halitosis

today we were reading a science book for school about bad smells. i know, i've talked a lot lately about stuff we're doing for school, but people, i don't get out much these days. i spend my life at home with a kid so all i've got most of the time to spark my creative juices is the stuff i teach to brooke.

ahem, where was i? ah, yes. stinky things. there was discussion of bad breath and the things that cause it. the word halitosis was mentioned. and that's when i went spiraling back in time. 

about 4 years ago when brooke was 5, she went to the little gym for the gymnastic classes. it's a wonderful place that i highly recommend if your kid is clumsy or nervous and you're not trying to get into a competitive sport. the teachers were all incredibly patient with brooke as she spent her first several classes hiding under equipment crying and avoiding every activity. it was a new atmosphere for her and very structured which she also wasn't used to. she was only 4 when she started, but after a few weeks, she started to like it and eventually she participated in almost everything. 

early on in our little gym experience, brooke was still afraid of the high bar that the kids could use with an adult assistant if they felt up to it. the coaches never pushed them to do anything that scared them, but would give them the chance each week to see if they were ready to try. one day a teacher asked brooke if she could pick her up and let her just touch the high bar with her finger. i didn't see it happen, but brooke told me later that she bit that lady's long leg like she was a hyena and the teacher was her attacker. she said she felt afraid and had to defend herself. the teacher didn't even mention it, so it must not have been a very hard bite, but i was just thankful they still let her come back.

one day after class, the owner/head coach came to me and quietly whispered in my ear, "i was helping brooke with something and she was nervous, so i leaned in close to talk to her about it. she said, 'smells like someone has halitosis today'." i know my head turned several shades of red, but i couldn't help laughing. we'd been doing some great vocabulary lessons and clearly they were sticking!

at the end of each 20 week session there was always an awards show where the parents could come in & observe the kids' skills and watch them get a medal on a ribbon. brooke was called last to go up on the little foam platform to get her medal. each other kid had walked up the steps and received their prize like a little olympian. but not brooke. when she heard her name, she dropped down on her hands and knees and ran/crawled across the floor, up the steps and to the middle of the platform and posed on her knees with her chin held high and one hand/paw up in front of her. we'd been watching the AKC championships and she was posing in poodle style to claim her award.

she went through several award ceremonies and for almost every one she did the crawling doggy thing again. and i heard from some of the teachers that it had spread and some kids even in other classes had started doing it too.

my little aspie trendsetter with her boundless creativity and imagination. she makes my heart happy.

napoleon the funky

my husband is gone for the night. it's work related and only for a day, but i woke up this morning and thought, "i'm going to be a slob and not take a shower today because my man isn't here to notice."

i've felt like i was being rather slovenly, but then i remembered something i read a while ago. supposedly, when napoleon was off at war, he sent his lady josephine a message telling her not to bathe for two weeks prior to his return. thinking about that today led me to do a little internet research and there's speculation if he actually said two weeks or three days, but most sources i found said two weeks.

this troubles me. i had to talk myself into NOT showering for one day and i will certainly be clean and pristine before i see my fella tomorrow, even if there's no hanky panky on our agenda.

i'm assuming that napoleon was coming home from his warring, feeling powerful and frisky. and maybe powerfully frisky, depending on how long he'd been gone and how many whores he'd visited while he was away. i can't imagine wanting to get up close and personal to anyone when i was dirty and.... ripe. because i don't care who you are, you will be smelling all kinds of funky by the time 2 weeks of non-bathing has gone past.

we recently read in a book on american history that people used to think that bathing was dangerous and avoided it most of the time. they typically took only a couple baths a year. did you catch that? two a YEAR, people! can you imagine how bad they smelled? they didn't have air conditioning or sanitary toileting facilities either, so their rears had to have been smellable from across the room. or the field for that matter!

and these people often slept several to a room. they didn't have the space or money to have large, spread out houses, so oftentimes, kids slept in their parents' bedroom. and it wasn't unusual for a family to have ten kids.

it makes my eyes bug out a little bit to think about going for 6 months without a bath and sleeping in a bed with a man who's been working the fields day in and day out and who's also been many months without getting intimate with a bar of soap.

now imagine that you are part of that couple, that dirty, odoriferous couple. it's summer and you're lying in bed after a long day of sewing garments by hand for your 9 kids. you've cooked several meals over a big open pot on a fire and you've killed and plucked a couple chickens. you've been inside a house with no electricity or water or even a door or screens to keep the bugs out all day.

you've been nursing infants for nearly 12 years straight. your boobs no longer resemble the breasts that we currently think of in america, but more closely mimic the ones we see in national geographic where they hang straight down with the long, uninspiring nipple distended and pointing at your feet when you stand up. when you lie down, your teets slide off into your sticky, hairy armpits. there's a pungent scent of old yeast and sour milk wafting up from the breasty region.

you're lying in your bed of grass. it's been covered with a sheet that you air out every week or so, but it's filled none-the-less with old hay. if you lay your ear directly on the mattress, you can hear the bugs crawling around under your bodies inside the hay. you can hear your children breathing in various locations around the room. one's in your dresser drawer bedded down on your grandma's old shawl. two are on a blanket on the floor beside you within arm's reach.

neither of you owns a tooth brush. you pick and scrape at your teeth from time to time with a stick that you've widdled to a point, but toothpaste isn't something you even know about.

can you picture the scene? are you with me?

okay, now close your eyes and tell me how you feel..... is the answer HORNY? i know that scientifically there would be a large build up of pheromones that are supposedly a turn on, but i suspect the other factors would counter the alleged attraction. i'm positive that the very last thing in the world that i can think of when i'm putting myself mentally in that situation is wanting to bump uglies when both myself and my husband are both big sweating stench bags. there would have to be a line of demarcation down the center of that buggy grass bed until such time as a bath could be procured for the both of us.

it's amazing to me that families were so large at that time. clearly, current american standards for cleanliness have affected my mindset on this matter, but it seems that even if that weren't present, surely my nose would protest close contact on a hot summer's night.

much like my appreciation of toilet paper from a couple posts ago, i am now voicing my appreciation of soap. and running water. and razors to scrape off all that armpit and leg hair. thank you, Jesus that i live in the year 2012 in the current conditions and standards for bathing.

never take for granted...

i bet from the title, you were thinking i was going to go deep on this post. talk about never taking our loved ones or our health for granted. you thought wrong, my friend. my last post had some depth, so i couldn't go there again so soon.

no, what i'm talking about today is toilet paper. i got a book out of the kids science section about the history and workings of toilets (i love the library and the gems i find there).

here's a picture i took of a page in the book that left me with my mouth in a cringe and my eyebrows in a pinch.

in case you can't read it clearly, let me point out a few pertinent bits. "Ancient Romans used a sponge on the end of a stick to clean up after using the toilet." this seemed all right to me initially. a sponge is soft and wet. okay, the romans had a good idea there other than the fact that they had a room filled with toilet holes all in a U shape so several people could go at once while looking at each other.

but the next line stopped me in my sponge-happy tracks. "When finished, they put the sponge in a pail full of water so that the next person could use it."

great googly moogly..... this is NOT okay! they shared a poop sponge?!! not so bad if you're the first guy with a fresh sponge, but something tells me it didn't get changed too often. and i know how gross a kitchen sponge gets after a few days, so i can only imagine how vile a community hiney sponge would be after a few days on booty duty!

the next line that had me making faces was, "Some used stones, sand, or seashells to scrape themselves clean."

a rock? did they hunt about for the perfect butt scraping rock and then keep it for using over and over? or did they just grab up any ole rock they could reach while squatting and just jam it back there and try to knock off the big bits? would a rounded or jagged rock work more effectively?

and i don't know about you, but when i'm at the beach and get sand in my suit, i pretty much just rip my suit to the side and try to shake, swipe or rinse it out with little regard for who's about because i cannot STAND how it feels! imagine using sand as a wipe! i've heard of using sand to wash dishes in a pinch, but never your crack. Ick!

the worst part in that sentence might be the seashell. i was just at the beach a couple months ago and i collected and examined a lot of different types of shells, so when i read this, i did a mental inventory of the shapes, sizes and textures of various shells, trying to figure out which seemed the most wipe-like for bum scrape-age.
this one seems somewhat manageable, i guess. you could use one side for scooping and the other side for buffing after the scrape was completed.

and i would definitely avoid this next shell, even if it was the only thing readily at hand. because, wowie zowie, i don't think anyone's rump could handle that.

this book made me very grateful for the lovely and delicate luxury that i've always taken for granted. oh blessed, glorious toilet paper, you are so precious to me. and your cousin, the moist, flushable wipe, is a gift to the behinds of this century. i will never take either of you for granted again. amen.

big cat quilt week

whenever it's getting close to time for a big holiday or the end of the school year, kids tend to get twitchy and have a hard time concentrating on school work. it's almost a losing battle to try to do anything that will require serious brain activity, so i decided that this week, our last school year of 2011, we would spend the week learning about big cats. national geographic has a channel that's all animal shows all the time and this week their theme is big cats, so that was my inspiration. i knew brooke would love it and it was the perfect way to spring board us into a short unit study about a topic that won't be difficult to keep her engaged in. we cleared the shelf in the library for all their big cat books, we've been watching lots of educational shows and we've been making christmas presents for our people.

this was also a good way for me to have enough time sitting still when i wasn't exhausted or straining my eyes for hours in the evenings to work on some of the projects that i've got going for gifts. the big one that i just finished yesterday is a quilt i made for my niece's american girl doll. since i can't spend much money this year, i've been finding things i could give that were free or almost free and this was the perfect thing.

i dug through my baskets of fabric for scraps and pieces that color coordinated and then cut enough squares to make a little blanket just big enough for the doll. i took some pictures of the process from start to finish.

this thing is made out of an old pair of jeans, a skirt, a dress, old pajamas, remnant bin scraps from hobby lobby, bits from my mom's sewing basket, 2 receiving blankets and a piece of fabric that i rescued from the trash in a house i used to clean.

as you can see, i did some ironing to flatten seams, but i couldn't be bothered to get out a real iron, so i just used my curling iron. this is the perfect tool for ironing other little things like collars and the front line along the buttons on a button down shirt too.

i'm very happy with the end result. i did every stitch by hand, most of them sewn while sitting on my floor in front of the tv or while curled in a corner of the couch.

i kind of wish brooke liked stuff like this so that i could give it to her in order to see it more often, but she really just doesn't give a crap. she looks at dolls the way most little girls look at giant rubber spiders. she admired the quilt but reminded me not to get any funny ideas about giving to her because she didn't want it.

hopefully it will be well received by another little girl who loves all things girlie and pretty. now i just need to get it wrapped before one of my cats claims it and decides to curl up for a long winter's nap.

schooling outside the box

sometimes homeschooling is great and i don't hate it at all. there are certainly days when i want to shuck that kid off to school & pass her aspie issues to someone else so i can have a break, but so far this school year, we're doing quite well. i've made a lot of changes in how i structure our days and it seems to be working nicely for the brookster. i'm more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person, but she's not & since it's her education we're working on here, i need to be more flexible in accomodating her need for a schedule.

we've had great sucess in keeping the cats close at hand for intermittent "kitty therapy" when brooke starts to feel overwhelmed. it helps to defuse volatile school situations when she can dig her fingers into some warm kitty fur for a minute.

though, sometimes, the cats can be more of a distraction than a help...

i was trying to help her understand fractions a couple days ago and the little manipulatives we were using weren't quite making the point. so i wrote on her feet. i told her that if i was only in the mood to eat 1/3 of her foot, look how much she'd still have left!

and this one, brooke took of herself. she was doing an art project where she needed to make a realistic picture of someone lost in thought. she couldn't think of exactly how to draw it, so she set up my camera on a timer & posed herself in the position she wanted to draw her picture critter. here's her drawing.

and when we have to tackle things that i know are going to be really difficult, i try to think outside the box in order to make them more fun. for instance, yesterday we were needing to do some dictionary practice. brooke detests doing anything dictionary related. alphabetizing is really hard for her and spelling is rough too, so i had to come up with a way to make it less suckish. so i had her look up the following words: plop, boll weevil, tuna, fat, urine, hag, tinkle, spit, breast, tinkle, mud. then i read the definitions to her in a very prim, proper voice. today, she's begging for more dictionary time and she even said that if we don't have time for it during school hours, maybe we could do it after school. i would have to count that as a win.

i suppose i need to do a little work on phone etiquette though because yesterday when we were at my sister's house, the phone rang. brooke picked it up and said, "woof," then hung up. oops.

star school

homeschooling a strong-willed child is a challenge for any parent. homeschooling a strong-willed kid with aspergers is an extra blob of stress and required creativity.

we have many days where brooke is mad about school. she'd much rather spend her days playing with toys, reading her fun books and inventing games in her mind than sitting around working on crap that doesn't mean anything to her. she tells me that school is torture and no amount of explaining or cajoling can convince her that it's worth it to just do the work without complaining.

however, i've found that if i let her keep one of her toys with her & somehow figure out a way to make her assignments pertain to whatever her current obsession is, it's much less painful for both of us. her obsession of the moment is the warriors series about tough cats who live in clans and fight a lot while taking care of their own. our house is filled with words like "tigerstar", "star clan," "ravenpaw," "kitty pet" and "two-leg". she's wearing cat ears & dressed all in gray today & can barely speak a word that isn't about these cats, but we need to get a school day in since i worked a lot and spent a day away from the house, giving all our money to the car repair shop this week.

so, in order to get brooke to engage & participate in math today, we determined that she's in "alpha school" and she hopes to become a clan leader one day, so she has to know how to add numbers so she could supply her omegas with food. now she's got an assignment to write about a sporting event, but since she's never been to a sporting event & we don't watch sports on tv, i changed it to a warrior cat event. this makes the work a million times easier because she has very little trouble coming up with a story about the cats in her head.

for lunch, she ate red squirrel (apple) and a pigeon sandwich (grilled cheese). for culinary class, we're going to make dinner. the menu includes vole intestines with muscle bits and blood sauce (spaghetti squash with chunky tomatoes and a little red sauce) and a desert of fish egg souffle (cadbury eggs).

later we'll work on maps because an alpha can't patrole her territory if she doesn't understand the borders and landmarks. and at some point we'll study squirrels. because it's good for a predator to have a strong understanding about the health and habits of the prey being stalked. tomorrow we're going to an exotic bird fair where she'll learn about foods from around the world. and we're working on a banner for art class that we'll hang up, declaring our kitchen to be "star school". because star = alpha in her world. she also blogged about warrior cats to practice typing. she even did the embedding of the video and put the picture in herself.

i wonder what next week will bring. and what kind of adjustments i'll have to make in order to get the school work done. it's always an adventure for this teacher.

nuggets of childhood

years ago, when i was looking out at my future life & the things that i expected it to hold, i saw myself with a few kids & in a neighborhood where the kids all roamed free like a pack of friendly dogs. eating lunch at this house one day or swimming in that backyard another day. i guess i imagined that it would look like my life when i was growing up. i'm one of 4 kids & our family always lived in neighborhoods where there were a lot of kids & activities.

i was homeschooled, starting in 5th grade and i had a little bit of a complex about being the weird kid since homeschooling kind of hadn't been invented yet. the average person had never heard of it and we were questioned about it frequently. along the way, we eventually met a few other homeschooled kids, but they were total freaks, in my mind. they were the kids who's mom never wore a bra and they wore tacky clothes and bad shoes. they didn't know who the popular musicians were and had never been to a movie theatre. i considered myself to be way cooler than them, even though i knew i wasn't terribly high up on the cool ladder when it came to the rest of the world.

because of this, i feel like i need to keep brooke informed about things and teach her all the stuff that kids usually learn from each other. she's my only one, there are no kids in our neighborhood and she's homeschooled. i've got a pretty tight reign on who her social contacts are, which i generally think is a good thing since i can let her wait until she's ready to learn about stuff rather than some kid showing her porn on the bus on the way to school & now she knows what intercourse is.

but i think it's fun to tell her the stupid crap that kids say to each other that generally parents tsk-tsk about, so that she won't be clueless when she runs into it down the road. stuff like "i know you are, but what am i?" or "i'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me & sticks to you." it's like i have license to return to my childhood & dig into those old ridiculous things kids say and sing, in the interest of keeping her normal. we taught her the lyrics to "on top of old smokey" and of course the "beans, beans, the musical fruit" poem.  ooo, and i just remembered another one that i need to teach her tomorrow- "great green globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat, itty bitty birdies' feet. great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts, and me without my spoon."

i've sung her the old songs that we used when jumping rope or skipping or doing those hand clappy games. and not long ago, i taught her the classic, "there's a place in france where the naked ladies dance. there's a hole in the wall so that i can see them all."  and we can't forget the always creepy, but fun toilet ditty, "i see your hiney, so bright and shiny. you better hide it, before i bite it."

i'm sure there are plenty more that i've forgotten or somehow missed during my own childhood & i'd like to make a plea, to you, my bloggy friends, to help my child have a full and well rounded childhood. share with us your wisdom or your folly, but educate us in the ways of children everywhere so that brooke won't feel like she's missed out any of the colorful little nuggets that must be passed on to each and every child.

kicked in the boob

nothing tops off a day of homeschooling hell like getting kicked in the boob at the dinner table by a spastic, scowling child with ice cold feet & then having that same child proceed to vomit out the dinner you just worked on for over an hour. and then, she has the nerve to ask for a cookie.

some days should get a do-over.

art therapy 2

today was one of "those" days. you know the kind - where you wake up & there are grumpy vibes coming from everywhere. the first thing i heard was the cats hissing & snarling at each other. i should rephrase that; the big one was hissing and snarling because the little one was bugging the crap out of her & needed her butt to be properly kicked. my kid was whining, my husband was huffing. i wanted to go back to sleep & try the other side of bed a bit later, but i was going to be responsible & productive & peel myself out from between my fabulous sheets, regardless of the day's beginning.

i tried to play peacemaker to all parties involved; i really gave it the old college try when i was out on the back deck putting out bird seed to feed our abundant wildlife. chris made a silly face through the window, so i dropped my pants & mooned him. nothing brings a spurt of shock & bewildered amusement to a group of people like a totally unexpected, pasty white butt flash.

it seemed as though we'd pulled our emotions up by the bootstraps, but after a few hours of school work, brooke & i were both over it. she'd been put onto yellow on her chart (green means good, yellow is not so good & red is bad. i know, so original) and still had to finish her book report. when it was done, she buried her face in my boobs & started shaking & saying that she just wanted to scream really loud for a long time. so i sent her up to take a shower & told her to scream it all out in there. our duplex neighbor wasn't home, thankfully, so it was the place in the house where it was least likely to annoy the snot out of me or result in cops showing up at our door.

when she came down later, she was wearing a red shirt & had made a little paper sign that she stuck to her stomach. i threw it away eventually, but then took a picture of it in the trash because it's kind of funny.

then she made a bigger sign to hang from herself to make sure it was loud & clear that she was feeling red. she frequently shows & expresses her feelings in colors rather than words & red or burgundy seem to be about the worst. well, black's pretty bad too, but that's a whole different place for her.

i told her it was time for another round of art therapy. time to go get her marker box & draw on the floor. when she's extra frustrated, there's nothing like coloring big, huge things to really purge out the crap that's on the inside so that she can go on with her day. there was some stomping, banging & snarking, but she soon got down to business. here comes the predictable giant head of anger. the angry eyebrows & the huge, toothy frown. she didn't have enough juice in her red markers (another source of pissiness) to fill the whole thing & she riduculed me for my suggestions of red polka dots because, duh, mom, polka dots are for cheerful times! she settled for drawing hearts & then scribbling them out to show her sadness & broken heart. she wrote, "I AM SO SAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and then she counted how many exclamation points there were so she could point out to me that there were 19 exclamations points worth of sadness displayed on the floor.

i told her that when i was a kid, i used to write all the bad words i knew on paper or in my diary and it kind of made me feel better. i encouraged her to try it because, 1, i thought it might help her. 2, it would be interesting to see what bad words she knows. and 3, it seemed to me that i might just have some bad words of my own that i'd like to write down after having such a draining day.

she resisted my peer pressure to write down bad stuff. she said it would make her feel too bad, so i got out a marker & started my own list.

it wasn't long before she joined in on the fun & was writing away. i told her that spelling didn't count when you're writing your mad words, so she could spell them any old way she wanted. you can clearly see that she did just that.

i love how she spelled onion & stupid & meany. and she asked me to write plaque & then she drew icky teeth. i tried to draw a tooth of my own on the left, but it ended up looking more like long-crotch tights, so i added feet.

she wrote down "o my god" and "damit" but then asked me to erase them immediately because it made her really nervous to even see those written down. she's so much better than me. she wrote down a couple of the stupid songs that i sing to her to help certain words stick in her head because she hates them since they get lodged in her brain & she can't get them out. (mwahaha! all part of my evil parenting scheme!)

we added another level of fun to our therapy by trying to read all our words backwards as we washed them off the floor. this tickled her little self all the way down into her funny bone. she wanted me to read them out & then filmed me washing & shouting them because it was probably the best part of the day & she's all about documenting her life on video. it's a horrible little video, but you can see how the therapy worked for her through her giggling.

she thought it would be fun to color on her face & i decided to join in on that portion of the fun as well. we started out with war paint (we've been studying sioux indians lately) and then it deteriorated to something involving angry eyebrows & a soul patch. it was very funny, either way & thankfully all washed off before bed.

and so ended another day in the riley household in which art therapy came, saw & conquered our pain.

temple grandin

a few months ago i saw a preview for the movie "temple grandin." it's the true story of an autistic woman raised in the 50's & 60's who pushed through the struggles & hard stuff that goes along with autism & she accomplished great things in her life. i've heard rave reviews from some friends of mine who know that this topic is of interest to me & tonight i finally got to watch it myself.

i couldn't wait to get brooke to bed tonight so that i could make a bag of popcorn, grab some tissues & plop under my fluffy, red couch blankie and watch this movie about an amazing woman. i do love a movie based in truth.

i will be the first to admit that until the past few years, i've never understood autism at all. i'd heard of it & felt sorry for the parents of kids who had it. i could picture kids flapping their hands or rocking with their faces screwed up. i could only picture a severe disability in a child & nothing more. i never gave a thought to their lives as adults or what it must be like to be them.

about 3 years ago i met a lady at a park & brooke had a really good time playing with her son. he's close to her age & the mom told me that he's been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

a month or two later, i went to a neighborhood block party at a friends' house & brooke spent most of her time playing with a little boy who i was told at the end of the night has asperger's syndrome. i'd never heard of that before.

shortly after that i watched a season of america's next top model & there was a girl on there who, for some reason i couldn't figure out, kept reminding me of brooke. they looked nothing alike, and the girl was about 20 while my kid was 5, but i kept thinking that she was like a grown up brooke. at some point in the season, the girl told her roomates that she has asperger's syndrome.

i went to the school box store where loads of educational supplies & books are sold & there, sitting on a shelf where it didn't belong, was a huge book with the words "ASPERGER'S SYNDROME" in bold on the cover. i picked it up because it occurred to me that since it kept popping up, maybe i needed to learn something about it. i started flipping through it & came across a section that said something along the lines of, "if you're the parent of an aspie child, these are probably things you deal with regularly..." i stood there reading in that store while brooke played with a train set & started bawling my eyes out. it was all i could do to even continue standing up because i felt like someone was writing the story of my life. how could it be possible that my beautiful, perfect, articulate girl could be defective? surely she wasn't one of these sort-of autistic kids the book was talking about. she didn't flap or rock. she spoke clearly; better than clearly, actually!

i went home & started doing some online research. there were definitely some similarities between brooke & the aspie kids i was reading about. i felt confused & sad and... i don't even know what all i felt because my emotions were all swirling like a snow storm inside me. i cried a lot because i felt like if i came to the conclusion that brooke has asperger's syndrome, i was calling her broken. defective. and yet i couldn't stop reading. i started observing her even more closely over the next months & mentally tallying up all the ways that she could be aspie & all the ways that she couldn't. some days i was convinced that she had it & other days it seemed like sheer foolishness to even consider such a preposterous thing.

during the past couple years, i've gone through cycles where i dig myself into the topic full force & can hardly think of anything else. then i have to take a period of stepping away from it so that i can simply absorb & observe. i've learned that it looks different in girls than it does in boys. that might be why it's been only more recently that girls have started to be diagnosed regularly. i've learned that it can be hard to get a diagnosis because many pediatricians are extremely ignorant on the topic. i asked brooke's pediatrician about the topic at her 6 yr old check-up & he basically told me that there's no way she could have it because she's well spoken & isn't a math or science whiz. he said this after asking me no questions about her or her schooling at all & only spending about 5 minutes with her during her check-up. (this was the first time we'd seen this particular doctor) he clearly knew far less about the subject than i did & didn't care to spend the time pursuing the subject. i decided then that i didn't need a diagnosis because there aren't any medications & behavioral therapy is the main plan of action for a kid who is diagnosed. she's not in a school because i teach her at home & i can do the therapy myself.

i was reading look me in the eye last year & it's written by a man who is an aspie. in it he tells his life story & it's great example of a success story. brooke saw me reading it & since there's a funny picture of a boy on the cover, she asked me what it was about. i told her that it's about a guy who has asperger's. she giggled at the name & then asked what it is. i gave a brief explanation & she thought about it & then asked for more. that's pretty unusual since she rarely pays attention to what i'm reading. i told her some more things & she kept asking for even more information. then after she was quiet for a few minutes she said, "that stuff sounds like me. do you think i might be an aspie?" she asked if we could leave the playground & go home to google it so she could learn more.

in the course of my learning about autism & asperger's syndrome, i've finally come to understand that it's not a stamp of defectiveness. there are varying degrees of autism & the aspies are at the end of the spectrum where they have the highest level of "normalcy". i've gotten over the idea that it's a shameful thing or something to be tucked away like a dirty family secret. it's not something to be embarrassed about. people who are autistic, at any point on the spectrum, are absolutely as valuable as everyone else. they all have struggles & challenges as well as strengths & talents. if it weren't for the people on the spectrum, i think that we wouldn't have many of the things in the world that benefit all of us, because they're inventors & designers & creators. they think outside the box & excel at their areas of interest. they're artistic & smart & funny.

i think the movie "temple grandin" is a fabulous example of someone being autistic & leading a wonderfully productive life. it shows very clearly how difficult life is for people who have it, but there's a line in there, spoken by the mom that keeps ringing loudly in my head - "she's different, but equal."

so there it is. we have no diagnosis, but there's something fabulously interesting & unique about my sweet girl. she's difficult & exasperating & hilarious all in one adorable package. whether or not she has asperger's syndrome, i think i will always remember that line & how fitting it seems in relation to brooke. she's different, but equal.

love notes

yesterday we officially kick started third grade w/ brooke. it seems to me that most kids are at least slightly excited about the first day of school after a lazy summer of excessive free time & lack of brain engagement. my child is not like most in that regard. she's pissed about school. she doesn't understand at all how good she's got it by being homeschooled. she doesn't comprehend how many hours she'd be in a classroom, away from her parents & cats & snacks if she went to regular school. how often she'd have to keep her mouth shut when she was positively bursting with something she needed to blurt out. all she can focus on is how mad she is that i'll be making her turn off the tv or come out of her room & do something that i thought of rather than whatever she had planned for the day. she says that my schooling plans interfere w/ her brain's ideas.

whatever.

at the end of a long day where we eased our way back into some semblance of structure, we'd had quite a few stress points. she'd been banned from any technology & was told to sit on the kitchen floor & await further instructions w/o speaking unless it was in a pleasant tone of voice. i put away the groceries in silence & then sent her up to get the bathroom rugs to shake in preparation for washing. she performed her tasks sulkily, but gradually worked her way out of her funk while she was washing the potatoes for dinner.

it seemed finally like the rest of our evening would probably be peaceful (cuz school was done for the day) and that's when brooke pulled up her shirt. and there, stuck to her belly was a post it note that i'd written for her a few days ago & stuck to the bathroom mirror. it was a love note telling her about the sunshine she brings into my life & how much i adore her. she'd found it on the mirror when she went up to retrieve the rugs & sticking it to her skin made her feel better. she said it made her heart feel my love again.

and that's how i keep going.

drivers ed

my family is pretty weird. i include myself in that statement, but i came by my weirdness honestly. for example, while we were on our way to charlotte last week, riding with my mom, mom & i were taking turns doing the driving. brooke asked for a turn at the wheel & my mom said, "sure, you can drive after our next stop." i hesitated & mentally calculated how far we were from her house. ok, we were pretty close, so our next stop would probably be in her driveway. they live on a hill w/ a tight turn around, so i was hoping she wasn't planning to let brooke drive in her driveway since i was pretty sure a crash would ensue. brooke wasn't sure she'd heard mimi right. she asked, "are you serious? you're ACTUALLY GOING TO LET ME DRIVE?!!!" mom said, "well, erica (my youngest sister) started driving when she was 8, so i guess you're old enough." i pondered that for a while & then i started laughing. i'm not sure whether or not i laughed out loud, but every time i pictured my tiny little girl driving my mom's camry, i couldn't stop smiling at how funny that seemed! before going to bed that night, brooke was praying & she said, "dear Jesus, thank you that tomorrow i can play with the dogs. and go out in the gourd garden. and especially, thank you that i can drive! i'm going to drive! MIMI'S GOING TO LET ME DRIVE!!!"

the next morning, before i woke up, my mom took brooke over to their old church where there's a huge, mostly empty parking lot. there are lanes & some medians as well as a few shuttle shelters where church-goers can hitch a ride from the shuttles on sundays if they can't manage the walk from the back 40 in their fancy sunday-go-to-meetin shoes. we prefer to call those bus stops. crazy mimi turned her camry over to a kid who can't even see over the steering wheel & had to look through the crack between the wheel & the dashboard. she had her try the gas & the brake before she ever let her take the death machine out of park & it was determined that due to overzealous gas administration, it would be better to just coast w/ both feet off the gas & only use feet for braking.

brooke woke me up by announcing rather non-chalantly that she'd just returned from some driving. trying to play it all cool & stuff like it was no big deal. later mom gave me the blow by blow account & then realized that no pictures had been taken of the momentous event, so we'd need to go back & the next time, i could take the pics while mom instructed & brooke drove. i was also to play the part of bus passenger & would need to get on & off the bus at the bus stops.

here are the photos & videos of our memorable drivers ed experience. i wish i'd been filming from inside when i got whiplash from a violent stop, but alas, i didn't anticipate the excitement in time.

the proud holder of KEYS! (disregard the squinting since i wasn't nice enough to take her pic facing away from the sun)

look, she even knows how to use them!

concentrating on getting the seat position adjusted before buckling up

she looks rather pleased & confident, doesn't she? i think the dog ears helped her to feel even cooler.

and from the next bus stop...



anyone need a ride?

capital disclaimer

i'm at a place in my life where i feel free to express myself in certain ways, even if other people don't approve. and one of those ways is that i have made a conscious decision to not capitalize anything other than "God" when i'm typing. i feel like it's disrespectful not to capitalize his name, just like i won't take it in vain. other than that, all words are fair game for being un-capitalized.

i was home schooled from the age of 9 through graduation by my well educated mother & father. they thought that writing & grammar & vocabulary & spelling were very important & it was imperative to them that my siblings & i all learn to speak & write correctly as it was a direct reflection on them. when i was in school, i followed their standards, but once i was grown, i felt that it would be acceptable to choose my own style of writing & that didn't include capitals. i still attempt to spell correctly & use good grammar most of the time, although i do drop that on occasion as well, such as when i helped brooke create a blog name. i know that i spelled wondrous wrong. it was intentional. i had just written a blog post about her called "girl of wonder" and she wanted it to be called brooke's wonderous world, so it seemed right to me to spell it that way.

when i'm schooling brooke and we're doing handwritten work, i make her use capitals appropriately so that she'll know the rules, but when she types, it's tough enough to find the letters and to spell words correctly, so i don't make her bother with capitalizing. i mean, why should she when i don't? so yes, i do know the rules and i do teach those rules to my offspring. i'm usually don't consider myself to be an uneducated ignoramus and i hope that my daughter won't be one either.

just thought i'd put that out there in case anyone was wondering.

*this is an edited version of the original post, in case anyone read that one. i was a bit too snarky & rude the first time around.

art therapy

do you ever have one of those super duper, totally unfabulous days? you know, the kind where you look down at some point & realize you're sitting out front in a really old shirt, worn inside out & partially unbuttoned, wearing thick, gooey whitening strips on your teeth that look like a football mouth guard and cause a lisp & with cheap hair dye on your roots that makes your hair stand up straight for about 2 inches all the way around your head? and there's a kitten inside your shirt, squirming downward toward your boob because it's got the urge to burrow and you can't get it back out without exposing yourself and you're waving to the garbage man...   and maybe later in the day after you've had a shower & put on clean clothes, but no makeup & gone back outside to try to coerce your kid into doing some school work, and you find yourself meeting the new neighbor from across the street. you're feeling a bit self conscious about the lack of makeup, but try not to be insecure, so you carry on a conversation for several minutes & thinking you've made a nice connection and maybe a new friend, maybe she invites your kid over to see her dog. maybe you run inside to put on a bra because it's one thing to be in your own driveway without a bra, but quite another to be strutting about the neighborhood with the girls flopping free. and it's when you walk past a mirror that you realize there are multiple sweat drops showing up like neon right under your boobs because you were too lazy to put your bra on after your shower because you didn't think you were going to see anyone and you didn't realize how freakin hot it was outside and therefor how sweaty you were going to get in that region. and so maybe you spasmodically splashed some water around the rest of your shirt in an attempt to.... well.... uh...camouflage your.... situation. except then it was just weird and you thought about changing shirts, but that would be weird too to change shirts just to walk across the street, so off you go in hopes that your new neighbor might possibly be blind.

no, you never had a day like that? oh, ummm..... me either.

if brooke had a day like that, her crisis might be that her brain had gone dry, her ideas all shrivelled up. she might think her life was over due to that loss and she might be crying. i might go with something that's worked well at points in the past and that might be to suggest a lil art therapy for the both of us.

and it might go something like this. please note the brain with nothing in it but those boring squiggly lines.

and here we have the spider and cobwebs in the brain. not even so much as those pesky squiggles.

and maybe she might then feel like she needed to write big & bold on the kitchen floor. it might be a giant potato shaped head with... unique features and a very sad mouth.

so maybe we might decide to sit back to back & draw some pictures that might possibly evoke an emotion in each other that would be better than sad or mortified. and if we did, brooke's might look like this.

and maybe puppy 1 eye didn't exactly cheer me up right off the bat, but maybe it could have evoked an emotion eventually. but maybe i drew one for her that's excessively stupid and lame, but colorful. it might have had a redneck rabbit and a lollipop tree and a fusa in a tree and the ugliest monkey you ever saw.

 and maybe then brooke would have added her dog to the sky so that it was even more charlie and the chocolate factory on shrooms.

and then there might have been a fish...

and maybe by the end, you're both giggling and wishing you had a lollipop tree in your yard. and maybe then you get a picture of your sweet kid's red rimmed eyes smiling back at you while lying on your therapy.

and maybe life is good again and the art therapy worked.

but if you've never had one of those days, please disregard.

mother's day mole

today was mother's day & to celebrate, after church, we had lunch at home & then chris took brooke out for a couple hours so that i could have a nap. there's not much of anything i'd rather do w/ some free time than take a nap in a quiet house. my husband knows me well.

after my nap, we all went out for dinner & then to a park so she could play while chris & I walked (we're trying to make some positive, healthy changes, so we go walking rather than go to the couch after a big dinner).

when we got home, brooke ran to the back of the house to find the outside kitty (who's very pregnant now) to give her one last nibble before nightfall & on the way to the back, she found a dead mole. another one. of course she squealed with delight & scooped it straight up to show me. it was smaller than the last one & seemed somehow fresher. there weren't any teeth marks or anything on it, so once again i don't know why it was above ground or what killed it, but brookie was thrilled to bits to find it.

i decided to embrace her love of the dead & i actually touched it & got the camera & filmed her playing with it.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM47lrMz3wI
once i was able to move past the creepy aspect of dead critters, i've found that it's actually rather cool to be able to get a close look at them & see their silky whiskers & itty bitty teeth and nostrils. and that mole was very, very soft. amazing that God would bother to make something so small & below ground with a delicious fur coat. brooke asked if we could dissect it & then skin it so that she could keep the fur to rub. i said no, i'm not ready for that yet.

she put it on her scooter, which she called the mole bus & drove it around the driveway. i'm not sure where the were headed, but there was in incident at one point where the mole flew off the bus due to unsafe NTSB standards & it was run over by the mole bus & then it had a flat stipe through its body & brooke didn't want to play with it anymore. it was laid to rest in a dandelion bush & some scavenger will probably retrieve it later tonight. i'm sure brooke will check in the morning to see if it's still there.

all in all, it was a good mother's day, if a nontraditional one. i like my life.

sinking

there are days when being brooke's mom leaves me feeling like i'm drowning. or like i'm on another planet where the creatures around me act & speak in a way that makes no sense, but i know i'm supposed to do something, i just have no idea what. they desperately need my help, but i can't figure out what that help looks like or how to perform it.

i sometimes wonder what God was thinking when He gave her to me. i don't know what i'm doing. she sometimes seems so sad or frustrated or overwhelmed, but there's nothing that i can figure out that i can do to help her. when she's hurt, she runs away from me, not toward me. if i wrap my arms around her & attempt to comfort her, she often stiffens up or tries to get away & run & hide. her stuffed animals give her greater comfort than i do. the cat makes her happier than i do. i would give my life for brooke, but so often i'm useless to her. she'd rather hold some inanimate object & hide in a hole than be with me. i just don't understand.

i think maybe it's time for us to get some testing done. i need to find a dependable, knowledgable doctor or counselor who can help steer us in the right direction, if such a direction exists. it would be great if some questions could be answered and maybe we can take some actions that would feel productive for a change.

i'm sorry to whine on here tonight. it's hard to feel funny or entertaining when i feel like i'm sinking.

girl of wonder

my daughter, brooke, is 7 now & she's a pretty unique kid. she has a love of animals that's unmatched by anything else in her world. as i've mentioned before, she likes to wear animal costumes every single day, sometimes several costumes per day because she feels a kinship with animals & often feels like God should have made her a lion or dog rather than a little girl. she says that it makes her feel warm & happy on the inside when she wears a costume, especially when i let her wear one in public. she told me this morning when i let her wear her kangaroo suit to panera, that she likes wearing costumes in public for two reasons - one, just because it's cool & two, because it makes people happy when they look at her. i'm so glad that the happy faces are the only ones she notices. i always smile when i see a kid in costume because i know they're happy & creative & feeling pretty good about life that day. apparently however, there are a lot of people who don't share that sentiment with me & they feel free to look haughtily upon my dinosaur-clad kid as if she's got dangling boogers & gum stuck to her forehead.

i can look back now & put my finger onto an exact moment with brooke when i first realized that she's very different from me. from most people, maybe. it was a day when she was 2 or 3 & she had a hamster named bitsy. brooke had always been very careful to keep her bedroom door shut when we weren't around, to prevent our cat from stealthily creeping into her room & killing the hamster through the bars of its cage when we weren't looking. i was pretty impressed that she was thoughtful & responsible enough to bother doing that, even when she was so young.

one day, we went to the mall for a couple hours & when we came home, i found bitsy, dead in her cage. the door had been closed, so she didn't have a cat-induced heart attack or anything; i guess she'd just reached the ripe old hamstery age of 18 months & keeled over. i was standing there, looking into the cage at the dead rodent, trying to think quickly before brooke came into the room about how best to dispose of it.  i didn't relish the thought of picking it up & putting it into a box. i debated going into the kitchen for a spoon, but then i'd have to throw the spoon away because i'd never want to eat off it again, so i chucked that idea. maybe a mini pulley system of some sort... i was standing there, lost in thought when brooke came romping into the room & hopped up on a chair beside me to look at what i was looking at. i told her as gently as i could that bitsy had died while we were shopping & maybe we should bury her. her eyes welled up with tears for a minute & then she looked at me hopefully & said, "can i have her?" i started to tell her that now that she was dead, we wouldn't exactly be keeping her any more, but she interrupted me & said, "no, no! can i hold her & touch her?!" i hesitated because i didn't want dead varmint germs on my hands & i certainly didn't want them on my baby's hands either, but then again... if she picked bitsy's carcass up, then i wouldn't have to figure out how to get it out. so i let brooke reach in & gently lift bitsy's lifeless body out & cradle it in the palm of her tiny little hand. she rubbed the hamster's open eyeballs, spread out its toenails, rubbed the little fingers, petted the belly. i was totally creeped out, but she was just mesmerized by this tiny dead creature's body. she would have rubbed her lips on bitsy's fur, but i had to draw the line there. fingers only, no lips!

we finally put bitsy into a little bitty shoe box on top of a tiny doll blanket. brooke covered her with a tissue & then put a picture of herself into the box so bitsy would always be able to remember her. then i repeatedly washed both our hands in scalding water for good measure. the next day daddy dug a hole in the backyard & we buried her without ceremony.

i think this was a turning point in my perception of my girl. it was a very clear statement of how she has her own individual thoughts & ideas. since then, we've interacted with numerous dead things. we saw a dead armadillo on a road in our neighborhood, which was completely random since they don't really live around here & she begged for a closer look, so when we went past it the next time, i found a parking spot & we walked over to check out the rotting, stinking flesh of an armadillo. i never knew they were so hairy! we went home & googled it to figure out what kind it was & where its natural habitat should be. brooke was in kindergarten at the time, so we turned it into a science lesson.

we had a lovely encounter with a bird that my parents' dog brought over to me after it crashed into a window & died. brooke got a chance to spread out its wings & feel the talons & skinny little legs of that sparrow. she opened & closed the beak & reached in through the feathers to feel the skin underneath. that was when i realized that it wasn't a macabre fascination with dead things that she was experiencing, it was a love of wildlife! she wanted desperately to get close enough to touch & examine & learn about any living critter, but when a wild animal is alive, it won't ever just sit there & let you poke & prod its body. you'll never get to rub the eyeball of a live hamster, so if you wonder what they feel like, you have to get your hands on a dead one.

i stopped being distressed about it after the experience with the bird. she picks up dead fish at beaches, dead bugs from the driveway & yesterday she scooped up a dead mole she found in the yard. she examines & rubs them & learns whatever their bodies will tell her. we even attempted to dissect her pet frog when it died a few months ago. we didn't have the proper tools & a box cutter wasn't exactly the right instrument for delicate cutting, but it was interesting to see how strong the bones of a tiny aquatic frog are, even in death.

now i try to just relish brooke's individuality and the fact that if there weren't people like her out there, we wouldn't know most of what we know about bodies & how they work.

so carry on, little carcass caresser, carry on.