3 Going On 21

Bagel goes to our district's special needs preschool, and he rides on a school bus to get there. Consequently he's gotten quite a swell head over it; he's convinced he's now the biggest kid in the house. He takes every occasion to point out how he is now big enough to ride the bus and even Princess and Sonshine aren't big enough to do that. If you ever slip up and call him a "little kid" he will immediately correct you: "No, I'm BIG." And then he demands adult privileges that he is not ready to have. He just declares that whatever he wants is For Big Kids; once he decides that, there's no convincing him he can't have it, and he will rage and scream when you won't let him.

It's really cute if it happens once or twice, but it's really wearing when it's day in, day out:

"No, you can't have that."
"I want that knife!"
"You're too little for that knife."
"No, I'm not LITTLE, I'm BIG!"
"You're big, but you're not that big."
"I AM that big!"
"Only big kids like Princess can handle Mom's sharp knives."
"I AM a big kid!"
"Big kids like you can have this [rather dull] dinner knife."
"NO, I want THAT KNIFE!"

Every day, about six times a day, we have this discussion or one like it, and it usually ends in him storming off to a different room in a rage. If we once slip up and use the "L-word" (Little), it's over. The word sends him into a meltdown. Of course, Sonshine, with his laser focus on absolute truth and an instinct for needling those around him, never misses an opportunity to point out that Bagel is littler than him.

Yesterday I had finally had it. I'd had to strap Bagel into the shopping cart for his own safety and he was protesting that big kids didn't need straps. I turned to him and I said, "Listen, Bagel. You are not now an adult, you have never been an adult, and if you keep this up you may never be an adult. So sit down and get strapped in like the kid you are!"

Aspies Shrugged

I'm finally getting around to reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. (Geez, it's taken me long enough, it's only been around, what, 50 years?) I'm only about 400 pages into it, and I'm thinking this isn't a philosophy book so much as a novel about a world where Aspies are idolized. If Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden had lived in our age, they would have had IEP's and been dragged to the child psychiatrist for meds. On the other hand, I'm starting to think that was rather Rand's point.

Ouch

At Baron's War I attempted to singlehandedly carry a 5 gallon jug of water, simplemindedly thinking that since water weighs around 8 pounds a gallon, and I regularly carry 50 or more pounds of childflesh up stairs, I ought to be able to carry a 5 gallon jug of water. Sadly, I pulled something in my elbow, and had to rely on Little D to carry water for me for the rest of the campout.

Well, that was at the end of July, and my elbow still hurts. In fact I'm getting numbness and tingling in my pinkie and ring fingers too, and the pain's spreading to my wrist and shoulder. So I went to the orthopedist, who thinks I may have damaged my ulnar nerve.

Today I was subjected to a rather painful test to see the extent of the damage. Basically they strapped electrodes to my arm and shocked them with progressively stronger shocks to see if the nerves would transmit them. It felt like someone was repeatedly stabbing my arm with a very sharp pencil.

The test results will help the doc decide whether to operate or not. I'm not afraid of pain-- you are talking about a woman who's had two unmedicated childbirths, the second by choice-- but I'm not too thrilled at the prospect that this damage might have to be repaired by surgery. What I'm afraid of is that having to go in for surgery is really going to set off my Aspies, so at the same time they're melting down I'll have a diminished capacity to handle them. Heck, Bagel threw a fit this morning when we stopped by the bank on the way to daycare, because we don't usually do that. How upset is he going to be when Mom comes home with a bandaged arm, and she isn't cooking dinner or carrying him up the stairs?

So, What Happened...?

I never did get around to reporting how it went at that medieval camping event.

I spent a whole month preparing Sonshine to go to it. I let him roll around in a pile of fabric for an hour so that he could pick a fabric for his tunic that would feel comfortable to him. I made two tunics for him, two for Bagel, and three for Knuckles (you can't go anywhere with Knuckles where there's going to be strange food unless you have three outfits, because he WILL throw up). I had Sonshine and Bagel try on their outfits numerous times and play fight so that they could see how fun it would be there. My brother Little D made Sonshine his very own personalized boffer sword. By the day we left, Sonshine had made a lot of progress. A month earlier, he would withdraw and start making Curious George noises instead of talking, just from fear of this event. Now he was excited to go and see the event.

We got there and it wasn't an hour before Sonshine was melting down and scratching himself till he bled. We called my mom (who had agreed to be our backup in case this happened) to come and get him, but she couldn't get him until the afternoon. But it did comfort him to know that his time there was finite. Nevertheless, he started having bathroom issues. He had to "go" so I pointed him in the direction of the nearest portapotty, but he went without his shoes on and got stuck screaming in a patch of sticker burrs. After I rescued him, he waited an hour or two before trying again to go to the portapotty. But then he wouldn't go into the portapotty. I tried to explain to him that the portapotty was freshly placed there and so would be cleaner than the park bathroom, but he still wouldn't go in the portapotty, so then I had to persuade him to walk to the park bathroom. By the time he got there he had wet himself, so we had to go back to our tent and change him into his spare outfit, and I washed his clothes and hung them out to dry.

Bagel did all right during the morning, but he refused to eat the lentil pottage I made for lunch, and by afternoon he was melting down. He badly needed a nap, but he would not take one and he just kept screaming "Get off me! Get off me!" So Grandma took him home too.

Knuckles did throw up right after lunch, but he enjoyed himself the rest of the time. He had a grand old time playing with a bucket with a couple inches of water in it. It kept him cool in the heat, and made a splashy noise when he put his hand in it, and the best part about it was that there weren't any brothers shoving him away from it. He had it all to himself! Princess enjoyed running around in her medieval clothes with her little rag doll wearing a matching tunic. She made some friends and they made forts in the bushes.

Little D and I sold scarcely anything. We let a lot of people sample our wound ointment though, so hopefully next time they'll remember how well it healed their minor wounds and buy some. We did sell some body powder, but I've gotta figure out a better way to package it. But Little D did get to do some boffer fighting, and he made some friends with other young men his age. We had them over for dinner on Friday when I made vinha d'alhos. I had made my usual 5-pound package of vinha d'alhos, but I didn't think that Sonshine and Bagel and FH would not be there, so we had a TON left over and we invited all and sundry to come and eat with us.

FH had to work on the Friday, so he came up on Saturday to the camp. He wore the tunic I'd borrowed for him, but he didn't stay long before he took off with Little D to go to Smith and Edwards to browse for medievalish stuff.

Our next event is going to be the Shire of Arrows' Flight's Insurrection, which is being held here in Tooele. I will be making a very brief appearance at Harvest War, just long enough to teach a little class on counting boards.

Latch The Fridge?

As we all know, fridges can be dangerous. Kids who get inside a fridge can be stuck there. It's dark in there, and they may not be able to kick the door open when they want to get out. Bagel, in particular, was constantly getting into the fridge and leaving it open, so we thought it prudent and responsible to get a fridge latch to prevent him opening it. I shopped around and found a very nice one that had the option to disable the latch if, say, you were doing a lot of cooking and needed to open the fridge without operating the latch every time. It was sturdy and durable and was easily operable by an adult, but not by a child. It latched automatically when you closed the fridge, so that we could always be confident the fridge was secure and wouldn't have to rely on my notorious memory to remember to latch the fridge. We taught the older kids, who were more responsible, how to open it.

So yesterday we caught Sonshine (yes, 7 year old Sonshine) trying to climb up inside the fridge and shut the door. He's never done anything like this before yesterday. And like I said, he already knew how to open the fridge with the latch on it, and has known for over a year.

So when I confide in people (including relatives and the doctor) that we caught Sonshine trying to climb into the fridge and it scared the crap out of us, why is the near-universal reaction to this "what the hell were you thinking, having a latch on your fridge? He would have been stuck inside!" Because, you know, I'm supposed to be clairvoyant and be able to predict that Sonshine might, after seven years of not trying to climb onto the top shelf of the fridge, suddenly try it. And I'm supposed to have a magical fridge latch that appears only when kids are on the outside. This isn't just some yahoo off the street saying this. These are people who know me, who know that I'm trying my best to keep my kids safe. One person self-righteously said, "We have a fridge latch that doesn't lock automatically," as if a fridge latch that locks without having to constantly remember to lock it was self-evidently a death trap.

So, safety police, which is it? Should I latch my fridge to keep my kids out of it, or unlatch my fridge so my kids can get out of it once they're in?

Vacationblogging from California

I'm in California, just a few blocks away from Disneyland. Sadly (or perhaps not so sadly) we're not going to Disneyland. FH's company has a suite at a hotel out here, and when FH had a chance to pick his dates to use it, it happened to be free for Memorial Day weekend, so he took it. We were going to see my dad's side of the family, who all live in this area, but unfortunately my grandfather on that side passed away on Tuesday. I did get to see everyone else, though, at the memorial service. I wish it had been under better circumstances, but on the other hand I got to see everyone all in the same place, and it was nice to be able to bring all the kids and FH with me to see the relatives. I had figured on coming alone by plane to Grandpa's memorial, back when we thought it would be a couple more months away.

Traveling with the Aspies has been fun, if by "fun" you mean "extremely tiring and making you question whether it would have been better to stay home". Bagel adores car trips, but there are limits to how much car trip even Bagel can tolerate, and he doesn't adapt well to hotels and changes in his food routines. Sonshine's been the biggest challenge. I wrote him a social story to help him get through the vacation, and we were reading it every day, but he lost his folder where we had put the social story, the map, and the hotel brochure. The three days before the vacation were full of escalating behavior problems, and the trip itself was marked by frequent meltdowns over things like being hungry (even though he was provided with snacks) and not getting to choose the movie all the time. Knuckles only puked once, after eating a hamburger patty, but we think he might have an ear infection or something, and he's certainly been acting like something hurts. We must have stopped every half hour for either a bathroom stop or a meltdown discipline moment, and sometimes both. Princess has been good though, but she lost her new bathing suit and decided to bring, instead of the spare one that fits whose print she doesn't like, the one that's so stretched out that it falls off whenever she wears it. So we may have to get her a new bathing suit, again.

Thankfully we are staying in a suite. It's really nice, and bigger than our first apartment. There are two bedrooms, one with two beds for the kids, and one with one bed for FH and I. There's a crib for Knuckles, which is nice for when the kids are fighting over allergenic foods and get them all over the floor. There's a kitchen so that I can cook special food for Knuckles, and also so that we won't have to eat out all the time.

Tomorrow we are going to San Diego to see the Festa parade. I haven't been to a Festa in a long time, and I'm so looking forward to eating linguica, sopas, and sweet bread! And I'll get to see my sweet Nana, God bless her. We all love our Nana.

My Math 0900 class was cancelled, so I don't start work until June 7 when my Math 1030 class at SLCC begins. I'm not really keen on working at SLCC, it's a commute, and they pay about half of what USU pays. But it's work, and it still pays more than my more local options. I wish USU Extension would give me steady, reliable work, but people in Tooele think "bettering themselves" is best done by getting a bigger pickup truck, so there's not much demand for math classes out there.