamin has also been wetting the bed every morning for over two weeks to make sure that the laundry room has a constant workload. I have been using the inefficient dryer along with my solar clothes dryer. That is fancy wording for "clothesline." I started using a clothesline when we lived in California during the "Gray outs" when electricity costs were sky high, so I have some experience.

I had a load on the line for two days. It got wet with the sprinklers in the morning, so I left it on. Then it got wet with the evening sprinklers, and left on again. This morning, I took off what was dry and put washed bedding out. I remembered to bring everything in in the afternoon, but didn't get around to folding until after 10:30 p.m. As I was turning an orange shirt right-side-out, my knuckle got an instant stinging feeling and I yanked back my hand. I couldn't think of why my hand would start hurting like that, then I figured it out. My hand got stung three times last year and my back had two stings the year before that. I threw the shirt on the ground and a hornet fell out. Then it saw a blur of tread and was nearly dead. Payback is a #@!$^*! as they say. I put its mostly squashed body outside and walked away from the laundry for a while.

Washing clothes is a love/hate relationship. I love being a good provider for my family, but the constant workload is intense. Having a hornet sting my knuckle while folding clothes at the sacrifice of my sacred sleep is just adding insult to injury, not a good equation. Stupid bug. Tomorrow when I go out to work in the backyard, I think that I will step on it again.

Birthday Boy

My son Ben is ten years old now. It seems like only yesterday that he was a little "alien" in an ultrasound photo. Now he has been a prisoner in his own mind for a whole decade.

He is getting too big for us to handle on our own. We are facing some very big decisions for his future and ours. If I had one wish, one dream to be fulfilled as I blew out candles on a cake...it would be this: That a key could be found to unlock that mental barrier. Better yet, that I could use a battering ram to vanquish useless synapses. I wish that I knew how to do...anything, anything at all to help him. It seems like a losing battle, but one that can't be lost for his sake, for our sakes.

I have hope and hopelessness. I have anger and sadness, regret and resolve. I have mixed emotions, to say the least.

Tomorrow is a new day, not a birthday, but a regular day. One more 24 hour time period to survive. That is what we are doing now, surviving, with style.




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Cyber Distaste

I saw a T.V. segment about a woman's blog that brings in $40k a week. She has huge sponsors like McDonald's, WalMart and Target. Curiosity piqued, I checked out her blog. The first few I read were ordinary and docile with a photo of her baby girl and a couple of lines. I read one about breastfeeding vs. formula that made me laugh out loud and sent it to my sister.

After that email, I read a few more and found vulgar comments and foul language that made me regretful that I had sent my innocent little sister to pollute her mind in cyber distaste. So here is my point...why the language lady? Don't people know how much the "f" word cheapens them? Yeah, so you are just speaking your mind, not caring what other people think, blah, blah, blah. I think that it takes a keen intellect to be able to express yourself in descriptions, analogies, humor, and colorful storytelling. On the other hand, I think that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can spew out cuss words and vulgarities. They teach potty mouth early on in every public school education, but that doesn't make it a good thing to learn.

I remember when Bill Cosby was in the news criticizing his African-American counterparts who spoke "Ebonics." He said that it took them back hundreds of years to when his people weren't well educated. In essence, it devalued all of the progress that they have made toward equality. That is a tragedy. How we speak, carry ourselves and present our ideas to others, adds or detracts from our perceived intelligence. If the President started a speech with "Yo, homey! How's it hangin'?" his authority would definitely be questioned. (Not that we shouldn't question him A LOT anyway!).

So McDonald's, what are you doing putting your endorsement on a blog that encourages the degradation of intelligence and promotion of foul lanquage and vulgar comments? Wally World, are you discounting your standards as well as your products? Why don't you be a no-vice leader as well as a low price leader? And Target, I think that you really missed the mark on this one! Think again people, in Nice vs. Vice, vote for good, the way that you always should. Now play nice!

I think that Wendy's and Kmart will be getting my business for a while.

"Veggies" Rot Your Brain

I know that every pyramid put out by the government tells us to eat plenty of vegetables to help us be healthy, but when can a good thing become too much of a good thing? When veggies get their own video series that your autistic son watches over and over adnauseam (that means it makes me sick!). My four year old yells "Not Veggie Tales! I want Thomas!!!" Or, heaven forbid, how about just leaving the T.V. on PBS? While I am wishing out loud, dreaming the impossible dream and planning how to spend my lottery winnings, how about some grown up television? Once upon a time, I remember watching shows with plots and dialogue, complex relationships and characters with arms and legs. Now I watch singing and dancing limbless legumes and articulate asparagus' (Asparagui or asparagusses?, see what I mean? My brain is gone). Is there any escape?

We try letting the other children watch their shows on a different T.V. or on the computer, but Ben is master of all. If it is in his realm, he dictates what is being viewed. How, you ask? Simply by stalking close by, waiting for a moment of weakness or a breach in security, then making his move. It is the same technique that he uses for stealing other people's food. I can't stand guard all of the time. I guard the T.V. for Wheel of Fortune occasionally, but it is exhausting to keep up that level of security for all viewing.

This persistance is why we are on our seventh DVD/VCR player, because he won't leave them alone. We also just spent a nice chunk of money repairing our portable DVD player and the small, yet sturdy, T.V./DVD combo that has been dragged down the stairs twice by its cord. It has such a strong will to live, that we just had to fix it. Plus, it was half the cost of replacing it. We just monitor how many movies that he has access to because apparently three at a time is just too many. We keep one player downstairs locked in a cabinet and the portable in the locked kitchen cupboard that I call the "forbidden cupboard." The combo one is upstairs in our always locked bedroom, so occasionally he can be upstairs with Dad and the rest of us can access the electronics.

I know that he will grow out of this stage like he did the Teletubbies, Blue's Clues and Disney CARS obsessions, but I'm ready to move on now! Those Veggies are rotting my brain!



http://www.flickr.com/photos/stickerart/3623387716/ Picture source