Rant and disclaimer

Thank you all for your comments, but given the nature of my raging case of foot-in-mouth syndrome, I've had poster's remorse and decided that just in case people find this blog and decide to read past posts, I'd be safer off keeping some things to myself. Seriously, though, I really appreciate all the kind words! Thanks for being a great sounding-board.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

Ok, so I can't eat chicken. It's a headache/body itch/intolerance thing. And this post has nothing to do with chicken, really. It's all about the culmination of M2's psych appointment with the pediatrician today so I could get reassurance and hear from the lips of someone who sees A LOT of kids that I'm not making crap up and trying to make my girl into a crazy loon when she isn't.

Turns out...

*I'M* not crazy.

She is.

While diagnosis is a dirty word when it comes to bipolar, that's more than likely what the diagnosis will be, especially as she gets older. The doctor said that with our family history/genetics and the total combination of M2's symptoms, that is what the whole picture looks like. We're going to try the ADHD drug Intuniv with her, because the pediatrician said that she's had good luck with it in aggressive ADHD children who don't necessarily have huge attention issues and it may help regulate her moods, which would be a good thing because I don't want her going to kindergarten and beating up her teacher (who happens to be a nun... beating up nuns is generally frowned upon, methinks). Plus, who wants to put their 5-year-old girl on an SSRI or an atypical antipsychotic and deal with the side effects that go with that? Oh, and we're going to be calling the developmental pediatric place in town and making an official appointment with the psychiatrist there to get more of a real handle on medications if the Intuniv doesn't work; if it does, we'll just go in for therapy with the psychologist we've already used for M1.

So that's the plan and the whole shebang in a nutshell.

I'm going to go drink some wine, do some work, and crash. It's been a heckuva ride. Thanks for sticking it out with me.

Four bags of trash

A few days ago, I went all Toy Nazi on my kids' rooms.

I had to pretend to wake Possum Girl up first. I love when she does this. She NEVER naps. OK, I lie. She naps maybe - MAYBE - twice a year. Most days she goes to her room for rest and talks to herself or her toys for an hour-ish. But the instant I open the door, no matter where she is or what she's doing, she drops like a rock and fakes sleep. Sometimes there are toys in her hands or hats on her head or she's wedged in a corner and she just flops back against the wall. I can't help but laugh. It's just so darn cute.

We didn't have a lot to clean out in her room. She goes through her toys about two or three times a year and gets rid of several things regularly. Honestly, when I told her to clean out her toys, she made a HUGE pile of stuff, and I have to talk her into KEEPING things.

"Babe, don't you want to keep Jojo?" Jojo is her gray stuffed kitty that she has been attached to since she found it in a store one day with her aunt and uncle when she was about 18 months old.

"No, she can go."

"Won't you miss her? You sleep with her every night!"

"Well, yes, but I have lots of toys."

"Darlin'... if you love the toy, it's okay to keep it." I say this to her every time we clean things out.

"Oh...," she says like she's never gone through this before, "OK, then. I'll keep that... but that's all."

And so the story goes, item by item. We did get rid of a sack of stuff, but most of it consisted of containers that she no longer needed, things like a doctor kit whose items had long since been relegated to drawers instead of the plastic box it came in. She also insisted on rearranging her closet so she had more room. More room for more toys? Well, no, that'd be logical. More room for her and her friends to sit in. They love to climb in her closet.

Then she insisted on posing for photos in her room that involves a plethora of pink. Girl loves pink.

Also... Girl got Ego.

This is the "after" photo of the boy's closet. The "before" picture had it overflowing with stuff and those drawers couldn't have fit in there AT ALL. He shrieked like a stuck pig when I told him we were going to get rid of *A LOT* of stuff, but when he realized the meaning of the word "priority," we started making progress. I told him he could have 20 items in his closet, plus the drawers. The first stuff he got rid of? Lots and lots of broken toys. Dozens of empty (and broken) Easter eggs, a broken Hot Wheels toy (which was HUGE and which I'd been trying to get him to dispose for age), etc. He was amazed at the things he decided he didn't ever need or use.

Then we went to the toy bins there in the background. By the time we cleaned out all the bins, this is what his room looked like. The giant pile on the left is the trash pile; the pile on the right is the keep pile. That's right. That trash pile was ginormous. M1 was feeling SERIOUSLY proud of how much he was getting rid of, and we were finding all sorts of laundry in the process.

And as the pile of trash grew, so did the pile of laundry. The boy has a laundry basket in his room and has had one since he was born, but getting him to use it is a whole other story. He hates putting clothes in the hamper. I have no idea why. But he would much rather stash laundry in random places around his room and have me get upset at him later when he comes whining to me about his lack of socks, shirts, and underwear. After we got done cleaning, he did an entire load of laundry that he hadn't seen for months. I can only pray that he gets past this anti-hamper fetish before puberty, or his room is going to be home to a very special sweaty-boy funk. Pray for me, wouldja? I don't think I could smell that and live.

This was the final trash pile. Most of the books there are actually magazines, but there was a whole stack of Level 1 or Level 2 science-related readers that we'll be taking to Goodwill since he had most of the information in them memorized but they're still in great shape. If anyone wants them, lemme know and I'll send 'em to you for the cost of shipping or get them to you personally if you're local. I can send you a list of titles, but they're things like "The Sun" or "The Solar System" or "Insects." Things that he loves.

This is his book basket now. Say hi to Vixen the Cat there, who graciously decided to clean her butt for the photo. Back to the book basket. Boy has a serious love of science. Everything facing right and all the stuff in the back is nonfiction. The fiction 'aisle' is everything facing front on the right. He loves fiction, don't get me wrong, but he doesn't re-read it 1000 times like he does with the nonfiction. And we didn't get rid of a single reptile/amphibian book. It was verboten. He did another stuck-pig shriek when I asked if we could, so I let that one drop.

And then I bagged up the entire trash pile. I stuffed those bags so full I could barely move them and it still took three to get rid of the entire pile.

Proud but exhausted, this mama is thinking now about birthdays (M1's is in October) and Christmas. They're coming way, way too quickly. And it all means more stuff to clean out. Maybe this year I'll just get them all gift cards and call it good. Think they'll go for that?

Thank you!

I felt I needed to get on here and say thank you to everyone who commented about the appointment on Monday. We're just going to see her pediatrician as a starting point; same as we did for M1. If the pediatician honestly thinks there's a problem, then we'll continue on to the pediatric psychiatrist, again, same as we did with M1. I fully intend to take a ton of stuff with me - pictures she's drawn, a mood log (because holy cow - RANDOM), and if I can find a way to bring the fit videos with me, I'll take those, too.

In the meantime, she's been very busy being 5. Even with all the issues, she's still a kid who loves to have fun and I do try to help her have that when I can.



She still loves to color and draw and "do art." This particular day she had the show Oswald on her mind. It was her favorite cartoon for a long time. She wanted to draw the character Daisy and got just past this before ... OK, so it ended badly. But it was beautiful while it lasted, and I'm so glad she loves art. Don't tell her, but on kids.woot the other day they had a huge art box and Oz and I bought it to save for Christmas. It's got everything from pastel crayons to watercolors to markers and everything in between. She'll love it.



I also dyed her hair "pink" the other day. I put that in quotes because we just used Kool-Aid and she's five and she couldn't handle being in foil any longer than was absolutely necessary.



So it's BARELY pink. There's a tiny bit of what might almost be a hint of pink around her face, and she's happy. She wants to redo it sometime and make it pinker, which is fair enough, but when you go to a private school, pink hair is frowned upon which meant I needed to make sure it was going to wash out completely by the beginning of August.

I'll have a humorous post up tomorrow. At least, I'm aiming for humorous. Sometimes I think my sense of humor is a little off compared to the rest of earth's, but I'm gonna give it a shot. Let's just say the kids and I cleaned out their rooms yesterday and the results were... interesting. 'Till then!

Torture

Because I like to torture everyone with the sordid details of my life, I'm writing a blog post today. I hear the excitement now!

*cricket*

*cricket*

OK, OK, so maybe nobody's excited. Even me. My life isn't very exciting. Interesting, but not exciting. Busy, but not exciting. Stupifyingly exhausting... but not exciting.

Time to cut to the chase.

M2 is having a psychological evaluation on Monday afternoon. We go in at 3:30 p.m. Is it wrong that I'm HAPPY about this? Not excited, and still maybe a little bit nervous, but happy that I finally scheduled the appointment and might come out with a few more answers than I have now.

It's hard for me to believe that I ever thought she was the easy child, comparatively speaking. Now that M1 has settled down and is starting to listen to Oz and I when we talk about appropriate vs. inappropriate responses and is gaining maturity by the day (except that I suspect he's having another growth spurt and so he's about to outgrow the size SIX flip-flops that I got him at the beginning of summer... and his bladder grows faster than the rest of him so we have potty messes now and then... and his mouth and attitude need adjusting now and then these days...), it makes it easier for me to see how difficult M2 is to deal with.

She's never been easy to deal with when compared to most kids. Neither of my kids are easy. I'm realizing how true that is now. Many parents are amazed at how high-maintenance my munchkins are. They have both always required a lot of attention, and I'm used to that. I can handle getting down on their level to deal with issues and talking to them one on one, breaking up fights every so often, and being the mom who just CANNOT let her guard down at a playdate because if I don't know where my kids are, things can go downhill faster than an avalanche. M2 had always just seemed easier. Her tantrums were fierce - always have been - but had always been over within 45 minutes or so. I am learning now that most 3-year-olds don't have 45-minute tantrums. Whoops. Both mine did, so that was no big deal. The age of four was high-maintenance for M2, but again, it was the same way for M1, so it seemed fairly normal. He actually had more school problems at the age of 4, so I thought she would be my "normal" kid since school hadn't been a massive problem.

Wrong-O.

About the end of the school year, the mood swings stopped happening exclusively at home and started extending into school... and the library... and other public places. It had been a while since I'd seen that, and I wasn't particularly happy about the Return of the Public Tantrum. I figured that it was some sort of end-of-school-year thing and would settle down during the summer.

Wrong again.

The past two weeks have been the worst. I can't take her anywhere without a random mood shift kicking a tantrum into full swing. Today we went to a group meetup with my mom's group. This is a monthly event. M2 knows the kids there. We've been to the venue before. She knows most of the parents, even, and it was at 10 a.m. so there was no way that she was tired. Oh, and she got lunch at approximately 10:30, so she wasn't hungry, either. Didn't matter. She was running around and M1 "put his hands on" her. I did what I always do and told her to use her words and if that didn't work to refer him to me. Most days that'd be fine, and she'd run off and be happy and I wouldn't see her again till something else happened because kids this age DO tattle. I get that. But not today. Today she crawled into my lap and started her routine of fuss/cry/clamber into my lap/paw at mom/pull mom's clothes/shriek/cry some more/etc. It was baaaaad. Other moms were looking and wondering what on earth was happening. Luckily most of them had been informed enough that I think word got around, and I think most of them could see that there is a serious issue that really does need SOME sort of looking into.

Yesterday morning was equally bad. You want to know what set her off then? She got it into her head that I had told her I would play with her, which I hadn't, and I told her I'd play with her as soon as I got done with the project I was working on (making a grocery list, for heaven's sake). Not good enough. Scream/cry/fuss/beat Mama up. Well, THAT makes me want to play with her. She was pounding on my legs, so I told her - again - that it was not okay to hurt Mama and that she could go to her room till I got done and was able to play. Usually that works, even if she does try to beat down her door and destroy things while she "waits." Not yesterday! Yesterday she took her hobby horse (her usual beat-the-crap-out-of-things tool - thank God it's stuffed) and went into MY room and started beating on the furniture in there. Being in my room without permission is a no-no to begin with, and she knew that. She was deliberately being defiant, and she was nonverbal for over an hour... probably closer to an hour and a half by the time I was able to get her truly calmed down and behaving again.

Then she drew me a picture of what goes on in her head when she's being naughty. That was fascinating. She says that there's so much going on in her head that she can't talk and listen to it all at the same time, which is why she grunts at me. Scary much?? And then she started talking about more of the 'dreams' she has at night. That was just terrifying. She doesn't know the word strangle, but apparently people in her dreams die that way. She doesn't know the word impale, but that happens, too. If M1 had a dream like that, I guarantee he'd classify it as a nightmare and be in my room telling me about it pronto. For M2, this is apparently par for the course because I very rarely hear about them. She says she doesn't have "good dreams... only bad ones." I want to say surely there are some good dreams, but when I ask her about her good dreams, she says there aren't any. Yikes.

Now you see why I'm happy about scheduling a psych eval?? Even if the fits are just a phase, the dreams aren't normal. And even if the fits become her new normal, I need to be able to curb them and keep them under control. It'd help if she had some sort of currency, something I could take away or use as a tool to help her behave, but there's nothing I've been able to work out yet. If I threaten to take away her toys, she offers to bag them up and put them in the trash can. If I threaten to make her go to bed early, she says she's tired and wants to do that, anyway. If I try spanking her, she just freaks out which it makes the fit worse, so that's out. The only 'currency' she has is me, and I'm her MOTHER. I can't take ME away. I am consistent and DO follow through with what I threaten or say I will do, but it doesn't faze her. She's a stubborn little goat.

Any thoughts for her, me, M1, and Oz would be greatly appreciated over the next week. If I wind up with one kid who has an ASD issue and one kid with a conduct issue, I don't know what I'm going to do, but surely there's some study somewhere they can be part of, right????

The Fourth

I would love to tell you about our 4th of July party. I'd love to tell you that everyone showed up, it was a perfect day, and everyone went home happy. Most of that is true. I *think* everyone had a good time. The problem? It DID rain. Right about 8 o'clock it started to drizzle and kept it up for a little over an hour. The womenfolk had already decided we weren't going to wait on water to pour on the food, so we'd already moved all the tables into the garage, and we all kept hoping against hope that the radar was wrong and nothing was actually going to fall from the sky except for spent fireworks shells.

Le sigh.

Before that, though, we did have a great time.

Oz and I had spent about 30 minutes earlier in the day blowing up water balloons so the kids could spend 5 minutes throwing them at each other. They all but climbed INTO the trash can (clean... we usually use it to hold bags of chicken bedding, i.e. pine shavings) to get to the balloons.


They did get a thrill out of bombarding each other, even though most of them bounced off skin and burst in the grass. Even Oz, who is a big kid himself, liked getting a little bit soaked before he went on grill duty.

The girls initially had control of the pool, but eventually the boys took over and refused to get out until they resembled something like really, really, REALLY wrinkly prunes. Even that didn't stop one little boy. It took draining the pool altogether to get him out.

No, these girls aren't sisters. The little girl on the left, though, absolutely fell in love with the Michelin baby girl on the right (who was busy turning 7 months old at the time) and was SO sweet and gentle to her. It was cute.

This is the same sweet girl getting ready for the fireworks display while we were all huddled in the garage with the food and drinks waiting out most of the rain.

The boys and some of the bigger girls waited out the rain in the house. The boys commandeered the Wii and played Mario Kart against one another, attempting to see who could lose the best. OK, not entirely true. They were trying to win... but for two of them, it just wasn't happening. The third boy (not mine) did really well and actually won a race or two.

Here's Oz getting his gear together to go set off fireworks. The sombrero belongs to my boy, who had a concept plan that it would act as an umbrella and keep the rain off of him. He doesn't like rain. Loves sprinklers, hates rain. It's like the dogs who love to eat the water out of the hose but hate baths. Go figure.

A few minutes into the fireworks show, the rain finally stopped,

and we got to watch the men play Pyromaniacs R' Us with all the fireworks. Except for the shell that blew up inside the tube, which was scary to all the adults and cool to all the kids, everything went without a hitch.

Did we have fun? I think so, although really her eyes are shut because she's about 3/4 of the way to sleep in the chair.

Not in the mood for witticisms and sarcasm today because I have a girl who's gone subhuman and isn't speaking or doing anything other than climbing on me and beating me up, but seriously, I hope everyone had a good Independence Day. Long live freedom!

Independence Day

I hope everyone (well, all you folks in the US of A) is having a fantabulous, rain-free 4th of July so far! Oz is out mowing some of the pasture in the hopes of having our fireworks show out there this year, the house is clean, and the kiddie pool is full. We're expecting between 40-50 people at our house this evening, and I'm excited! It rained all day yesterday, thanks to the remnants of Hurricane Alex, but it looks like everything will stay off to the west of us today. Here's hoping!

Anyway, photos to come tomorrow, I'm sure. I hope everyone has a great, SAFE, Fourth of July, and don't forget to say remember the folks who made it all possible!

Big giant kiss & lick to you all!

The rest of yesterday

While I was canning everything in sight yesterday, you may well wonder what I did with my children. It's not like I can just lock them in their rooms and leave them there for a whole day. That idea just scares me because I don't want to know what would happen behind those closed doors, and I really wouldn't want to open the doors and find out. Plus, I imagine the Powers That Be frown upon children being neglected in their rooms for an entire day while their mother sings variations on "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the kitchen while stuffing sliced cucumbers into jars and dumping boiling vinegar over them.

Don't ask.

Anyway, so I didn't just leave them in their rooms. Besides anything else, they had their last swimming lessons at 10:30. Oz had taken the day (and today) off to get ready for Sunday's bash, so I designated him the Keeper of the Children for the day, and he took them to their swimming lessons. By the time they got home after lessons, lunch, and errands, they were beyond excited. First, M1 had been told that he gets to stay in Level 3 this fall when he starts lessons again during the school year. Since he was technically only supposed to be in Advanced Level 2, this is exciting. He's very happy to get to "skip" a level (and, quite frankly, so is my bank account).

M2 was the bigger surprise. In two weeks - eight days - of lessons, she completed all of Level 1!! For a girl who wouldn't let water get in her ears a few weeks ago, this is a massive step forward. Of course, there's a down side. When the woman running the program was talking to Oz about M2, she said, "You'll have to watch her, though. She thinks she's invincible."

Well, yes. That much we already knew. Good to know other people see it, too. Very reassuring.

Oz did bring them home, as mentioned, with their progress cards and the photos he was apparently suckered into buying, and the kids played for a while so I could finish up what I was doing in the kitchen. They did rest for a while, too, because both of them had been promised that they could stay up late for Very Special Evenings.

M1 got to go to his first baseball game last night. Apparently he had a BLAST. Oz took him, and they also took my mother-in-law and my youngest brother-in-law. That meant there were three adults to entertain Aspie boy. It's a good ratio. He also consumed everything he could talk Daddy into - I believe this consisted of two glasses of pop, nachos, a Sno-cone, and Dippin' Dots. His favorite thing? The nachos. Like mother, like son. When they got back to the house around 11 p.m., the first words I heard from the boy weren't, "I loved the game, Mom, and our team won!" No, that would be way too predictable. His first words to me were, "Mom, you were right. Stadium nachos are the best." I love raising a foodie, even if he does have to have a little fake cheese now and then to make his world a better place. Our team did win, though, 6-2, and there were several home runs which of course makes it even better. Oh, and it wasn't 9000 degrees outside, which meant sitting outdoors for hours was something that could be accomplished without complaining.

He had enough adrenaline pumping that when Oz and I finally headed to bed about 12:30 a.m., he was still reading in his room. I confiscated the lamp, and he was sacked out cold within 20 minutes. I know because I accidentally closed a cat in his room and the scratching on the door brought me back down the hall 20 minutes after the aforementioned lamp confiscation.

M2 had her own special evening. My friend Mary came over and brought her sewing kit so that she could teach M2 how to sew, because M2 had spent the last two days attempting to make a pillow with fabric scraps, paper, and a stapler. The fabric scraps came from my mother who is one tiny little hop-step away from the show "Hoarders" and who decided to give some of her beloved scraps to my daughter so she could start her own collection. Luckily M2 doesn't develop emotional attachments to fabric and has cut apart several pieces for various uses. She's got a few pieces left that could make very nice items, though, and Mary had agreed to help M2 sew a pillow because I am challenged (and left-handed) when it comes to sewing. Cross-stitch? Sure! Sewing? Oh heck no. And Mary has the patience of a saint.

Here's a short little video of her starting to teach M2 how to sew. She had already explained how to thread a needle (and given M2 a tapestry needle to practice on, which M2 got down pat first try) and how much thread to use and about pincushions and fabric shears, so now it was time to sit down and actually sew. This was on some practice fabric, but M2 actually did make her own little pillow. She got it about 3/4 done last night and finished it up today and has been carrying it around with her everywhere. She even wanted to bring it outside while we were working today. I told her it would be much safer indoors. She's a little seamstress in the making. She really is my sister in miniature. It's kinda scary. Anyway, here's the video:

The fruits of my labor

Let me say, first of all, that I am grateful to whoever invented central air conditioning. This day would not have been possible without them. Every time I can food in the middle of summer, I gain a new-found respect for being able to stand over something that's blowing cold air directly at me.

My day did NOT go as planned. I woke up at 9, for a start. I guess the kids had decided to sleep in, because M2 had only come in about 10 minutes before asking me if it was time to get up. Most of the time she asks this, it's about 6:45 and my answer is, "mmfffh??" and then she repeats herself, and then I look at my phone and mumble something along the lines of, "Make your bed, change your clothes, and I'll be up in a bit. Go back to your room." It's usually less coherant than that, but she knows the routine.

So I got a "late" start. By 10 a.m., my kitchen looked like this:

In other words, I had things organized but not a speck done unless you count hauling out ingredients and sorting "mini" cucumbers by size - medium and gargantuan.


I felt vindicated by noon, though, when I had these beauties sitting on my counter.

Did I also mention I got two dozen pint jars for this project today? I thought I had overestimated the need for jars, but it turns out I had underestimated the bounty of my garden.

That's the last of the pint jars over there, with the rest of the cucumbers sitting forlornly on the counter. They're now back in the fridge to either be eaten fresh or bequeathed to friends. Any subsequent cucumbrage from my garden will also be sold, eaten fresh, or bequeathed.

It's the least I can do. With two dozen jars of pickles, I don't think *I* will be needing any more of them for a while.
Then I started on salsa.

OK, after I ran to the grocery store and got extra lids for the jars and gloves so I could handle jalapenos, I started on salsa.

Here's where all hell broke loose. I discovered that I am completely incapable of math calculation. As a teacher, I am ashamed. Six pints is the amount my salsa recipe makes. Last year, I made 12 half-pints. In my head, I calculated that to make 12 half-pints again this year (which was about enough to last us), I'd need to make two batches of salsa.

I was... in a word... WRONG. Very, very wrong.

But of course I didn't realize this until I already had every single tomato blanched and peeled.
I also had all the half-pint jars washed and ready. So I took my half-pint jars - 13 of them, anyway -

and filled them with salsa. I don't know why, but those two photos amuse me because it makes it look like all of a sudden the jars just magically filled themselves up with salsa, and that was SOOO not the case. It's not a hard recipe to make, but with all the chopping, blanching, peeling, etc., it is fairly time-consuming.

Then I canned tomatoes, which hadn't originally been on the agenda at all. At least I had the stuff to do THAT. Another store run might have done me in today. I'm very grateful to my children for not letting me make it down to Porter to get peaches. I will be doing that another day, though, and having a jam session. Get it? "Jam" session? Hahahahaaaa... OK lame.

But I will be making blackberry jam, peach preserves, and canning peach halves another day. I'm sure there will be more tomatos then, too.

The one problem I'm going to have?

I'm going to have to get more cans.

To be continued...

I am making pickles and salsa today. Pictures forthcoming. Stay tuned.