Graduation is on Saturday, and so I will just be over here Cleaning All The Things and Cooking All The Things and Crying About All The Things, if you need me. However, I'll leave you with a few items I've noticed of late, because I am nothing if not helpful. 1) Wishing you could lose a little weight, but feeling stupid for being shallow and wishing you could lose a little weight? Solution: Have one of those fancy keep-track-of-everyone's-profile bathroom scales, and then one day while trying to flick some lint off the scale with your toe before weighing yourself, somehow accidentally tell it...
Did I mention that I---like every other person in the world who likes to cook and bake and who gets periodically sucked into food trends---made some sourdough starter a while back? I did, and now I have returned to that place where I don't buy bread, I just make a couple of loaves every week. That's all good and well (I enjoy doing it, the family seems to enjoy eating it, and it's both cheaper and more nutritious than the stuff from the store), plus I'm experimenting with making other stuff (sourdough pizza crust! sourdough garlic knots! sourdough oh look I'm making something else I can't...
In the ever-losing game of balancing out the time I spend with each kid so that neither assumes I love the other better---or both of them assume I love the other better, but I feel pretty confident that they are being ridiculous drama llamas---I was thrilled to discover that the day after Chickadee's birthday, there was going to be a screening of Autism in Love at our local indie cinema. "Hey Monkey, would you like to go see this documentary with me? I think it'll be pretty interesting." I was braced for a shrug or a swift refusal (this would, after all, cut into his gaming time...), but to...
... all I have for you today is this. (There was no Nerd Night this weekend, alas.) Monkey began texting me about some injustice in class, but it quickly devolved into the following. And for the record, this went on for quite a while even after this. It's a good thing I'm fond of that kid. (Eventually I told him I had to go. He responded, "Sea you later! I'll reef you abalone now." Internet, HOW DO WE TEACH HIM TO USE HIS POWERS FOR GOOD?)
You know that I always bake for school meetings, right? And for when my kids go off to their weekly gaming night? I love to bake. I can no longer actually EAT most of what I bake, but that's okay. It makes me happy to feed other people. Funny story: usually at the holidays I start making cookies at the beginning of the month and bake all month (sometimes making/freezing dough to bake later, sometimes baking cookies and freezing them) so that we can give out goodie baskets at school before the winter break. That's not the funny part. The funny part is that I just found out that one of the...
I realized I may have---in my attempts to be privacy-shielding and vague---accidentally left the impression that the sky was falling with that last post. And no, I wasn't smart enough to figure it out on my own; rather, after a bunch of concerned emails followed by one from my dad asking what was going on, it occurred to me that sometimes I need to distinguish between "feeling miserable here" and "genuine crisis here." So. Um. Oops? I'm sorry! And thank you for the concern! Long story short, Monkey has been ill, but in that special Monkey-licious Aspie way of "NO I AM FINE I JUST HATE...
Actually... most of you probably WOULD like me when I'm angry. But other people... not so much. Anyway, I'm trying to cool down, but: I'm angry. Every day, in a dozen tiny ways, the world misunderstands my kids. That's the nature of the beast and my mantra is to assume people are generally well-meaning and kind, and ignorance isn't malice, after all. But every now and then, the ignorance is hard to bear. I dusted off my soap box for this one, because disability is not laziness, and teachers---of all people!---should know that. C'mon. It's 2015.
I love reading articles about "today's teens" because they never actually sound like they're about any real-life teenagers I've met. Granted, my special snowflakes are the specialest and the flakiest (haaaa) and their friends also tend to be anything but regular, but still. "Kids today" are risk takers! "Kids today" act first and think later! Well, okay---that's true even of my kids, I guess. Except instead of using drugs and sleeping around, my kids are doing things like stabbing each other in Minecraft "by accident." (OOOOOHHHHHHHHH! Rebels!!) Therefore, I humbly offer as an antidote to...
Hey, I wrote some advice-y stuff and forgot to tell you about it, but then I remembered: I wrote a thing about girls and autism because someone asked, and also because I find it a totally fascinating topic. Having a kid or two with special needs means a lot of adults who were never diagnosed in childhood end up learning important things about themselves and going OH MY GOD THAT'S WHY as they go along just trying to meet their kids' needs. I, myself, am not autistic (although---GEE I AM SURE THIS IS SURPRISING---boy am I having a ton of conversations lately about ADHD Inattentive Type...
