Happy day...

The garden is planted. Thank you - that is all. :)

I love my hubby

I love my hubby, especially when he tries to surprise me.

I had a cute little box show up at my house today.

It's from Ukrainiangiftshop.com. Nice and obscure, right? Except that my birthday is coming up soon and I had mentioned that I would like to try making some pysanky.

Even if he's not very devious, he's a keeper. Now I just have to try to work out what EXACTLY is in the box.

Dieting, the sensory way

M1 has Asperger's. Well, technically I lie. His "official" diagnoses are pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified; ADHD; and anxiety.

But he was five when those diagnoses were made, and for all intents and purposes, I have discovered that if I treat him with methods for working with Asperger's children, he functions quite well.

And to 'treat' him that way, sometimes I have to cater to his specific needs. He is HIGHLY touch-seeking, especially lately. He can't walk down the hall without rubbing against the walls or through the kitchen without leaning against the counters. I let him bring his fake fox tail to the grocery store today, and it was the best trip ever because rather than messing with everything else, he had the tail to hang on to. I really appreciate my mother buying him that at the Renaissance faire that she took him to last month. She has no idea. I'll have to let her know.

So right now, while he's in the midst of a growth spurt to defy all growth spurts (today for lunch he ate two sandwiches with homemade wheat bread, bologna, lettuce, and tomato followed by half a canteloupe and a huge brownie), he's especially in need of touch. Of course, it has to be the right KIND of touch.

In my quest to keep him busy and satisfy that need, I pulled out "The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun." Heavens to Betsy, I love that book. It gave me this idea:

Shaving cream!!! Simple idea, right? Completely out of the realm of my meager imagination. M1 dove right in.

M2 was somewhat, shall we say, hesitant.


M1 did try her method.

"And now you put in the flowers, like this, and you make a beautiful blueberry pie."

Not so much. He bailed for more space and sunlight.

And, just like the Energizer bunny, he kept going...

and going... and going.

My girl? Still smoothing. She's more proprioceptive-seeking - LOVES swingsets and roller coasters and amusement parks. This wasn't really her cuppa tea.

But finally... after much persuasion on his part...

... she finally tried it. And BOY did she get into it.

I love it when my kids help each other grow!

CATS!

I have cats. Just a few. Like... six. Oz says that's five too many. My parents think I have an infestation. My grandmother is just downright appalled that I let half a dozen cats reside in the house with me, but her view may be a bit skewed by the fact that in her eyes cats should live only in barns. It drives her nuts when she visits and sleeps in M2's bed and wakes up to find a cat on the bed with her, and when my Old Man Cat jumps on her lap to say hello, it's all I can do not to laugh when she pats him and says "nice kitty" while trying to figure out a way to get him off... while he's settling in for the long haul and starting to knead with his gnarled old claws.

I love my grandmother. She's 86 and sharp as a tack and still lives on her own. I shouldn't poke fun.

But for the sake of my cats, I do. They are wonderful critters. They are my therapy when chocolate doesn't cut it.

However, I'm pretty well convinced that my kittens aren't 100% cat.

One of them is half mountain goat.

That's the top of my not-very-short fridge. He jumps up there from a table that's probably all of 3 feet tall. He can also get on the top of the cabinet in my bathroom which is probably a 4-foot leap from the sink.

That can be unnerving when you don't know he's up there and you go in and you sit down on the toilet. You start your business, hear a noise, and look up to see a cat staring down at you, licking its chops, and you can HEAR it asking, "Whatcha doin'?"

Shrieking "GET OUT!!!" while throwing toilet paper directly up at him doesn't really have the desired effect.


He may have a bit of a thing with heights. He also likes to get up on the top of the cabinet in my laundry room and knock down my cake carriers.

You see why I say he's part mountain goat.
Ah, crap. They found the candy.

They must have fed it to Kuro.
Have you met Kuro?

Oh, wait, hang on... let's get a better shot.

Thaaaaat's better. Meet Kuro. He's 20-some-odd pounds of cat. The kids have a song about him. It's really cute. It goes, "He's big. He's fat. He's 20 pounds of cat."

I told you. Cats are therapy.

They're great for laughs. Sometimes they are just happy. For no reason. And that makes ME happy for no reason.

Here's Vixen proving that point very eloquently. She found a pheasant feather that I had stashed in a cabinet as a cat toy.

"Afink ah borked mahself."

(Inside joke, sorry... it had to be said.)


"Gah, Mom... I told you... NO paparazzi."

Pheasant Pheather Phail.

And then, just for kicks, there's the dog. He makes me laugh sometimes, too.

Like when I give him a bath and his hair kinks up like I gave him a perm. And I promise I didn't. He tolerates the cats, too. Or is one. The kids call him the Barking Cat.

Poor Gizmo. He's outnumbered 6 to 1.

Life just ain't fair, but when you live in a house with this many cats, it sure can be fun. :)

"Don't laugh at me. I'll sit on you."

Let the gardening begin!

It's that time of year again. The time when I step outside and realize how pasty white I am and that it *may* be time to work on my summer tan. I don't tan on purpose, but I love it when I realize that if I take my watch off, the skin beneath is a lighter shade than the rest of me. Even if it does mean that technically I should purchase a whole new shade of foundation for my face for those off days that I wear make-up. My Avon lady can't make me do it!

It's also that time of year when usually storms crop up out of nowhere, but we really haven't had any of those yet this spring. Knock on wood. Repeatedly. Because having children appear in the middle of the night to sleep on top of me or, worse yet, eyeballing the radar on the TV with fearful eyes while asking if we have to go to the shelter isn't my cuppa tea.

However, on a great note and finally getting around to the point of this post (I do like to digress... did I mention that M1 is still growing and is eating as much as Oz these days? I may have a few ADHD symptoms meself), it's gardening season!

M1 got it kicked off by tearing up the soil in the entire garden. That much you already knew. I am still shocked that he did the whole thing.

Not that he stayed in one place and worked systematically.

He was kind of all over the place.

But he did do a great job.

The next day he talked Oz into taking him to Lowe's and purchasing 40-pound bags of mushroom compost and cow manure.

He also talked him into purchasing an aerator tool. I have no idea what exactly he'll use it for, but he has big plans apparently.

Oz talked him back into using a rake. It's probably a good thing and slightly less dangerous for us all.

This beautiful weather has been wonderful.

M2 hasn't been entirely left out of the gardening equation. She and I (and M1) got all these planted earlier this week as well. Except for the box on the left, which is a mix of herbs, they're all little cornflower plants that her Grandma gave her for Easter. When they get bigger, I'm going to transplant them into...

... the front garden. We also planted a few bulbs in here. I hope they'll come up, but even if they don't, the cornflowers should be enough, I think.

My order from Burpee should be in this week, and I'm taking a trip to the nursery tomorrow for the rest of the plants, so I should have my garden in by this coming weekend.

Huzzah for dirt under the fingernails!

Random school stuff

M1 is a Tiger Scout this year. He loves it most of the time, though sometimes I wish we were in a bigger troop. And/or not in charge. Can you go straight into Boy Scouts if you've never been a Cub? Part of me wants to pull him out next year and find something else he'll enjoy like maybe a cooking class. He'd love that.

But I sound like a bitter old hag. I love my Scouts. They truly rock. My den consists of M1 and his two best friends - twins - who are hilarious. None of them go to the school where they are Scout members. It's M2's school, though, where they all went last year, so it's familiar turf to them.

We completed one of our last requirements a couple of weeks ago. The goal was to discuss nutrition, then study the food pyramid and make one. I whipped a basic pyramid out of a piece of paper as the boys were on their way over, grabbed the magazines, and let them go to town.

OK, so Reader's Digest is what we had, but hey, they have lots of food ads in there! The boys were really funny about it, too. They'd cut out a picture of crackers AND cheese and debate which section to put it in, or they'd cut out a picture of a tomato and feel the need to ask me whether that was a vegetable or a fruit (for the record, I went with vegetable because I'm not getting technical at the age of 7).

Silly boys.

A couple days later, M1 had another assignment involving finding the right category. We've been studying different branches of the animal kingdom in science, and the time came for review.

From left, we have worms, cnidaria, echinoderms, arthropods, mollusks, and vertebrates. It took him a while, as you can see here, but he did get it without me having to break out the cheat sheet. I just had to ask him to remember how many body parts an echinoderm had.

Anyone know?

Anyone?

Bueller?... Bueller?

Sorry... got distracted. The answer is five.

This is one of the things *I* have learned while teaching him. Like the definitions of the words autotrophic and heterotrophic. And how fungus eat. And that's just science.

He's a smart cookie.

Mmmm... cookie...

Gotta love learning. And Scouts. And cookies.

Movie attempt

I'm going to try again to let you see the movie. When I last tried to upload it, I started it about 11 p.m. and came back at 7 a.m. and it still wasn't done. It's not THAT big of a file, so I'm going to assume that something went wrong.

This is M2 playing one of her Suzuki "Twinkle" variations. She's been taking violin lessons for almost a year now, and I'm really proud of all she's done. She's been working hard, is one of the youngest (if not THE youngest) student that her teacher has right now, and really enjoys it, which is the idea in the end no matter what.

Enjoy!

Moments of impact

Thank you all for the kind comments yesterday morning. I really appreciate all the support. With the growth spurt that M1 has been on lately (he took a nap, of all things, this afternoon), he's been eating everything and had tons of excess energy followed by major crashes. It was hard enough to keep up with him during Spring Break, and yesterday afternoon he got out a hoe and broke the ground in the entire - ENTIRE - garden, all by himself. We have a garden that's about 15' x 15'. He's 7. Even with as big as he is, that's a huge job. I think today, and maybe for the next day or two, we're going to have a venue change during schooltime to see if that helps... and maybe throw in a few laps around the yard to get energy out! Did I mention M1 also got Oz to take him to Lowe's, get manure and compost, and dump it all out, just so he could mix it into the garden dirt this evening? Oz did most of the work, of course, but M1 was right out there in the thick of things.

Excess energy much.

Moving on... I showed you the pictures of Easter morning. In the evening, we went over to Oz's grandmother's house for a cook-out. My brothers-in-law brought their Frisbee golf gear, and one of them stayed with M2 while M1 was on the other side. Usually M1 has spectacularly bad aim. Usually the Frisbee was going either WAY up in the air or straight into the grass. So my BIL stepped away from M2 for a second. And it was at that moment that M1 made the perfect shot. And this was the result. I took her into the pediatrician on Monday morning, and the x-rays don't appear to show a fracture, but she now has two pretty good black eyes. Very smoky. You'd never know just to watch her run around, but when you see her close up, it's pretty visible.

I'm going to try to get a movie posted on here in the next few days. I was going to add it this time, but Blogger wasn't cooperating.

Someone tell me again...

...why I homeschool. Right now the boy is spinning in circles on the carpet and squawking and kicking the curtains because he doesn't want to do his math page that he's already failed once (and that I'm making him correct), because he refuses to acknowledge the importance of place value in solving addition problems. Last week, he loved addition and carrying. This week, he hates it. Oh, what a difference four days can make.

Now for the sales pitch.

FREE TO GOOD HOME: Asperger's boy - comes with anxiety, ADHD, sensory issues, dysgraphia, possible dyslexia, and oodles of attitude. Also has a tendency to pee in nightstand drawers and use his shirt... or arm... or hand... as a Kleenex. All sales final. Thanks for shopping.

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And now, while I attempt to get the boy to pay attention to SOMETHING, back to your regularly scheduled program.

Easterlings

Easter was a fun day for my kiddos. Every year since M1 has been old enough to hunt eggs, Easter has been a rainy day and the Easter Bunny has had to hide eggs indoors.

This year, though, it was a gorgeous morning - mid-50s, sunny, bright, not even muddy. So the Easter Bunny - and her friend - was able to hide the eggs outdoors. He was even able to leave a trail of "bunny poop" on the porch. "Bunny poop," in Easter Bunny lingo at our house, is small foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. He also leaves some in each child's room which they usually consume (be)for(e) breakfast.

M2 has a thing for bunny poop. Something about chocolate. She picked up the vast majority of what was on the front porch.


M1 went straight for the eggs. The Bunny leaves a note stating how many eggs are available. The kids are really good about dividing them equally, which is really sweet. They even divide the cash eggs equally.


I just really loved this shot.
And this one, where the kids are tallying up how many eggs they had and how many more they had to find.

But most of all, I love the one where they've got all their loot and are totally flaunting their highly individual personalities. Stage Girl is posing and Understated Boy is just wanting to show off the eggs.

I hope everyone else had a happy Easter, too!