It's All Blurring Together

I really need to get some sleep. Everything's just whirling around my head.

I ordered 2,160 pairs of identical white 27" shoelaces from Rhode Island Textile. Why? Because I use shoelaces to lace up my handmade baby booties that look like sneakers. Even at Wal-Mart they are 77 cents a pair, and since our Wal-Mart doesn't ever restock anything it sells out of, I'm having to buy them at the grocery store for $1.09 a pair. In just a few months I'll have spent as much money on shoelaces as this order cost me, and that's not including the cost of my shopping time and the lost wholesale orders that shoelace supply bottlenecks will cost me. So even though this is four years' supply of shoelaces (assuming I make nothing but these baby booties), it'll be worth it. I've just cut my shoelace costs by 90%.

Now, does anyone want shoelaces? 'cause I'll gladly give you some as soon as they arrive. No joke! This is going to be the biggest box of shoelaces I've ever seen in my entire life. You think I want to haul it out to the garage? If you ever want 27" white shoelaces anytime in the next 4 years, please ask me for some.

Seriously, I need to think of some shoelace crafts for my kids to do. If you have any ideas, PLEASE leave them in the comments. (They're polyester so I can't dye them.)

Bagel has a date to start testing through Early Intervention next Tuesday. They're going to start with the usual developmental tests (vocabulary, motor skills, etc.) but hopefully they'll be able to give him sensory tests soon. We suspect that a main contributor to his problem is a sensory processing disorder, which is what's keeping him up at night and making his daytime activities unbearable. Doing the research on this is hurting my brain. I normally love to be in rapid brain expansion mode, but on this issue it's been very difficult. All my life I knew something was wrong with me but my mom kept insisting I was perfectly normal, and I knew I wasn't. I'd blocked out a lot of my childhood because I just wrote it off as an out-of-the-ordinary experience. Keeping a log for Bagel really shattered a lot of that. Reading back over the log I realized that I was compartmentalizing each day as "this day is unusual, but tomorrow will be a better day". Reading the log made me realize that it never ever was different tomorrow. And reading about Bagel's symptoms made me realize that I had done the same thing to my life-- anything that didn't fit in with what was normal for other people, I disregarded. I had thrown out most of my experience as outliers. I was skewing the data set so that I would think I was just like everyone else. It has been a very emotional experience, going through and reading that yes, there really was and is something different about me, but that there is treatment for it and that I can cope with it. My mom was right, in that it's just the way I am. But to finally have acknowledged what my mom had denied, that I really am different in a measurable and definable way, I just don't know how to feel about that.