The Squashed Bologna: a slice of life in the sandwich generation

Kinda Wordless Wednesday: Nice Niece

2012-02-01T23:30:00.000-05:00

My lovely niece Rachel came to town for a business meeting this week and I got to see her twice - once at home with the kids, and once at my Mother's. How delightful!

Rachel came at bedtime, and Ethan was in a silly mood. Luckily, Rachel is playful and fun as well as intelligent and beautiful!

The next day Rachel and I had a nice coffee together, then we went to see my Mom (her Grandma) and joined her for lunch.

Rachel had a new iPhone and we took some pictures with her camera as well.

Mom was fascinated by the phone/camera concept. Also that these tiny things are computers that can call up the internet. It seems like magic to her.

Rachel had never seen instagram (shocking!) so on the cab back to the west side, I gave her a demonstration, taking and manipulating this photo of her:

I believe a new instagram addict has been born!

Come back soon, lovely niece!

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January Round-Up: What I Loved on OTHER People's Blogs

2012-01-31T22:00:00.000-05:00

January half-moon through city trees

Well, I so enjoyed doing my 2011 year's end round-up that I decided to make an annual tradition of it. Also I figured I would start collecting posts for it early in the year, so all I would have to do is hit the "publish" button come next December 30th.

But then I discovered something... By the middle of this first month, I had already collected so many of these wonderful posts I've found on OTHER people's blogs that there is no way they are all going to make it to the final cut at year's end.

But I have been so moved by these, I didn't want them to pass un-noted. So I thought: why not make it a monthly thing?

Can't think of a single damn reason not to, so... OK!

So here it is, the first monthly round-up of what has caught my eye (and brain, and heart) on the internet; some dozen wonderful posts from January, 2012, presented for your edification and enjoyment...

As always this is an idiosyncratic, and very incomplete list. There is always more wonderful out there, but these are the particular ones I have chosen this month:

The fight goes on. from Jenny (the Bloggess) of The Bloggess

Why? from Jessica of Four plus an angel

i see myself from Jess of a diary of a mom

Help from Alysia of Try Defying Gravity

Nothing To Say from Neil of Citizen of the Month

Angst, ennui, desolation and other words I found in a thesaurus from Jillsmo of Yeah. Good Times.

Compelling. from Eden of edenland

Chickened out, grabbed a pen and paper, sat down and I wrote this song. from Elysha of Wet Clay on Jo Hilder's Blog

full circle from Meredith (aka camerashymomma) of the spirit of the river

Realistic Optimism from Phoebe of Herding Cats

going on a bear hunt… (and it sucks) from Deborah of MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa

This Might Give A Lesser Man A Stroke from Alexandra (The Empress) of Good Day Regular People

Um, looking over these, I realize they are mostly on the heavy side. Sorry.

Guess that's my January seasonal depression talking. I'll try to find more funny ones next month. (But then again, you might have to wait until April for lightness and mirth - just warning you, winter and frothy are not mixing for me these days.)

Ciao, babies, see ya next month (um, yeah, that's tomorrow).

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Composting in New York City

2012-01-30T20:04:00.002-05:00

Nope, that's not a typo. I really meant composting, not composing.

Yes, in New York City... Manhattan, even!

And no, we don't have a townhouse or ground floor apartment, no backyard or roof deck or access to any outdoor space that is not public property. And while we jokingly call Riverside Park "our backyard" I don't think the parks department people would take kindly to our appropriating a bit of it to create a family compost heap.

I had not thought it possible. But then the wonderful folks at Mom Central Consulting contacted me to participate in the Glad / New York Compost Blog Tour and giveaway...

And even though I already have so much (too much!) on my plate, I just couldn't say "no." For, you see, even though I am a thoroughly urbanized city-gal now, at times in my (distant) youth, I have lived in the country and been elbow deep in the fragrant, fertile earth of a garden, and the compost that facilitates that.

Also for a number of years running my family has gone to visit my cousin Jessie and her family in Burlington Vermont in the summertime. And they? Have a wonderful, abundant organic vegetable garden, a BIG healthy compost pile, and... chickens!

So for a week every summer I am mindfully sorting every scrap of garbage we create into their respective chicken, compost, trash and recycle containers. And then when we come home to New York City it has felt so odd and so thoroughly WASTEFUL to be throwing out all that wonderful compost material and chicken food.

So you can see how I jumped at the chance to do something about this in an easy and fun way, and in my very own (small galley) kitchen here in NYC. So this, my friends, is a double first - my first giveaway and my first sponsored post!* (And you are here to witness it!)

When the composting kit arrived and I unpacked it, I found:

Glad Compostable Bags.
An "Easy Household Guide" to composting by Nicky Scott, called, well "COMPOSTING."
An appropriately sized, lidded, dark green compost bucket, labelled an "ODOUR FREE Compost Caddy." And yes, it IS made in England, how could you tell? ;-)
A sunflower growing kit (that I shall pass on to a Brooklyn friend with a back garden).

The compost bucket settled very comfortably on my kitchen counter. Due to an ingenious filter in the top of the lid and lined with a Glad Compostable Bag, it indeed lived up to its "ODOUR FREE" claim, in spite of the many apple peels and garlic pulps that have been dumped into it.

Also? As yet, no fruit flies (the bane of open compost buckets everywhere).

It was interesting to see how much fruit and vegetable scrap waste we generated in just a few days. Did I ever mention Ethan eats 2-3 apples a day and they must be sliced and peeled?

When it became clear that the bag would quickly fill, I emailed Adam at New York Compost and arrangements were made for an easy right-to-my-door pick-up. And of course, the vehicle for this is human powered by clean, green bicycle!

I hand my tidy, unsmelly, tied-up bag of luscious, gooey compostable stuff over to Adam and away it goes to ferment away in a community compost site, ultimately to enrich the soil for some lucky gardeners.

OK, I am feeling so environmentally virtuous and green now. I plan to keep doing this even after the official compost blog tour is over.

So, if crazy stressed - SQUASHED - me can do this, then you certainly can, too! You in? Good!

To learn more about the Glad environmental programs, go to their site Glad to Waste Less. I did, and was pleasantly surprised to see all that this plastic-bag-selling company is doing to help people go green. Who knew?

Something else cool and green and philanthropic that Glad is doing is supporting youth sports programs by providing 10, $2,000 "One Bag" grants (and counsel from sustainability experts) to help youth stadiums or sports leagues’ waste diversion efforts. Entrants will be asked to share a brief description of their need and plan to take their high school stadium, community fields or youth sports league “One Bag.”

Grant submissions will be accepted at their GladtoWasteLess.com site and the grant entry period runs from October 18, 2011 through February 29, 2012.

Also, if you are my neighbor here in NYC and want to know more about the wonderful New York Compost folks, visit their website: New York Compost!

And here's a handy dandy little video of the venture, featuring the kind of cart that comes by to pick up our NYC compost.

And now, to give you a further nudge in the right direction (drumroll, please)....

THE GIVEAWAY!

I have a Glad Composting Kit to send to one, randomly selected, lucky reader. It contains:

Your own handy green "Odour Free" composting bucket
A box of 20 Glad Compostable Bags for the bucket
A small, easy to read book on the ins & outs of composting
A sunflower growing kit

How to Enter:
First off, I'm easy.
(And don't tell me you've already heard that from my husband.)
#1. Just leave a comment here. That's it, you're entered once.

For additional chances, you can do any or all of the following (each one gets you an additional entry):
#2. Follow me on Twitter @SquashedMom and tell me you did it - or that you already follow me - in another comment.

#3. Like my Facebook Fan Page and tell me you did it - or that you already like me, you really like me - in another comment.

#4. Go check out the New York Compost website - and tell me you did it in another comment. (On the honor system here.)

#5. Go check out the Glad to Waste Less website - and tell me you did it in another comment. (Again, I trust you.)

Contest runs until NOON, NYC (Eastern Standard) Time on Sunday, February 5th, 2012. The winner (selected at random by their entry number) has 48 hours to respond after email notification of their awesome luckiness, or the package will go on to another randomly chosen entrant.

Did I forget anything here? I hope not, I'm new to this blog contest / giveaway game after all.

Good luck and happy composting y'all!

*In accordance with transparency and legality, I am letting you know that I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Glad and received a composting kit to facilitate my review, a sample to giveaway, and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate. The opinions expressed herein, however, are uninfluenced by this compensation and are completely my own.

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SOC Sunday: January Blues

2012-01-29T23:30:00.000-05:00

Sunday. Yawn. Sunday. Thank goodness for SOC Sunday because coherence and my brain are not converging tonight. And this? Gives my incoherent rambling legitimacy. Yay, me!

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January... 2012... so far? Not off to a brilliant start. Feeling, truthfully, like crap most days. Last week I said we were finally all feeling better. And yet it's not quite true.

I am no longer officially ill, but have been left exhausted. Feeling bone tired. I feel so weary, like my mitochondria have just said "Eh? I don't feel like pumping any energy into cells today." and gone off to do something else. Fishing?

I literally cannot keep my eyes open, cannot drag my ass off the sofa to do much. I rally for an hour here, an hour there. The kids are fed and shuttled about. But the weekends are killing me because there is no school to keep them occupied so it's all on me & we are not going out to do anything more than the minimum and I hate being THAT mom, the lazy-ass mom. Which i have been nearly all month.

And there is SO much to do this month. LTYM-NYC is heating up. Summer needs to be planned - camps & the like. I have my first sponsored post & giveaway (almost like a "real" mommy-blogger!) going up tomorrow or the next day. And to do that one? I am composting, folks. Yes, right here in New York City. And no my kitchen doesn't smell like rotting produce, thank goodness.

And amidst all the angst and feeling so low - How much is physical, how much is emotional/depression? DAMNED if i know! - I have to keep reminding myself to count my blessings. And there are some.

Jake is really growing and changing again this month. It was a rough start. The first 2 weeks of the new year held nearly nightly crying jag / meltdowns. But he is talking and interacting more than ever. He practices conversation with me, the cat and his stuffed bear. Hopefully soon there will be real friends.

Tonight when I sat with him in the bathroom while he took his bath, he wanted to talk and talk and talk. His usual topics: what did my ear look like, what are the shapes of my eyes and eyebrows and head. How he was once a baby and will grow to be a man, how his hair is yellow-blond but mine is red-brown. But still, there was more expansive language. The eye contact was full on and awesome.

The light in his eyes was fully on, his delight in talking with me, in the back and forth of our conversation was clearly evident, infectious.

It is so easy to despair, to see how far he has to go. The progress is so glacial, so frustratingly incremental that i have to make myself stop and look at where he has come from... So far! I need to close my eyes and remember back to when I questioned if he would ever be able to carry on a conversation of any sort, when he seemed so lost in his own world.

And so when I am getting all judgey with myself, when i feel like I have just lost all my mojo, that I am merely getting through the days, I need to hold on to this: My kids are thriving. And maybe it's in spite of me right now, but still, I'll take what I can get.

Reasonably happy kids = not sucktastic at all. And hopefully I can join them there soon.

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Sorry I'm still in the cave here, folks. Hopefully the grateful cancels out the whining.

New to SOCS? It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spell-checking. This is writing in the raw.

You can do it, too! Click on the picture link and let's hear your 5 minutes of brilliance...

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Art, art, art, and a few words

2012-01-27T19:14:00.000-05:00

Since I blew right past Wordless Wednesday this week, I might as well add more words into the story of these pictures that I had been planning to share with you.

The boys have both been busy making much art, and I have been having too much fun with my iPhone camera, always handy, always there.

This past week, parents were invited into Ethan's school to walk the halls and witness the results of the wonderful "Studio in a School" art program that has just completed a unit with the 4th grade, quite interestingly tied in with their history curriculum.

The kids providing docent service for the grown-ups, Ethan loved shepherding me through the show, helping me to find his own creations.

I know he wasn't consciously trying to mimic the expression on his "Crazy Warrior" - a portrait of the self, imagined as a colonial era figure. But, it shines through, no?

Ethan and his self-portrait as a colonial era Native American - "The Crazy Warrior"

Jacob has been drawing, drawing, drawing, as usual, and I thought I'd share some of the latest crop:

A guy

A Dragonball Z Kai dude. And if you have to ask, you don't want to know.

All TV show and cartoon characters this time. But, once again... WOW! Jake's ability to capture so much emotion, especially in the eyes, I find beyond astounding. Who says autistic kids don't perceive, understand and process emotion?

Dragonball dude again

Yes, it's everybody's favorite airbender: Ang the Avatar

I love these eyes.

Is it just me, or do you not want to meet this guy in a dark alley, too?

My favorite are the half-finished ones, with the simplest lines.

I love this drawing

And because he's so damn cute, here's a picture of the artist, too:

Jake out & about on our snowy Saturday last week

Me? It rained and rained and rained today. A biblical level downpour that lasted about 20 minutes. Excellently, of course, during the alternate side car-parking shuffle time. So what did I do? Document it, of course.

Rain on my windshield on Riverside Drive.

I turn my wipers off at red lights and watch the rain overwhelm the windshield.

Enjoy. And coming tomorrow - lots of words!

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Listen To Your Mother-NYC's Call to Audition!

2012-01-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

Y'all may recall my announcement this past fall, that I was going to be a key part of the team bringing LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER - the national series of live readings by local writers in celebration of Mother’s Day - to New York City for the first local production here, right? OK, if your memory needs jogging, here it is: Listen To Your Mother!

Well, kids, things are now heating up big time...

We have a date and a space and a charitable cause, and now we need a cast. So that means... AUDITIONS! ... and that means YOU! Yes, you! No, don't look over your shoulder, I'm not talking to them (well, I may be talking to them too, but that's not the point here!) I am talking to YOU, my friend...

If you are a writer, and you write about mothers (being one, having one, or any mom-role person who has been in your life) then come audition to be in the show. While many of us are also bloggers, you don't have to be one to participate (but if you are it's a great way to promote your blog!)

Here's the skinny on auditions:

The show is on Sunday, May 6, 2012, at 2 in the afternoon, at the Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Family Auditorium at the JCC in Manhattan (on the Upper West Side).

Auditions will be held on the following dates by appointment only:

Sunday, February 26 th 11am - 2pm

Monday, February 27 th 6pm - 9pm

Tuesday, February 28th 10am - 1pm

To schedule an audition, email listentoyourmothernyc@gmail.com. Please include your name and your availability during the time slots listed above. Auditions are being held at a convenient midtown Manhattan (west side) studio. The exact location and other details will be sent with your confirmed appointment time.

Choose a piece you really love, and that takes about 3 to 5 minutes to read. While you don’t have to be a mom (or even a woman) to participate, your piece MUST be primarily about motherhood in some way, and the words must be your own.

I really want to hear your stories of MOTHERHOOD, the good, the bad and the ugly; the funny and the sad; the profound and the profane. (Yes, you can curse, this isn't a kid's show, it's for US!)

That's it! Easy! (And if you want to see what sort of pieces have made it into the show before, you will want to watch the past Listen To Your Mother shows.)

The time commitment if you are chosen for the show? Not that much: two rehearsals TBD in March/April, a pre-performance run-through at the JCC, and the 2 p.m. performance itself on May 6^th. Also, while it's not REQUIRED that you come out for a celebratory drink with us after the show, I'll be damn disappointed if you don't.

All that said, I am warning you in advance that there are going to be readers and works that I absolutely LOVE that will not make it into the show this year because:

a) it's not my decision, alone, to make; I am but one voice on a team, and

b) we need balance, to represent a wide spectrum of mothering voices and experiences, and sometimes the specific wonderful has to be tossed to serve the show as a whole.

Please don't let the possibility of rejection hold you back from auditioning. At the very minimum you'll get 10 minutes of my undivided attention and a hug at the end (if you want one).

Also you should know that even *I* - the PRODUCER - am not guaranteed a spot on the final roster. Like everyone else (with the exception of our MC and Director, the amazing Amy Wilson), I am also going to be auditioning, and might not make the final cut.

Finally, if you're feeling at all nervous or anxious about (gulp) standing up and reading your work in front of (horrors) live human beings? You should read a wonderfully encouraging essay by my friend Stacey Connor of the blog Is There Any Mommy Out There? This year she's reprising her role as the Director/Producer of the Spokane, Washington LTYM show, and wrote this about the experience of being a writer, reading: A word on stage fright and storytelling.

Also, if you want to read the more formal (more informative, much less chatty) version of the call to auditions, come to our local Listen To Your Mother - NYC Website, and read the official post, here:
NYC Listen to Your Mother show CALL for AUDITIONS!

I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am to begin this audition process, to be sitting in front of you, meeting you, and hearing all your stories. Bring it on!

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Promises, Promises

2012-01-23T23:41:00.000-05:00

I hate disappointing my kids.

Ethan is all aggression, calling me a liar when I have to backpedal on an agreement, undo a plan; telling me next time he's going to make me pinkie-swear and if I break THAT promise I then owe him a million trillion dollars. But it's Jake that breaks my heart again and again.

I had promised we'd go to the movies together, just he and I, this past weekend. Two weeks ago we had finally seen the Muppet Movie, and I have been walking around singing the very catchy "Am I a Man or Am I a Muppet?" in my head ever since.

Jake loves movies, lives for movies. But Ethan and I both had been laid low sick on Friday and were recovering slowly over the weekend.

Dan, as nearly always, worked all day Sunday, and I just didn't have it in me. Didn't have what it takes to hustle up a playdate to fob Ethan off on, to get out the door with Jake and Ethan, dropping Ethan off, head down to the movies with Jake then pick Ethan up afterward and hope the timing wasn't off, and oh my god, feed the kids, too and get them to bed early enough for school the next morning.

But Jake, being Jake, just didn't understand, even though I explained and explained and explained. Even though I let him watch hours and hours more TV on Sunday than usual, come 4, 5, 6 pm, come bedtime, he just kept asking "Can we go to the movies, Mom? Are we going to the movies, now, Mom?" in this small plaintive voice.

He didn't have to say "But you'd PROMISED!" the way his blatant, brazen brother would have. The movies are his magic and I had dangled it in front of him then snatched it away. And because it wasn't Ethan's own disappointment he was able to keep perspective. Too much in fact; was scornful of his brother in the guise of being helpful:

"Jacob, Mom is not feeling well, she can't take you to the movies, you'll go next week. So stop bugging her. It's just the movies, no big deal. Star Wars 3D doesn't even open for 2 more weeks, anyway."

Ethan was happy as a clam to lounge around all day in PJs with the resident screen police too tired for any real rule enforcement.

But Jacob? My sweet Jacob? "Moovies Mommy, I want to go to the moooooovies."

"Next week, my love, next week, OK?"

Please, gods of autism and head colds, don't let me break my promise.

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SOC Sunday: Nearly Human

2012-01-22T03:17:00.000-05:00

Yup, Sunday again. Technically. It still feels like Saturday to me because I haven't gone to sleep yet. Or rather I should say "haven't gone to bed yet." Because that hour spent semi-sitting up, slumped on the sofa with the TV playing to my closed eyelids was sleep. Sorta.

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Well, I am happy to report that rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, and I am, in fact feeling much better. FINALLY. Feeling something like a human being again. SHOCKING.

Not quite human enough, unfortunately, to take the kids sledding, in spite of the inches of snow today. Human enough, however, to have fun tossing snowballs with Ethan on the way to the corner diner where we met his best friend for lunch today,. We scraped fresh snow off the parked cars on the two blocks of our walk and packed it down as best we could.

The snowballs were fluffy, disintegrating as they flew. Which was fine by me as Ethan still has the tendency to make up for accuracy deficits by standing WAY too close when he lobs them.

It was lovely to get out of the house, to snarf down a quick lunch and steal a few minutes of uninterrupted grown-up conversation with my friend, the mother of Ethan;s friend. Sacrificing my iphone to the boys greasy food fingers was so worth it.

And then, Saturday being Saturday, there was basketballl. This week was my turn with Jake, who did not want to leave the cozy confines of home/cat/TV, but I made come out anyway because the wide world must not be ignored.

He kept thinking that every snow-covered car we passed was OUR car, and it distressed him no end that we had not found our car yet, no matter how many times I explained to him that we were, in fact, parked one block away in the OPPOSITE direction of the school he plays basketball in, so would definitely NOT not be seeing our car on our walk there.

But Jake being Jake, he still had to ask about it. Every. parked. car. we. passed. And I also answered the question "What color is our car, Mom?" about 1,000 times on that 10 block walk, too. (It's still green.)

I was worn out by the time we arrived. Getting Jake out of his snowboots and into his sneakers left me wanting to collapse in a puddle. And taking his mittens off reminded him how he had left his other pair at school and nearly set off another crying jag like the one he'd had upon arriving home on Friday. But only nearly. (Thank goodness.)

But still my heart swelled with pride as I heard the coach setting up Jake's new helper this week by telling him: "You'll be paired up with Jacob today, he;s our best shooter." And even though Ethan's games are more exciting and coherent, actually recognizable as "games," there is something so sweet about the special needs division; our kids trying so hard, their one-on-one helpers so kind.

And then afterwards we met up on Broadway with Ethan and Daddy for a snack and slogging home through the snow together. And then, home, the boys even played together for a few minutes -- if you count sitting on each other with the sitee attempting to throw the sitter off to be playing. (And i do, i SO DO!)

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OK, I cheated tonight! Clearly this was longer than 5 minutes - more like 10-15. But it felt to good to feel human enough to want to write, I just couldn't stop. I figure I will be forgiven. (Right, Fadra?)

And now? To bed!

New to SOCS? It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spell-checking. This is writing in the raw.

You can do it, too! Click on the picture link and let's hear your 5 minutes of brilliance...

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Friday? Really?

2012-01-20T21:23:00.000-05:00

(This photo has nothing to do with anything in this post.)

Today is Friday? Really?

How did that happen? It was just Monday, like, 10 minutes ago.

Wasn't it?

No?

(Insert much cursing here, especially the word that is alliterative with the day of the week it actually is today.)

I have gotten nothing done. NOTHING.

I've been sick as a dog all week.

A few different things all converging.

Including - TMI WARNING: LOOK AWAY IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT GIRL-PART RELATED THINGS - my first period in 3 months that came on like gang-busters and has knocked me completely on my ass for 3 days. I know last year I told you all I thought maybe I was done with all this.

Not quite.

Instead I've been continuing on, regularly irregular, for the past year.

Fun. (Not.)

And today Ethan was home sick, too, with the same sore-throat-voice-stealing-nasty-cold I've got.

So I have had to scrape myself off the sofa to bring care and comfort to him all day. Because sick kids need their Mom. Right?

And while sometimes I find hard times inspirational? Not this week. This week I have had neither the energy nor motivation to write anything.

I feel lumpen.

Completely.

And yet my blog is staring at me, glaring at me, with a Monday date on my last post.

(Insert more cursing here.)

I got... nothing.

And not the wonderful nothing like my friend Neil's amazing post last week.

Serious nothing.

(Although I have stolen a page from him and included an instagram photo since I figure if I've given you nothing really to read I should at least give you something semi-interesting to look at.)

My mojo is missing.

My lyricism has left the building.

But I am feeling sad in the silence.

I miss you guys.

Even if I have nothing more to say than: Hello. I'm still here. I'll pull through this all, and hopefully be back sometime soon with words wiser and worth reading.

And until then?

(Insert more cursing here.)

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Monday Listicles: 10 Things I Said I'd Never Do

2012-01-16T13:04:00.002-05:00

Another Monday, another Stasha’s Monday Listicles. And today's topic came from... Greta of Not Enough Patience and Never Enough Jewelry.

She said: So, your topic (should you choose to accept it) is: "I'll Never...": The Top Ten Things You Said You Would NEVER Do And Have Caught Yourself Doing.

I don't know why she thinks parenthood would cause us to frequently eat our words. Oh, wait, I so do. So here it is:

Ten Things I Said I Would NEVER Do (as a parent) And Have Caught Myself Doing:

#1. Feed my kids junky "kid food." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you will know that Ethan rarely eats anything but. He is going to turn INTO an organic hot dog someday, because he eats so many of them. And? He considers the color green in a food to be indicative of it being POISON. At least he eats. I've got a friend whose son hates just about everything, including pizza.

#2. Make separate meals for everyone, be a short order cook in my own home. I even once said "I will make one family meal and if the kids don't like it they have a choice of a peanut butter sandwich as an alternative or nothing. And once they are old enough they can fix it themselves." Wow, was that a lifetime ago! I thought things would run so orderly in my house. That was before autism and special diets and THESE particular children landed in my home (and heart). Because letting your (nonexistent) children go hungry in theory? Not at all the same as watching your already too skinny actual child eat nothing and be fine with that.

#3. Lose my evening time to the kids, every night. I have a very organized, disciplined friend who had kids long before me. I thought she did a great job with them, and asked for lots of advice, thought I could just copy her parenting tricks and all would go as smoothly in my house. She had told me: "9 PM is when kid-time is over in my house. They can stay up later if they want, but in their rooms and quietly. After 9 PM is grown-up time in the common spaces." What a lovely philosophy. And COMPLETELY impossible in our situation. The boys share a TINY room and Jake crashes at 7, while Ethan can not ever fall asleep before 10, often later.

#4. Ask my kid the soul-killing question "What is WRONG with you?" OK, I am REALLY not proud that I crossed this line once. It was Ethan (of course) getting on my very last nerve, doing something completely ridiculous over and over and ignoring my request to stop. Something I thought he REALLY knows better, and aught not to do at all. Before we had identified ADD and poor impulse control were just a part of his makeup. Sigh.

#5. Let my body go to hell. Yes, B.C. (before children) I had looked at a formerly skinny friend of mine who'd had a kid and thought: "Geez, it's been 3 years, shouldn't that gut be gone by now?" HA! It's been over NINE years now that I have been resembling a Weeble, with no end in sight.

#6. Yell. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! (Wiping the tears from my eyes and picking myself up off the floor from laughing so hard.)

#7. Let my kids watch too much TV. This is a REALLY hard one. I HATE how much the TV is on, in our home. It goes against everything I believe in, how the kids should be doing REAL things, engaged in the world and with other people. However, with this particular set of kids? "Engaged" with each other? 99% of the time that means fighting. Yelling, screaming, hurting each other. It's the autism. And it sucks. But they will both sit peacefully together in the living room if the TV is on. And sometimes (OK, a lot of the time) I really, really need peaceful.

#8. Completely lose touch with the culture that I love - movies, theater, art, music, avant-garde performance. When I was a young woman in New York City's Off-Off Broadway, Performance Art, and Independent Cinema world, I had older friends with kids who brought them along to all sorts of unusual and avant-garde events and I thought: "Yes, that's how I'm going to parent! No Disney dreck, "kid-culture" drivel for my offspring! I will open and expand their minds at a young age." HA HA HA! I wasn't counting on autism rendering one of my kids perpetually much less mature than his biological age. Nor his brother's insistence that all this culture stuff is BORING. Sigh. I haven't been to an art opening in 9 years.

#9. Tell my kid: "I'm cold, you need to put on a sweater." Yup. Well, I did expand on that and add: "and it's really, really cold out and I know you don't feel cold yet, but you will soon, and I don't want you to catch a chill." And it WAS really, really cold out! But still...

#10. Spit on a napkin and wipe my kid's face with it. Well, in my defense, his face was REALLY, really dirty! (Hangs head in shame.)

aaaand that's all folks! What's on YOUR list of backpedaling?

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SOC Sunday: MIA via ASD

2012-01-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I have hooked up with Fadra's SOC Sunday meme. I head over to catch today's link and what do I find? A beautiful new logo!

Thank goodness for SOC Sunday. Because that's about I can manage today. And barely that.

@@@@@@@

I feel hollow, scooped out; a brittle husk surrounding a great nothingness. And not the lovely nothing of Zen but the bleak nothing of having been shaved away until there is very little left, just a concave space surrounded by little curled up, crumbling bits of me.

I have been AWOL from my blog for 3 days now, the longest gap in a long time. Three days ago I started a post called "Another Day, Another (Autistic) Meltdown" trying to find the gallows humor in what I've been going through this week. But it just didn't come. I couldn't laugh. And I was tired of crying.

Jake has not been a very tantrummy kid. Until now. He's going through something. God knows what. Hyper-emotional. Is it the ugly middle stage of some forward progress, or his medication in need of tweaking? How can I know - they often look the same from here.

All I know is that for the last week, nearly EVERY evening (and some daytimes too) there is about an hour of crying and screaming. Because I have done something HORRIBLE like turned off the TV. And yes that's only one hour out of twenty four, but what it does is suck the life and energy out of the other 23 for me.

I;m really being unraveled by it. And i feel like a wimp, like a wussy because some families with autistic kids have been going thorough tihs for YEARS on end. And multiple hours / incidents per day, day in and day out. While I know (hope & pray, but mostly know because it has happened before) that this will pass here in our home, waiting it out is exhausting me.

Jacob WILL find his even keel, his usual sunny disposition will right himself once again. Because when he is not weeping he is still happy as a hundred proverbial clams, chatting away, demanding as usual I "Look Mommy!" at everything he is doing and listen to every thought that floats through his brain.

"Daddy is a man, Mommy"

"Why yes, yes he is, Jacob."

"He was a baby!"

"Yes, he was, Jacob. We were all babies once, that's how human beings - people - start out. Me, Daddy, you too. you and Ethan."

"I was a baby!"

"Yes, Jacob, a beautiful baby. And now you're my wonderful, big boy."

(SIGH)

And so it goes.

@@@@@@@

Still here? You've a brave soul. Thanks for making it through the cave with me. And there's a reward: Tomorrow's post is funny, funny I tell ya!

New to SOCS? It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spell-checking. This is writing in the raw.

You can do it, too! Click on the picture link and let's hear your 5 minutes of brilliance...

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Nearly Wordless Wednesday

2012-01-11T20:09:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday, after the boys' basketball games...

Ethan & a friend enjoying a post-game ice cream

Jacob, still moody after the previous night's MASSIVE meltdown

And you thought I couldn't do it! (Hell, I thought I couldn't do it, either.)

And, as usual, I’m linking up to Wordless / Wordful Wednesdays... at Angry Julie Monday... at 5 Minutes for Mom... at live and love...out loud... at Dagmar*s momsense... at Parenting by Dummies.

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Hopeful Parents Day Again

2012-01-10T23:40:00.000-05:00

Well, today is the 10th of the month, so I'm over at HP as usual. Today's post, however, is a rerun.

Jake was home sick today. Nothing major - just a sore throat and slight fever - but he was clearly feeling too punk to be put on the bus this morning, was low energy and very needy all day. And this, my first day with Dan back home after nearly a week in Seattle, me holding down the fort on my own, I wasn't expecting to spend, essentially, as a human pillow.

So my plans to write a brand spanking new HP post during the day? Out the window. Not wanting to miss my HP day, I am bringing a special post from December over there.

So if you haven't read it before, or if you want to see it again, come on over to Hopeful Parents and read my post:

See you back here tomorrow!

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Monday Listicles: 10 Things I Have Done to Make a Living

2012-01-09T23:00:00.000-05:00

Well, it's Monday, so it must be time for Stasha’s Monday Listicles again. And today's topic came from... ME!

And, it seems, I'm being late to my own party. (And not for the first time, I must admit.) You would think with my having known the topic for, oh, two weeks, I would have had this post written long ago and ready to pop up at one minute past midnight, be at the top of the link-up over at Stasha's.

Well, think again.

It's been a rough beginning to the new year is all I can say. And my ADD is acting up something fierce. So anyway, it's still Monday here (barely) and will be for a few more hours in at least some parts of the world, so let's proceed shall we?

Today's topic (as chosen by moi) is:

Top Ten Strange (odd/unusual/funny/interesting) Jobs you have held in your life.

#1. Well, to start with, when I was a baby my father was an advertising photographer and sometimes he needed a baby for a shoot or for his portfolio. So, for a very short time, I was a baby model. He also was a fine art/documentary "street photographer" (with work in Life magazine, etc.) and took loads of pictures of me for that, too. Wanna see?

Jim Steinhardt: "Girl with Balloon (ME!) at Central Park Zoo" 1963

#2. Then my Dad realized he hated advertising and got out of that business, bought an art gallery and frame shop on Long Island and it grew into an international and American crafts gallery of some renown. And I grew up in the family business, spending Saturdays and many of my summer days at the gallery.

I couldn't even tell you exactly when playing there became working there, but I distinctly remember setting up and helping to serve drinks at show openings from about the age of six on. And I know that from the time I was twelve I was selling in the store and working as a buyers assistant, accompanying my parents to big national craft fairs like Rhinebeck and the wholesale showrooms in the city.

Holiday time was always busy, and as a teenager I worked full long days every Saturday in November and December, and then when the "blue laws" were repealed (yes, I'm old enough to have lived when NO businesses outside of restaurants were open on Sundays) Sundays in December, too.

When I was 15, I ran the gift wrap "department" (me & a friend of mine) on the weekends for the holiday season. To this day I can eyeball any unusually sized or shaped object, instantly figure out what size box it will or won't fit in, and wrap it neatly with nice ribbon bows to boot.

My most memorable sales interaction with a customer? It was the day before Christmas, when the desperate men who hadn't a clue would arrive, and you could sell them practically anything. He was buying jewelry. Three nice pieces. One for his wife, and one each for his two "girlfriends." He wanted to spend about the same for each. Wrote lovey notes on gift cards to be included inside the boxes. Had us put a little code on the bottom of the wrapped boxes so he could know which was which.

How much did we want to "accidentally" mess up the code for him? The whole staff was abuzz with wicked plans to do this while his gifts were being wrapped. In the end of course, we didn't. A customer is a customer, and he was a good spender. (Times 3!) But we talked about him for years to come.

#3. Away at college, through friends I fell into a summer job as a founding member of the Sunflour Bakery Collective in Bar Harbor, Maine. Of course, first I had to learn how to bake bread, which I did in a hurry that spring.

This was not a typical "job." We all lived together, communally on the uppermost floor of the building which was not in any way set up or zoned for habitation, while the landlord conveniently looked the other way. We each made little nests for ourselves using odd materials found on the second floor of the building, in what had been a woodworking shop at one point. My "chair" was an ornate antique toilet stuffed with my sleeping bag to make a cushion.

We often took in like-minded (i.e. hippie) folks who were passing through town and let then "camp out" on the second floor and share meals with us for a few hours of work in the bakery. It was all very whole grain and natural (naturally), and actually quite delicious. I think I ate better that summer that at any time in my life before or since.

#4. The following year, I spent my summer in Cambridge / Boston with a combination of 2 jobs to keep me afloat: showing up at 5 AM on the weekends to be the breakfast chef at the very vegan Golden Temple Emporium Cafe (yes, run by people with big white turbans on their heads). Can you say "scrambled tofu" anyone?

That was combined with my weekday job of slinging the greasiest of burgers and fries (while wearing hot pants!) to a lunch crowd of finance guys at The Saint, which happened to also be the local lesbian bar at night, which I frequented... frequently. And the irony of all this was not lost on me, I laughed about it constantly.

#5. Then I landed in California for a few years. You may have heard me mention this one before, but yes, in 1981 I actually WAS a Bean Sprout farmer in the wilds of Mendocino county.

We were a womens collective on 160 acres on a ridge with a number of odd buildings on the flat land at the top, and among them 3 geodesic domes. One of these was given over to the business of hydroponically growing bean sprouts that were sold to restaurants and in health food stores in Northern California.

My tasks included washing the sprouts daily, cutting them when they were the right length, bagging them, and assembling the "mixed sprout" salads. Also driving up & down the coast for delivery. And yes, we had to remember to put shirts on when driving off the property.

Looking back, I don't think we had a license and can't ever remember a health inspection. But those were different, looser, freer times. And I don't THINK we ever gave anyone salmonella poisoning.

#6. Also in California, now living more conventionally in Santa Cruz, I became the assistant manager of the Polar Bear ice cream shop in Capitola. And my right (scooping) arm became twice as strong as my left. I was living with a woman who had a 6 year old daughter who was THRILLED to be able to come in and order anything she wanted for free.

And no, I wasn't stealing. The owners wisely gave us a monthly allotment of free ice cream, which kept us all honest about what we ate or took home or gave away. And made us very popular with our friends.

#7. Back on the East coast and back in college, I found occasional work as an artists model. Yes, nude. And people this is HARD work. Holding a pose that seems just dandy at 2 minutes will feel like torture by minute 10 with your muscles screaming for release. And, totally exposed, if you twitch, they will see. And yell at you to keep steady.

#8. My main job while in college was at the local pottery gallery (using my family business talents at last) but on the summers, to not lose me during them, the gallery owners - who were 3 potters themselves - had me come out to their studio to do odd jobs for the seven potters who worked there and shared kilns.

I was not a potter, and it quickly became clear that my natural talents did not lie in this direction, but everyone found things for me to do to help out that did not require actual potting, including wedging clay (great anger release), packing orders for shipping (I still have nightmares about plastic peanuts), and, most terrifyingly, carrying precious fragile pieces to and from the gas kiln which was outdoors, out back, DOWN a little hill. No, I never dropped anything, but did have daily palpitations, thank you.

#9. 1988. Out of school and back in New York City, while working my way into jobs in the film and television industry and also directing and stage managing plays and performance art off-off Broadway, I landed a regular gig with the brand spanking new World Financial Center as an assistant stage manager for their arts and events program, including a month of opening galas.

As I was a bit more mature and put together than a lot of the kids they had working for them, I was usually assigned to babysit the talent, including escorting them to the "stage," which was always rigged in different places and often far, far from the holding areas.

This also meant that I would be seen in the "front of the house" and had to work evening events in formal wear and heels. On miles of marble floors. (Ouch!) Highlights included: a frantic search for one of the coconuts of Kid Creole & the Coconuts who had decided to go look for a friend in the audience, minutes before their call and watching Grace Jones go into makeup and be transformed into... Grace Jones.

Best of all was escorting Cab Calloway up onto the stage itself because he was rather elderly and unsteady on his feet and the steps didn't have a handrail.

This was also the first time I was given a newfangled "cell phone" thingy - about 8 pounds of equipment with a handset connected to a rectangular box that hung from a shoulder strap - this was 1988, people!

1988 Cell Phone. Really.

#10. Fast forward many, many years (see the calendar pages whirl by) and come to my current occupation: Autism Mom. I am an amateur neurobiologist, behaviorist, teacher, translator, pharmacologist, allergist, gluten & casein-free chef, and deep hug giver. In my 9th year of an ongoing experiment in radical sleep deprivation.

Definitely the strangest "job" I have ever had. But the most fulfilling. Worth every minute of it.

And, believe it or not, (believe!) I could go on and on. But I'll stop here at ten.

See y'all next week!

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Tough Night in Autismville

2012-01-07T23:27:00.000-05:00

As any of you who tapped into my Twitter stream last night would know, Jacob had a really rough time of it at bedtime (as did I). I am still trying to figure out exactly what happened, to fill in the gaps, figure out the whys and wherefores, but how it manifested was this:

A one hour non-stop crying and screaming fest from 9 to 10 pm, followed by another hour of cycling through whimpering, tears, giggles, and more tears until about 11 when he finally fell asleep, exhausted. Poor guy.

And Ethan, of course, could not go to bed until Jake went down. He lay on the sofa, escaped - as much as he could in our small apartment - into his book.

Jake does not melt down often, is generally pretty damn happy. For a kid on the autism spectrum this is awesome, and I am grateful for it every day.

But when he does?

Oh, my.

He is the unhappiest boy on the planet.

It starts slowly. His eyes well up, his lip trembles. I can see it coming, but an seemingly powerless to stop it.

Sometimes it's a brief shower, a quick downpour, and then it moves on.

But, more likely than not, he just has to go all the way through the maelstrom until the happy boy I know can emerge out the other side.

I am alone with the kids this weekend - Dan is still in Seattle - and so don't have the time or energy to write out the full long story of this and still get enough sleep, but I can copy and paste in my tweets from Friday night, so you can see a bit of what I was up against (in 140 character snippets):

And then, of course, today, Jacob woke up asking "What happened to me last night?" and "What happened on Friday, Mom?" and wanted to TALK all day long about his crying and screaming AND about swinging at school, when I just wanted to forget it and move on. Sigh.

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Go (the F) to sleep, Ethan.

2012-01-06T01:29:00.001-05:00

Ethan was talky, talky, talky tonight at bedtime.

Again.

Sigh.

The gems:

E: You know what, Mom?

Me: Ethan, it's very late, you're going to be tired and cranky in the morning. Go to sleep now.

E: Know what I love the most? Life! Being alive!

Me: That's great! I'm glad you feel that way.

E: Know what the best thing in the world is?

Me: Go to sleep, Ethan.

E: Getting to be alive.

Me: OK, Ethan that's a great feeling, now stop talking and go to sleep.

E: Want to hear a great tongue tickler word?

Me: No, I want...

E: Zucchini! Isn't that a great word? I love tongue ticklers.

Me: Ethan, talking is keeping you awake. Stop talking, lie still and you will fall asleep.

E: But what would happen if someone tried to REALLY tickle your tongue, like stick their hand in your mouth and...

Me: Tongues aren't actually ticklish, Ethan they're... STOP we are not having a discussion, you are going to sleep.

E: But what about...

Me: No but. Stop. Go to sleep.

E: So is Tigerclaw really all bad or is there still some good in him?

(Yes, he's just started reading the Warriors series. Months of confusing, similar sounding cat-character names lie in my future.)

Me: You'll find out yourself, as you read. You're not roping me into book talk. Shhh. Sleep.

E: But do you think...

Me: Shhhhh.

E: Mooooom, I was in the middle of saying something!

Me: Yes, and that's the problem. You cannot talk and sleep at the same time.

E: But I'm not sleepy, and I WANT to talk!

(lightbulb going on over the mother's head)

Me: You miss Dad, don't you?

E: Yes, I do, I really do! (big sniffle) I just feel so sad that he's not here and it's going to be days and days before he comes back home. I wish we could just instantaneously transport ourselves to Seattle so he could kiss me goodnight.

Me: Me too, honey, me too. I keep thinking he's about to walk in the door at any minute, then I remember he's on a trip. We'll call him tomorrow, OK?

E: OK, Mom.

(forehead kiss)

Me: Sleep now, babe.

E: I love you, you're the best mom in the whole world. For me that is. I'm sure everyone else thinks their mom is the best, too.

Me: I love you, too, kid. Now, no more words, REALLY. Time. For. Sleep.

(2 minutes later, cue light snoring)

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Wordless Wednesday: What I did on my Winter Vacation

2012-01-04T23:30:00.000-05:00

Actually, this would be more accurately: What WE did on OUR winter vacation. Because I was never alone, not even for 5 minutes... and as I'm the family photographer, there are never any pictures of ME... so herewith are some highlights:

The day after Christmas, we drove up to our in-laws' house in the Berkshires for a few days, where we go every summer and some winters, too. There was absolutely NO snow - except on the slopes where they make it, of course.

Thanks to Ethan's Aunt (my sister-in-law) we got some free package passes to Butternut that include EVERYTHING: equipment rental, day lift ticket and a group lesson. The helmet is extra, but I think my son's brains were worth $12 a day, so we sprang for that.

It was awesome, because Ethan really wanted to learn how to ski and neither Dan nor I do, ourselves.

Skiing!

First day, Ethan was in a group of 1, so he got a free private lesson - WIN!

By the 2nd day he was riding the lift

Skiing!

A friend of mine says, if you're not falling you're not learning. Ethan did a lot of learning.

What Jake did while Ethan skied.

Tuesday the 27th was the last night of Hanukkah. We light the menorah for the last time this year. You can tell this is at my in-laws' house and not our apartment because it is so nice and new and clutter-free.

Waiting for presents.

All 8 candles

"... and while we are playing, the candles are burning low..."

And, as ever, the views from their windswept hill were stunning, especially at sunset.

End of day sky in Great Barrington

Back in the city, Ethan had a playdate and I had fun shooting the pretty, late afternoon, wintery, city skies with my new favorite toy: instagram.

On January 2nd, the last day of break, we took a jaunt with friends over to the Liberty Science Center, just across the Hudson river, in New Jersey. It's a great hands-on, interactive science museum, and while Jake and I have been there recently, it's been a while for Ethan.

It is so interesting to see how much more the kids are getting into the actual science learning of the exhibits, now that they are older; how they can read the displays themselves, follow the directions, really do investigating and exploring.

Who doesn't love messages and hidden meanings?

Ethan and a friend coloring pixels

(doo doo deeeee doo) Science!

Spaceship or telecommunications teaching module?

Jake LOVED to play with & manipulate his own image.

Some of the signage in the communication exhibit made me sad.

And then it was home, early to bed, school the next morning, How was your vacation?

And, as usual, I’m linking up to Wordless / Wordful Wednesdays... at Angry Julie Monday... at 5 Minutes for Mom... at live and love...out loud... at Dagmar*s momsense... at Parenting by Dummies.

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Back in the Swing

2012-01-03T16:51:00.000-05:00

The mornings are cruel again. 5:45 does not come easily to me. Especially after such a long spate of respite: ten whole days of late risings. No bus to be met, lunches made, homework double checked, backpacks packed, sleepy children to be cajoled and scolded into hurry, hurry, hurrying through pajama shedding, clothing donning, teeth brushing, and breakfast wolfing.

I don't realize how much I adore our languidly paced mornings until they are gone, gone, gone. Children in pajamas until lunchtime or later (me too, some days, me too). Sigh.

Back in the grind now. 3 hours of my workday slogged through by 8:45. My workday which feels like 24 hours sometimes. The 24-7 that is parenting, even still when they are located elsewhere for 6 hours of that, because there is always the clean-up and the prep and the appointments to be made and the insurance companies to spend hours on the phone with because clearly my time could not possibly be valuable.

And then there are the phone calls to come pick them up from school because what was seemingly just cranky in the morning has turned into puking or fever by lunchtime. So all plans are scotched and I must be given over to being a lap, a pillow, the warm safe place my ill child needs to be curled up into. But thankfully not today.

My "to do" list would frighten even the most efficient and stalwart, and that is certainly not me, not even by a long shot. I can only pick and choose today, selecting the screamingly urgent and the seemingly doable to push up to the top, attempt to tackle. I promise myself to not start out the new year feeling failed, inadequate; to accept that I will only get do much done, that reading with my children is more important than a tidy house.

But we must have food, my mother must have her medications, the mountain of clean laundry must get sorted, drawered and shelved before my children wail that they have no underpants to wear.

I blink and it's time to meet Jake's bus home. Don't ask how much of the list I've gotten to, I don't want to talk about it.

Today, sitting on the sofa, munching his chips, Jake asked me "What did you do today when you were waiting for me, Mommy?" (meaning while he was at school). He's never asked anything at all like that and I was floored.

And even though he got bored with the answer before I was halfway through, still my heart sang with the question asked, with his knowing I am a separate person who does things he doesn't know about when I'm not with him, with his curiosity, his interest in the world outside himself. (Pffft to the notion of the autistic lacking a "theory of mind.")

It aroused this thing called hope that flutters its butterfly wings in my chest sometimes. It comes when he asks to see my face when I'm looking elsewhere, when he springs to my side to share something he's happy about (usually a win on his DS game but I'm not going to be picky), when he showers kisses up and down my arm like Gomez to Morticia and says "I love you Mommy" out of the blue.

I love you too, baby, I love you too.

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Monday Listicles: Impossible New Years Resolutions

2012-01-02T10:48:00.001-05:00

Well, it's time for Stasha’s first Monday Listicles of the new year, which is reflected in the theme... Today's topic came from Theresa, the Mountain Momma, who said we should write a list of ten New Years resolutions we will never keep. Softball, I tell ya; could do this one in my sleep (and I kind of did).

You can probably guess what these are all going to be. But I will go ahead and spell them out for you anyway. And in an annotated list, because simple & easy are just not in my vocabulary. And then at the end a wee surprise for you. So...

10 New Years Resolutions I Will NEVER Keep:

1. Stop Procrastinating. Also probably nearly every other resolution on this list would be moot if I could keep to this one. Chance of that happening? The proverbial snowball in hell. I am ADD-rific, remember?

2. Exercise more. Well, I better say exercise regularly. Because I am likely to exercise at least a tiny bit this year, and that would mean I would be keeping this resolution... since ANYTHING is more than the absolute nothing I did this past year.

3. Stop eating sugar. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

4. Get to bed early & get enough sleep. OK folks, I have two sons and one is a natural early-to-bed-early-riser, while the other is a classic night owl (like me & their father). The early riser catches a 6:40 school bus, which means I am up at 5:45 on school days, while the other one doesn't have to walk out the door until much later, can roll out of bed at 7:30, so often stays up until 10pm. Can you do math and see how impossible this resolution is? Yes, doomed before I even start.

5. Get off the computer when the kids are home. I'm going to really TRY to keep this one. Because I really don't want my son to declare once again: "Mom, you love the internet more than you love us!" But? Realistically? Too addicted to my blog and FaceBook and Twitter and other people's blogs to keep it. I WILL cut down though, and only when they are on their screens, too.

6. Cook more. I make this resolution every year and never keep it. The fact that there are so many limits to what Ethan WILL eat and to what Jacob CAN eat, and all of the above is mostly what Dan and I do not WANT to eat... means cooking = making 3 separate meals. Not happening. Someday... someday... but that day will not likely fall into this year.

7. No more dinners in front of the TV. Sigh. I wish I could say this one was do-able. I grew up with lively dinner table discussions, truly enjoyable conversations with my parents, nearly every night. But the way Jacob's autism manifests is that if the TV isn't on? He will talk non-stop loudly about his own topics and ask the same questions over and over and over again, making dinner table conversation nearly impossible. So the TV goes on and the boys eat separately from my husband and I (who rarely eat together on weeknights anyway).

8. Keep the house clean and tidy. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

9. Keep my car clean and tidy. See above.

10. NOT pick up my iPhone when I am interacting with actual human beings, even when my "new stuff" alerts ding. Wow, when did I become one of those rude people looking at the screen in my hand instead of the people at the table I am sitting and drinking coffee with? (Answer: when I got my first smart phone.) Will try hard to keep this partially, only picking it up for important DMs from people I am waiting to hear from. Wish me luck!

@@@@@@@

And now, here's the surprise: I get to be responsible for next week's Monday Listicles theme!

As I have lately been obsessed with plans for getting back into the working game this year and trying to figure out how I can morph all the skills I've acquired in all my old career(s) and jobs into something I can currently earn a living at, I have been thinking of all the many odd and various jobs I have held and skills I've amassed in my long life. And I thought it would be fun to make you all do that too.

So Next Monday's Listicle topic is: Top Ten Strange (odd/unusual/funny/interesting) Jobs you have held in your life.

And if you are young or have had a much less varied life than I have and haven't had 10 jobs yet, then make it 10 interesting things you have done / tasks you have been responsible for as PART of a job. And I am totally willing to define "Job" loosely here... as in parenting is clearly a job, and so is being a student, or volunteer positions including things like PTA President.

I can't wait to see what you come up with! See y'all next week!

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2011 Round-up: What I Loved on OTHER People's Blogs

2011-12-31T23:05:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been some ride on the rollercoaster this year, folks, hasn't it? And today, on the final day of the old year, I'm going to do something new and different here on the old blog:

Besides my Squashed Mom year in review post, "The Squashed Best of 2011" (which went up Thursday) all about where my blog has gone in 2011 (and, no, "to Hell in a handbasket" is NOT the right answer, here, folks) I also want to share some of the awesomeness I have found in OTHER people's blogs, on the interwebs, among my blogging friends and brethren.

So I have compiled for you a short, very unscientific, VERY incomplete list of a few of my faves and raves of 2011.

And if you know I love you and you don't have a post on this list? Please know it's just an artifact of my tired, ADD-rific mommy brain. I'm probably slapping myself on the forehead right this instant, going: "Doh! How could I have forgotten THAT amazing post by wonderful HER!" - so please add a link to your one of your favorite 2011 posts in the comments section!

Here goes...

In no particular order, I have been moved to laughter. tears, astonishment, or action by these wonderful posts (among many more) this past year:

Mothering, Disability and Race from the lovely Elizabeth of a moon, worn as if it had been a shell

In the Beginning from my blog-heart-friend Adrienne of No Points for Style

the ghost of john wayne and the perils of eleven from the adventurous Deborah of MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa

Invisible from the delightful Momo of Momo Fali.

Adventures in Depression from the wonderful and very brave Allie of Hyperbole and a Half

Who Are You? from the wise and deep Alysia of Try Defying Gravity

I Dreamed You from the amazing Amanda of Last Mom on Earth

The Only Way To Make It Through This from our dear Empress (Alexandra) of Good Day Regular People

Whispered fingertips from Kris of Pretty All True who needs no qualifier, because she just IS all that.

The Obsessive Joy of Autism from Julia Bascom of Just Stimming and also Quiet Hands because her words are THAT important.

This Is Not Really About Cake from the "badass" Kelly of Mocha Momma

Of Spiderman, a bully, and lessons learned from the great-assed Cheryl of Mommypants

I keep thinking about the nurse. from the kick-ass Eden of Edenland

Top Ten Things You Should (and Shouldn't) Say to The Parent of an Autistic Child from the highly opinionated (and often hysterically funny) Stark Raving Mad Mommy.

On growing up with strange sensory reactions, and the difference between passing and being passed off. from outspoken Amanda of Ballastexistenz

I want my son back from the inspiring Blue Sky of Looking for Blue Sky

worst case scenario from the incomparable Maggie of Flux Capacitor

what i would tell you from the beloved Jess of a diary of a mom

Sunshine on the water is so lovely from eloquent Emily of Emily Rosenbaum

in the midst of this from the, well, extraordinary Heather of The Extraordinary Ordinary

The Bridge: One Terrible Night from Anna See of An Inch of Gray who has gone where none of us wish to go, with more grace and fortitude than I can possibly imagine.

I could go on and on and on, but 21 feels like a nice number, so I'll stop here. In hindsight, looking over it, I find this list was probably a bit heavy on the autism and special needs stuff. But then again, so is my life. So. is. my. life.

Wishing all of you a wonderful New Year, a terrific 2012, wherever the next turn of the great wheel takes you!

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The Squashed Best of 2011

2011-12-29T00:39:00.000-05:00

It's the end of the year, and, as I said in last year's "Squashed Best" post "a traditional time to both reflect back and look forward." I stand by that.

Although I will say that looking backward is so much easier than looking forward. Especially when you're old, like me. (Now is when you're supposed to protest that I'm not that old, or at least that I don't LOOK it.)

As I'm now approaching my 2nd blogaversary, it is fun to be revisiting things I've done from last year, creating bloggy "traditions," as it were. So obviously I had to do this, the SECOND annual Year in Blog wrap-up for The Squashed Bologna, 2011 edition.

This year there seem to be a gazillion people doing wrap-up linkys on their blogs, and I'm probably going to link this up with about half of them. So if you've come over from one and you're new here: Hello, nice to meet you! Pull up a chair and stay a while, have a nice meander through my blog. I'd love to offer you a cup of tea, but that would fry your motherboard.

And if you're an old blog-friend (I mean long-time, I'm not calling you old, really) maybe you missed one of these. If not, go visit an old favorite, or just say "Hi and Happy New Year." Whatever!

So, without further ado, some posts I'm fond of from 2011:

January: O is for Oxygen {All about my sons' early language development, or lack thereof.}

February: In my Grandmother's House {My first memoir post - and it's a doozy - about some strange goings-on at Grandma Dunia's.}

March: The Last Room {Standing in the room my father spent the very end of his life in, remembering.}

April: B is for Best Friend {About Jacob's lack of, and desire for a real friend, and one day in the playground when a kind boy played with him.}

May: Thoughts on my son's getting older and getting stranger {What it is: Jacob is still autistic.}

June: H is for Holding Hands {A small, quiet, tender moment with my elderly, widowed mother.}

July: Breakers {At the beach with my sons, remembering summers past, reveling in the ocean.}

August: Missing my Father {His absence as a presence in my life that comes and goes, sometimes more acutely than others.}

September: Choosing kindness {Choosing kindness when it would be so easy to be harsh; both with my children and with myself.}

October: Blink {Watching a baby while sitting with my sons, remembering, and observing how quickly the time goes, trying to be mindful and appreciative.}

November: What remains possible {Another dispatch from the trenches of a hard day of special needs parenting.}

December: Skipping Maybe not my objective "best" but a fun and funny little post, because I am getting tired of the heavy, and I reveal my sci-fi geek self therein. Enjoy!}

and on to 2012 we go....

So, as to the "looking forward" part? I really have no idea what 2012 will bring. More challenges, for sure. But also, hopefully, opportunities. Growth and bounding forward for my sons. Maybe even a bit of maturity (for me, I mean; my sons will certainly be doing some maturing).

I know one thing I am certain of in 2012 is that it will bring new connections and strengthen old. What I never imagined when I began this little blog nearly two years ago was how it would expand my life. I never foresaw the amazing community of (mostly women, mostly mom) bloggers that I would become a part of, and who would become such a vital part of my life in such a short expanse of time.

If 2011 has taught me anything it's how vital community is, both local IRL, and virtual on the interwebs. And I am grateful, grateful, grateful for the overflowing support and friendship therein.

And so I wish you all the happiest of New Years, and a 2012 that is wonderful and bountiful, exceeding your wildest dreams.

Linking this post up at:

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Wordless Wednesday: 2011 in Pictures

2011-12-28T04:33:00.000-05:00

Today I'm linking up with my friend Jessica of Four Plus an Angel who is hosting a year-end wrap-up linky thing:

This is what she says about it: Just create a post with 12 words or 12 pictures… a little year in review. Pick a word for each month of 2011 or a picture for each, or a 12 word sentence that sums up the year or a 12 picture collage, as long as it’s easy for you to put together and easy for others to read.

And me, because I can not QUITE follow any rules exactly as written (rebel, rebel...) and because I never met a simple easy task I couldn't find SOME way to over-think and over complicate... I am doing a picture AND a word for each month (and in two cases 3 words were necessary). You're welcome.

So, without further ado, my year in review:

January:


Surgery!

February:

Snow

March:

One Year Gone

April:

Awareness

May:

Mom

June:

Goodbye

July:

Birthday

August:

BlogHer11

September:

Tragedy

October:

ComiCon

November:

Thanksgiving

December:

Struggling (but Hopeful)

Aaaaaaaand, that's a wrap! Here's to a great 2012 for us all!

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Monday Listicles: 2011 Firsts

2011-12-26T22:14:00.001-05:00

Well, it's time for the last of Stasha’s Monday Listicles for the year, so fittingly it's a year's end theme. Today's topic came from Bridget at Twinisms:

Top Ten things we've done for the FIRST time in 2011.

Hmmm I'm pretty old so there's not a lot of "firsts" left for me, but I'm sure I can come up with something... or rather, 10 things, right?

1. Well I started out the year with a first. In December 2010 my gall bladder went rogue, so on January 5th, 2011 I had it removed. And that was the first non-pregnancy related surgery of my life; the first time I have been separated from any of the original parts my body came with.

2. I had my first triple-month-skip: getting only one period from August through the year's end so I am clearly moving into the endgame of my shift from peri- into full blown menopause.

3. I began better living through chemistry and went on anti-depressant medication for the first time in my life to deal with the on and off depression brought about by wonky biochemistry from the above 2 items.

4. OK, I'm hating to sound like too much of a downer here, wracking brain to come up with a cheerful & happy first... how's this: Jake & Ethan both went to sleep-away camps (for the first time!) for about a week this summer, at partially overlapping times, so Dan & I had the apartment to ourselves for 4 whole nights for the first time since the boys were born. We're talking 9 years here people! We were spontaneously going out at night without the babysitter tax, we were sleeping naked, we were sleeping in, we were... well I'm not telling you about THAT.

5. Related to #4 above: I drove through a hurricane for the first time in my life. Well it wasn't quite a hurricane yet, but rather the leading edge of one, and believe me that was enough. What happened was that Jake's camp in Massachusetts was directly in the projected path of Hurricane Irene. I had just picked up Ethan at his Pennsylvania camp & spent the night with friends there. So instead of bringing him home and having a night's rest before heading up to pick up Jake, Ethan & I drove through the outer bands of the storm to get him and then the 3 of us high-tailed it home like bats out of hell, racing the full-on storm, trying to make it into Manhattan before the bridges & tunnels got closed down (which never actually happened but there were rumors of its certainty). And that kind of excitement? Happy to have my first also be my last.

6. I finally started to write from memes and prompts and ended up going to surprising and wonderful places in my writing and blog.

7. As related to #6 above, I wrote FICTION for the first time in... oh, about 25 years. It came out of the blue as I was mulling over a prompt. And I really enjoyed having strange people talking away inside my head, even when they were yelling at me.

8. When I went out to San Diego for BlogHer11, I spent 4 nights away from my husband and kids for the first time since the twins were born. It was glorious. And may I confess? Until the last day... I barely missed them at all. Having 4 days in a row in which my time was all about ME was simply amazing after 9 years of full time, day-in & day-out care taking of young and old people.

9. Due to the lovely synergy between menopausal metabolism changes and stress eating (have I mentioned it's been a fairly shit year overall?) I topped 180 for the first time in my life, non-pregnant. Oops. Really need to do something about THAT in 2012.

10. I wrote my first "Top Ten" list post. Something I swore I'd never do. And I liked it, I really liked it. Stasha, you've created a monster... I can't stop. Lists, lists, lists, I love lists now!!!

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Happy Holidays

2011-12-25T00:30:00.000-05:00

From my family to yours:

Coffee Shop Santa, by Jim Steinhardt, New York City, 1949

Whatever you celebrate (we're having a typical '"Jewish Christmas" - Chinese food & a movie - then lighting the menorah because it's the 6th night of Hanukkah), we're wishing you and yours:

The Happiest of Holidays and a kick-ass New Year!

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5th Night of Hanukkah

2011-12-24T05:10:00.000-05:00

Hi there, friends. It's December 24th, and while some of you will be thinking "Christmas, Eve, yo!" over here it's the 5th night of Hanukkah, which I am sucking at this year.

We are not having a small group of friends over for latkes and menorah lighting tonight; not hosting the sweet little mostly-kids Hanukkah party as we have done for a number of years running.

Ethan is disappointed, and so am I. But I just... don't have it in me this year. I don't have the energy for the hustle and bustle it takes to pull that together, not even a haimish little party, like ours are.

If our apartment were bigger... if our apartment were tidier on a regular basis... if I had a sitter and more help... if Danny weren't so busy and otherwise occupied... if Jake didn't have autism... then, maybe.

I guess though, this is one of those times I'm actually grateful for Jake's autism because he doesn't care, doesn't really have any expectations of a party. He's just glad he doesn't have to go to school today and can spend the day with his beloved cat and his video games.

So in order to do something holiday-ish at least here on my blog, I give you the following awesomely kick-ass Hanukkah song. M'kay?

My little Happy Hanukkah to y'all.

And just to prove you don't have to be Jewish to be rocking the Hanukkah thing? I ~~stole~~ borrowed it from Stark.Raving.Mad.Mommy who isn't Jewish at all! (Well, she was born in Brooklyn which pretty much makes her an honorary Jew.)

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I'm Saying Things Over There

2011-12-23T12:01:00.000-05:00

Today? I'm not here. This is an illusion of a post, a mere wisp, designed to send you elsewhere...

Today I'm guesting over at Shell's place, Things I Can’t Say, with a post about bloggy friendship and how important the blogging community is to me.

Which is so fitting as Shell is a wonderful community-building sort of blogger.

So come read me over there, with my post: Dear Friends I've Never Met

And if you're here for the first time, coming to visit from over there...

Welcome! Nice to meet you. Please make yourself at home, poke around, stay awhile.

Don't know where to start? Want a little Squashed Mom road map? Click the links below for a nice assortment of my posts; a Bologna smorgasbord, if you will...

I'm an older mom, with nine year-old twin boys and an 89-year old mother in my care. I recently lost my 92 year old father and 93 year-old mother-in-law. I'm the squashed meat in the middle of the sandwich.

I write about birth and death, about being a mom and being a daughter.

I write about Autism in general, and my autistic son Jacob in particular.

I write about how adding in my and Ethan's ADD makes us a very neurodiverse family.

Sometimes I try to make you laugh.

And sometimes I try to make you cry.

Sometimes I tell stories from my childhood, and my family history.

And I once let Ethan take over my blog and tell his own story.

I also write every month for Hopeful Parents.

And sometimes I link up on Mondays with Be. Enough. Me.

Also? Ethan and Jacob do not get along well, so I started a guest post series to talk about sibling relationships in families with special needs kids, called Special Needs Sibling Saturdays.

I hope you like what you've seen, and that you'll come back to visit soon.

Finally, thanks so much to Shell for inviting me to her place today. It's an honor.

And for those of you celebrating Hanukkah, like we are: Happy Fourth Night (we're halfway there)!

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Leaps and Bounds

2011-12-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

Wide-eyed Jake at our building's Holiday party, 2011

I am happy to report some good news, for a change: Jake's original language has been making some marvelous jumps lately. The things he says out of the blue being startlingly observant and detailed, or his conversation loops are going deeper and deeper, continuing to make sense in wonderful and wondrous ways.

Jake to our neighbor sitting in the lobby with her leashed dog the other day as I brought him inside from his school bus:

Jake: You have a dog!

Neighbor: Yes I do!

Jake: Hi, doggie! What's your name?... (then, looking up at neighbor) What's his name?

Neighbor: His name is Jack.

Jake: Hi, Jack, I'm Jake!

Neighbor: He really likes kids.

Jake: (waving) Nice to meet you Jack! (then, to me, done here) Mommy can we go in and pet Cocoa?

A very nice, little social exchange!

Also, yesterday morning, my husband stumbled into the kitchen bleary-eyed as Jake was getting ready for school.

Jake: Daddy what's wrong with your eyes?

Dan: Nothing Jake, I just woke up, I'm still sleepy.

Jake: Dad, open up your sleepy eyes! Bigger, like this! (gives demo of his ridiculously wide-eyed stare)

And? Driving home from the big family Hanukkah party this past Sunday, we took a different route than usual into the city, as we were going to the East Side first, to drop off my mother.

As we pulled off the FDR into the city streets, Jake looked around and asked: "Are we home?"

I explained we WERE in the city but a different neighborhood, on the Upper East Side dropping off Grandma and would then be driving crosstown to the Upper West Side (where we live) through Central Park.

We were moments out of the park when Jake spotted a familiar building, and complained "That's not home, that's (name of our synagogue)!"

Boy does this all make me happy! Combined with his insights the other day (born, unfortunately, out of pain), combined with his amazing artistic spirit erupting, my son is really blossoming forth.

So as we head into this longest night tonight, having passed through the shortest day of the year today, I tell myself:

Have patience, have faith, it will be getting brighter; brighter and brighter, soon. Know it will happen, incrementally, day by day.

Believe; feel the coming sunshine, even whilst standing in the dark.

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Monday Listicles: Inside my Brain

2011-12-20T00:05:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know today is Tuesday. But since I fell asleep on the sofa (upright and lightly drooling, yes) before I could finish my Sunday evening post and had to put it up on Monday, this one has had to move on down the line. Welcome to my life.

I guess that could be another YouMightBeAnAutismParentIf tweet: "#YouMightBeAnAutismParentIf you put up all your blog posts a day late so it's SOC Sundays on Monday and Monday Listicles on Tuesday" (And Wordless Wednesdays on Thursday and Alphabe-Thursdays on Friday and Special Needs Sibling Saturdays on Sunday... and yes I've been guilty of ALL of these late postings!)

Anyway, I'm posting this just after midnight, on American East Coast time, which means it's certainly still Monday somewhere... California, for example. So, on a technicality, I'm not REALLY late.

OK, enough meta-jabber. I rest my case. On to the actual post...

This week’s Listicle assignment (from Bridget of Twinisms via Stasha at The Good Life) is based on the show "Inside The Actor’s Studio With James Lipton."

You’ve seen this program, yes? Every celebrity interview ends with the same 10 questions, which I will attempt to answer, now:

1. What is your favorite word?
You're kidding right? ONE favorite word? Ain't gonna happen from wordy, word-loving me. Like I tell my kids: I don't have just one favorite. (And yeah, I'm gonna start this list being all contrary, oppositional and rule-bashing again. Wanna make something of it?) But on my short list, you'd find: smorgasbord, chartreuse, ungepatchket, and fractious.

2. What is your least favorite word?
Retard or Retarded. And if you don't know why I hate this, the "R-word," you're probably at the wrong blog, here by accident. If you want a refresher, read my friend Ellen's posts all about it. Start with this one: If you ask people not to use the word "retard" then plug in the R-word into her search box and read everything that comes up.

3. What turns you on?
Intelligence, humor, kindness.

4. What turns you off?
Willful ignorance and cold-heartedness. Also black socks and white sneakers with Bermuda shorts.

5. What sound do you love?
An ocean beach. Also? Truthfully? My own voice. (Hangs head.)

6. What sound do you hate?
Metal scraping on metal. If you use a metal fork to eat out of a metal bowl I will be forced to make you stop by any and all means necessary. It's like nails on a chalkboard to me. Also, not coincidentally, nails on a chalkboard.

7. What is your favorite curse word?
Really, it's a toss up between motherfucker and bullshit. I guess I like compound words. Ethan is studying them in school right now. But never fear, I'm not going to suggest THESE for his "Write 10 juicy sentences using compound words" assignment.

8. What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
Brain surgeon. *Kidding!* But seriously, neuroscience interests me greatly, the biology of how we think and feel. I could have gone into medicine, have a great affinity for it. In other words, my mother was right - I shoulda been a doctor!

9. What profession would you not like to do?
The thought of accountancy fills me with dread. And I like numbers. I just hate paperwork.

10. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
A variation of what my husband quipped when first we met: "Oh, sorry, I got you confused with (renowned French filmmaker) Agnès Varda... Your number's not up yet, back you go!"

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Early Hanukkah

2011-12-19T08:41:00.001-05:00

Yesterday my husband's family gathered for their annual giant Hanukkah party extravaganza. On the car ride back from the latke and present fest, Ethan asked his Dad when it started and he calculated that it had been going on since about 1943 or so. Coming from a tiny family like I do, it's nice to be a part of a giant, sprawling, warm, inclusive clan.

Leaving my first ever of these, when Dan and I had been dating for about six months and I was still his "new girlfriend," I told him, "I've never been hugged and kissed by so many people I just met in my life."

In my husband's family, if you love one of them, they love you. It's nice. Exhausting, but nice. (Not a year passes without at least one - and often more - Bar Mitzvah, wedding, landmark birthday or anniversary, and, unfortunately funeral or unveiling. Lots of opportunity for togetherness.)

This year the Sunday that is also Hanukkah just happens to fall on Christmas, and the one after that on New Year's Day, so the party was held a week early.

We brought my mother, of course, who, because of her poor short term memory recognizes nearly no one, but is happy to be out in the swirl of family, with her own grandsons and lots of random (to her) toddlers and babies to boot.

Jacob actually yelled "Happy Hanukkah!" to everyone this year instead of "Merry Christmas!" which he used to be wont to do, as there is so much more of that in the world around him to catch his echolalic attention.

Ethan again asked to be the one to light our family menorah, and this year I finally said yes.

Saying prayers

Jake and my Mom watching

Ethan, lighting the candles

"Real" Hanukkah begins this Tuesday at sundown. But Sunday we got a little sneak preview; an all too rare family outing; a lot of hugs and kisses. A happy togetherness.

Wishing you all Happy Holidays and good times with your families (or without them if they're on the torturesome side)!

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Morning Rites

2011-12-14T21:56:00.000-05:00

The boys are sleepy this morning, waving me off like an annoying gnat when I come to rouse them, Jacob quietly at six and Ethan more noisily at seven. In this, too, they are separate and unequal, and it saddens me, one more drop in the bucket of disconnection that sits on my chest, heavy.

Jacob is still growling at everything that displeases him and there is much that displeases him about mornings. I want him to get undressed and he wants to pet the cat. I want him to get dressed and he wants to pet the cat. I want him to eat breakfast and he wants to pet the cat.

Jake is mad about his underwear again, having outgrown the brand he has worn since he was four and toilet trained. "I want puppies, I want basketballs, I want orange!" he yells, hitting his body in protest as I pull the boring solid grey underpants up over his sizable hips. And so I make a mental note of something to add to today's already overflowing "to do" list: find boys size XXL or mens size small briefs in bright colors with fun pictures on them.

I wish we had the luxury of time in the mornings, to take a long snuggle on the sofa and pet the cat to Jake's hearts content. But he is up too early already. I can't set the clock back any further and his bus is now coming ten minutes sooner for no reason other than DOE regulations suddenly being enforced.

So the mornings are a non-stop nudge fest from me, nearly every interaction an iteration of "Hurry, Jake" or "NOW, Jake!" All the fun and sweetness poured out of it.

I resist the urge to growl at the bus myself, as I see it pulling round the corner, lights already flashing. A quick kiss on his cheek, with the matron impatiently waiting to whisk him away, must sustain me for the rest of the day.

Entering the apartment again, divesting myself of the down coat thrown on over pajamas, I survey the kitchen carnage, prepare for round two. Another breakfast, another lunch, another tired boy to shake loose from his dreams.

"Hug me, Mama!" Ethan demands as I lean over him pulling the warm blanket away, hoping the shock of cold will do what my hand lightly tousling his hair and my voice sing songing "Wakey, wakey, school time, babe..." could not.

He's in a good mood, dancing around the apartment peeling off his PJs, putting on his clothes. Which means, of course, that they are strewn throughout.

Checking his homework once more as I place it in the folder, put together his backpack (intone for the thousandth time that this really is HIS job) I notice a question skipped, so a pencil is hastily procured, math dipped into briefly and then his nose is back in his book.

Ethan is at the very, very, very end of the last book of the Harry Potter series and he just can't get done soon enough. Mysteries are being revealed; all those secrets he'd attempted to wheedle out of me for the past two months, and I'd blithely answered "Read the books you'll find out at the end" are finally within his grasp.

Watching him read and eat, curled up in the armchair as I bustle about packing up his lunch, picking up Jake's pajamas, I am struck again by how much he looks like me at that same age.

I take a mind's snapshot of him ("Zen photos" we used to call those in my family) knowing that soon he will lengthen, the angles of his face sharpen and a man will emerge from this boy-child.

But not quite yet.

He dons sneakers and jacket right on time, with nary a nag. Book stowed in backpack for reading at school, basketball retrieved and tucked under his arm, we set off.

Walking together down our quiet morning street, he gleefully dribbles the ball a bit, showing off his latest moves; then stops, slips his hand into mine.

"You're the best mother, ever." I try not to beam too much. "Well, for me that is. You wouldn't be a good mother for him." he adds, pointing to a dog being walked in our direction.

"And you're the son for me" I tell him, "You're the son for me."

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Step by Step

2011-12-12T20:14:00.000-05:00

Saturdays, these days, my husband and I divide and conquer to bring the boys to their simultaneous basketball practices, and it was my turn for Jake.

Jacob truly loves basketball and the "Challenger" Special Needs division we finally found for him to play in last year, but was having a hard time sharing the ball after all those months of getting his own when we went to shoot baskets in the schoolyards.

Jake shoots wonderfully well, but the rules of the game, remembering to dribble, the need to pass, to pay attention to what other people on the court are doing... all these things continue to elude him. Autism, you know.

Jake kept chasing after the kids with the balls and yelling "STOP! That's mine!" Cringe.

I try not to interfere, to intervene too much when we're at basketball, try to give him his independence, to not be "that mom" kid-coaching from the sidelines. Yet the actual coaches seemed too busy to deal with this really-not-OK behavior and I couldn't let him terrorize the other kids, who were mostly younger and / or smaller than my giant son.

I kept popping out of my seat, running up to Jake to remind him that game is played with ONE ball and everybody shares it. Or yelling something to that effect when he was within earshot of my seat on the parent bench.

A couple of times he came over to me looking sad, and I kept sending him back into the game after a quick hug or a deep drink of water, reminding him to stay with the other kids wearing red vests and to keep his eyes on the ball.

Jake held it together during practice, drifting in and out of connection with the drills and game. But afterward as we were getting our coats on I saw the eyes blinking, the lip trembling, the sadness welling up; and on it came.

So I sat with my son, sobbing and wailing. I held my son, lost and losing it, his words coming out in a jumbled salad I could not make sense of.

And then in the middle of it all, he looked me in the eyes and asked the most amazing thing:

"What's happening to my brain, Mom?"

WHAT?

This level of self-awareness, recognizing that something in his brain is going haywire?

Monumental.

Unprecedented.

An incredible thing that I feared I would never see.

And then Jake was telling me that he was going to go home and cry at Cocoa the cat, and that then she would be mad at him, and he started to caterwaul anew.

I was trying to piece it together, realizing he might be thinking I was mad at him for having had a hard time in the game, and maybe even mad at him for crying, now.

I kept telling him to look in my eyes and see that I wasn't mad, that no one was mad at him, that I was proud of him for how hard he had tried playing basketball today, that it's fine to cry if he's sad, but that maybe his brain was stuck, and if he wanted to stop crying I would help him.

"Remember to breathe Jacob; slow breaths; in, out; one, two."

He gained his composure, only to lose it again. Again and again. We were going to be late for the movies.

And then one of the coaches came over and praised his shooting abilities, promised he would get more ball time next week.

And maybe my murmured words of love, of soothing, had washed over him enough that they were sinking in.

Or maybe his brain finally stopped misbehaving, let him move on

But suddenly it was OK again.

My boy smiled. Said: "I want to eat popcorn at the movies, Mom."

And so off we went.

And loved the movie as Jake loves all movies, although this movie, Hugo, was particularly lovable. (Paris in the 30's, a history of cinema, what's not to love?)

And when we stopped for a quick grocery shopping before coming home, Jake was remarkably present, helpful. He reminded me that we needed bananas, picked out a nice ripe-but-not-over-ripe bunch himself without any prompting at all.

Hungry for dinner, we hopped a cab home, and as we pulled up in front of our building he said: "Thank you driver, for taking us home!" to the cabbie, more polite by far than his twin ever is.

And so deep into the evening I pondered my son and his question.

A sign that more self-awareness will one day come.

That one day I may actually know my son Jacob's innermost thoughts, a cypher no longer.

Patience is now needed. For this can not be pulled from him, but rather, I must wait for it to blossom.

Wait for his next step, in this dance that he alone knows.

Let him be.

Enough as he is, and embracing what he will become.

Embracing what will come.

I am linking this post up to Be Enough Me Mondays at Just. Be. Enough.

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SNSS takes a Holiday (meanwhile, I'm over at Hopeful Parents today)

2011-12-10T12:41:00.000-05:00

If you came here for a new Special Needs Sibling Saturdays guest post, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

First off, today is the 10th of the month, so I'm over at HP as usual with my post: Building Community One Tweet at a Time

Over there, I'm talking about... you guessed it, the wonderful #YouMightBeAnAutismParentIf Twitter conversation that's been going on.

But also?

I am here to announce that the Special Needs Sibling Saturdays series is going to be on hiatus for just a little while, as the holiday season ramps up into gear.

It's going to be getting very busy and I want to spend time with my family. Plus people are going to get swamped and miss their deadlines to get posts to me. I know that - can see it coming - and want to avoid all the stress that entails. So I'm giving it a break for a bit.

Special Needs Sibling Saturdays will be back in early January (probably about the second week) and continue as a weekly series until I make a full year of it - through the month of March, that is. After that I'll re-evaluate to see if there's enough steam left to continue as is.

The series will never go away completely, this is too important a topic to me for that. Also there is much to the hosting that I enjoy, but it is also an (unpaid) weekly obligation that sometimes gets to me, so I'm not going to continue it indefinitely. At some point it will likely become a biweekly (fortnightly to my Anglo friends) or monthly feature, as seems fitting.

So while it's on break I will be contacting potential and confirmed guests and scheduling out the SNSS posts for the new year. If you think you've got one in you, and I haven't contacted you yet - or if I have made initial contact but haven't followed up (ADD brain strikes again, many apologies) - please let me know! You can leave a comment here, send me a tweet or an email.

Just don't send your note by carrier pigeon or owl (yes, that's a geeky Harry Potter reference), as Cocoa the cat thinks they're delicious.

Also, if you have previously committed to write a SNSS post but have somehow not been able to come through yet (no name calling or finger pointing here, you folks KNOW who you are) this is the perfect time to cough one up and send it to me! All will be forgiven. The hounds will be called off.

(Actually you are already forgiven, because you are a SN parent and how could I *not* understand how life gets, and bloggy obligations are just NOT at the top of the priority list. Believe me, I understand all too well. It's just that this was too good an opportunity to mess with y'all to pass up.)

So, all that said, please go visit me over at Hopeful Parents, today. And if think you might not have seen all of the many wonderful SNSS guest posts that have appeared here for the past 9 months?

Go to the SNSS page now, see what you missed, and catch up on your reading:

Click me to see all the SNSS posts

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Because

2011-12-08T15:14:00.000-05:00

Because he would rather skip than walk down the street... and he's so fast that I have to run to catch up...

Because he gives the best hugs, pulls my cheek down to his lips telling me "Big kiss, big kiss for Mommy" and then plants one on me with a loud smacking sound...

Because every day when I meet his bus, he turns around once we're on the sidewalk to wave and yell "Goodbye, Deba, see you tomorrow!" and his stone-faced bus driver flashes him the brightest smile you've ever seen...

Because he draws people with "all the parts" and his drawings breathe with life:

It took Jake 3 minutes to do this sketch of "Mommy" as he was in a hurry to play

Yes, that's Timmy & his fairies from TV's "Fairly Odd Parents"

This IS our cat's expression when Jake's around: anxious

Jake didn't get to finish the body, but I love Bruce Wayne's face here

I tell you: "If you've seen one kid with autism... you've seen ONE kid with autism."

Look at my Jacob with fresh eyes, anew every day, and every day he will astound you.

As he does me,

as

he

does

me.

I'm linking up to Shell's Pour Your Heart Out & Maxabella's I'm grateful for... because I am so grateful for my wonderful autistic son Jacob.

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Crash

2011-12-06T18:29:00.001-05:00

Driving in Italy, July 2000

It was our honeymoon. In Italy. (The last time I used my passport, a long time ago.) My husband is a native of New York City, not naturally at home in cars, so I had been doing the driving around Northern Italy: to Lake Como, through Bassano del Grappa and the Valdobbiadene wine region, up to and back from Cortina d’Ampezzo at the edge of the alps.

We were on the last, short leg of the driving part of our trip, about to surrender our rental car to spend our final honeymoon days walking and being ferried about Venice in the vaporetto waterbuses.

My husband had witnessed my driving for a week and declared himself ready to take the wheel, now that we were on the flat lands and relatively wide roads of the southern Veneto.

We were entering a traffic circle, or so my husband thought, and, as we had been specifically admonished at the car rental counter that in Italy traffic in a circle ALWAYS has the right of way over traffic entering, my husband was looking exclusively to the left, at the other traffic in the circle, and ahead to where we would be exiting.

He did not look to the right, no need in a traffic circle. But, ah, we were not in a simple traffic circle, but rather a traffic circle BISECTED by a highway, which, naturally, had the right of way.

So my husband was not looking to the right, did not see the tiny “yield” sign, nor the semi bearing down upon us at full speed from that direction. It missed us. But the small car behind it did not.

It happened just like in the movies, the slowing down of time and our reflexes; the ear-shattering crunch, the bone rattling grind, the grand clashing and crashing of it all. Fortunately for us, the impact point was well behind the front seats we were sitting in, the empty rear of our car sustaining all the damage.

We pulled over, shaken but unharmed. There is a long story here of all that happened next, too long to tell in this flash moment, but I will say this:

Everyone was uniformly kind to us, from the young woman driving the (totaled) car that hit us, to the car’s owner, her boyfriend’s father who stayed with us to help translate to the Carabinieri. Well, It didn’t hurt that I would waggle my finger back and forth between my husband and I and intone the one phrase I knew well in Italian “Luna di Miele”(honeymoon) as the Italians are quite a romantic people.

And also? In Italian, the term for car accident is “incidente d’auto” – “incident” in English, versus our “accident” conveying a vast difference in attitude. Accidents require responsible parties to be determined, blame to be laid, while incidents… just… happen.

In due course, the Carabinieri and tow truck from the rental company arrived. There was much standing around, and then retelling of the “incidente.” By the time we arrived at our hotel in Venice we were bone weary and famished, but happy to be alive.

In a vaporetto in Venice on the last day of our honeymoon, July 2000

Maybe the saddest part for me is that we lost a roll of pictures (yes, children, this was back in the old days of cameras running on film) as I had stashed our most recent shot roll in the glove compartment and forgotten to retrieve it in the aftermath, so a few days of our honeymoon disappeared from the photographic record forever.

A small price to pay for escaping from the crash with life and limb intact, nothing lost but a few hours of our time, our insurance deductible, our dignity, and... the notion of my husband ever driving in Europe again.

This post was inspired by a prompt at Write on Edge. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post inspired by the word "Crash." It was supposed to be a 10 minute flash writing exercise, but I must confess I bent the rules a bit. I have never written any of this story down, and I just really needed to tell more than 10 minutes worth. Sorry.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.

Also linking this up to Love Links #34

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Memories Captured and Captioned

2011-12-05T07:34:00.001-05:00

Galit, over at These Little Waves is running a linkup in conjunction with Alison at Mama Wants This, called “Memories Captured” and I found out about it when I went to visit my friend Deborah over at MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa. Ain't the internet grand?

So I thought I'd participate with this gem, a blast from the boys' past:

Photo: April 2004, Jacob & Ethan at 20 months. Not talking yet, so below is my interpretation of their expressions in this photo that PERFECTLY captures their personalities for the first two years or so of their lives.

Jacob: "Hey buddy, how-ah-ya? Nice ta meetcha!"
Ethan: "Who, may I ask, are YOU? Why have you presented yourself? And what can you do for me?"

Also? The hand in the photo, holding Jacob's hand at the far left is my mother's. She was very much in their lives when they were little, the kind of Grandma who, in spite of being in her 80s with creaky arthritic knees never hesitated for a moment before getting down on the floor to play with them or going for a walk to the playground, like this day.

I love looking at this photo as a reminder of that more innocent time before we knew about Jacob's autism, when we just thought the boys had speech delays.

In those early years, Jacob actually had the more outgoing personality. He was a giant flirt. Back in the day, we thought his lack of "stranger fear" - which Ethan had in spades - just meant Jake was uber-friendly. Little did we know it meant he wasn't processing that there might be anything to be afraid of, part of his autism constellation.

A short time after this photo, when Ethan had a language explosion and Jake didn't, their personalities switched and Ethan began to reach out much farther into the world than Jacob, who was getting more spacey and "dreamy" (as his rather stupid first speech therapist called him).

Ethan went on to make friends, many friends, while Jacob has really yet to make a one. So it's nice to look back on this time when Jake seemed to be so socially connected. When "connected" meant smiling and laughing and batting his long eyelashes at pretty girls. Because THAT? He is still good at, my beautiful boy.

So, come join in and link up your own photo with Alison or Galit.

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SNSS: Amazing Sister to Grace

2011-12-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

My guest today, Frelle of the blog Made More Beautiful is a very, very special person. She has just come through a very hard time, including a separation from her husband and impending divorce.

But in spite of the difficulties on this path through her life, Frelle is always reaching out to help others. She is a part of many online communities.

I first "met" Frelle through some lovely supportive comments she left on my posts. I followed her home to her blog and discovered that not only was she a good online friend, she was also a wonderful writer, honest and deep.

Frelle is the mother of four children, the oldest of whom is a daughter with challenges that fall on the autism spectrum. Today she shares the story of the strong relationship between her eldest daughter and her just younger sister, who is like an older sister now.

Read her beautiful words, here:

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Amazing Sister to Grace - by Frelle

My oldest daughter, Grace, is almost 12. She was diagnosed with Aspergers about 3 years ago. She has three younger, neurotypical siblings. Two sisters, Lily (9) and Felicity (6), and one brother, Jackson (4). I keep them anonymous on my blog as Oldest Sister, Middle Sister, Smallish Girl, and Little Fella.

The journey toward diagnosing Grace didn't start until she was about 5. I had no idea that Grace wasn't developing typically until Lily came along three years later and had excellent hand eye coordination and motor planning skills that her older sister had a lot of trouble with.

Because of the 3 year age difference, I decided to have Grace evaluated, and she scored a 36 month delay in both gross and fine motor skills, and was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder, Sensory Modulation Dysfunction, Auditory Processing Disorder, and Dyspraxia.

At age 6, she possessed the emotional maturity of a preschooler, and would often get overstimulated in public and have meltdowns. The laying-in-the-aisle screaming and crying variety. Her siblings never made scenes like she did, and more than once I heard the words "brat" "can't control her child" and "isn't she a little old to be throwing a toddler fit?" By age 8 she had mostly grown out of public meltdowns, but Lily began to be embarrassed at the loud wailing and yelling her sister would do in the car or in front of Lily's friends.

I told Grace about her diagnosis at age 9. She had been having an incredibly rough day, and had been hitting the door in the van and crying and screaming all the way home. She went to her room to calm down, and when we spoke later, she asked why she was so different from other people. So I told her I thought she inherited her blue eyes from her grandma, her freckles from me, and the way her brain works from her dad. A variation of normal.

Lily is the sibling closest to Grace in age in our family. I told Lily about her sister's diagnosis when she was in second grade. Grace was still having meltdowns often, but I never sent her to her room to get control of herself. I knew she needed to be talked through the panic attack/meltdown. On the other hand, when Lily was being loud and obnoxious and having a tantrum, I would send her to her room and expect her to pull herself together and come out when she could be nice to people.

She thought this was really unfair, and confronted me about it one day after Grace had caused a particularly disastrous meltdown scene during her birthday party. I explained in very general terms that Grace can't talk herself down out of a fit very well, and that she could easily pull her own self together. I explained that Grace's food and clothing and loud noise sensitivities were all tied together, and that her brain thinks a different way than hers and mine do.

Lily passed her sister in emotional maturity last year. I wasn't sure how Grace and Lily's relationship would change when Lily did this. I'm not sure either of them realize it happened, and there's no resentment from either of them toward the other.

Lily continues to relate to the world in a much more mature way than Grace. She has taken on the role of the oldest probably because she sees that it needs to happen, as well as it just being because of her particular personality.

Lily, at 9, is a very typical tween. She's very into popular music and tv shows, she loves to go shopping and is very into fashion, she enjoys going out for coffee with me, and helps her siblings with shoes, clothes, bathtime, getting snacks or sippy cups, and is attuned to needing to jump in and help when both of my hands are busy or I haven't noticed an issue in another room.

In contrast, Grace has few tween characteristics, preferring to draw, read, play webkinz online or Barbies with her youngest sister, Felicity. Outside the house, Grace behaves much like a typical tween, and does well at blending in with other students.

She is protective of her diagnosis, but when she makes a new friend and learns she can trust them, or that they have a sibling with special needs, especially autism, she confides what makes her unique. She's never had it used against her, and she has a circle of close knit, very protective and mothering friends that she counts on to help keep her centered throughout her day.

She has a difficult time not losing control at home these days, partially due to the necessity to act older than she feels and blend in and deal with sensory issues very quietly all day long, and partially because her father and I have separated and are divorcing.

Felicity and Jackson, Grace's youngest siblings, have never questioned why she acts differently. They have never spoken up accusing her of getting special treatment, or complained very much about how she throws fits more than all of the rest of them combined.

Recently, Grace was being cyberbullied by a girl at her middle school. This girl had started trouble between Grace and her friends in elementary school as well. I overheard Grace telling Lily what was going on and reading her the emails that the bully had sent.

Lily listened patiently, told her she was sorry that the girl had said mean things to her and about her to her friends, and that it wasn't right. She gave her advice on how she would handle the situation. Then she said something I think a lot of older siblings tell younger siblings: "I can pick on you, but NO ONE ELSE can!"

I appreciate that Lily doesn't make fun of Grace in a cruel way or use her diagnosis or hypersensitivity features to put her down. She seems attuned to that without ever having been told to avoid it. Lily also has a general appreciation for those with special needs and invisible disabilities because of the openness in conversation about them in my house.

Grace and Lily have recently started confiding in one another due to the separation and divorce their father and I are going through. I can't tell you how it warms my heart to see them develop a closer emotional bond.

A few years ago I never would have believed they would make good friends, let alone feel any loyalty to one another. Being a special needs sibling can be challenging, but Lily has naturally and without instruction, become a wonderful "big sister" and I'm proud of the young woman she is becoming.

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I love everything about this post. And the supportive relationship between the sisters truly moves me to tears.

Now that you have read Frelle here, please do follow her home to her blog Made More Beautiful and read her beautiful heartfelt words there, too.

You may want to start here, with this post about a big step Grace took one day, or this one, about Rigid Thinking, Expectations, and Public Meltdowns, or another post about Grace's Meltdowns and Real Life Coping Skills.

Do read this important post, Happy Half Birthday, You Have Aspergers about what it was like to talk to Grace about her diagnosis.

And if you want to know more about Frelle herself and her difficulties, read this post where she talks about striving to feel like she is enough.

Finally, go follow her on Twitter where she tweets as @frelle.

Thank you so much Frelle for sharing your lovely family with us here today.

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Today I am Just Being Enough

2011-12-02T08:05:00.000-05:00

I'm not here, today.

Or rather, I'm here just for a moment, for long enough to tell you to go over there.

Where?

Here:

With a guest post: Letting Myself Think BIG over at the wonderful site Just. Be. Enough. whose tag line is:

And if you're here for the first time, coming to visit from over there...

Welcome! Nice to meet you. Please make yourself at home, poke around, stay awhile.

Don't know where to start? Want a little Squashed Mom road map? Click the links below for a nice assortment of my posts; a Bologna smorgasbord, if you will...

I'm an older mom, with nine year-old twin boys and an 89-year old mother in my care. I recently lost my 92 year old father and 93 year-old mother-in-law. I'm the squashed meat in the middle of the sandwich.

I write about birth and death, about being a mom and being a daughter.

I write about Autism in general, and my autistic son Jacob in particular.

I write about how adding in my and Ethan's ADD makes us a very neurodiverse family.

Sometimes I try to make you laugh.

And sometimes I try to make you cry.

Sometimes I tell stories from my childhood, and my family history.

And I once let Ethan take over my blog and tell his own story.

I also write every month for Hopeful Parents.

And sometimes I link up on Mondays with Be. Enough. Me.

Also? Ethan and Jacob do not get along well, so I started a guest post series to talk about sibling relationships in families with special needs kids, called Special Needs Sibling Saturdays.

I hope you like what you've seen, and that you'll come back to visit soon.

Finally, thanks so much to Elena and the gang over at Just. Be. Enough. for inviting me to their place today. It's an honor.

Hope to see you back here tomorrow for Special Needs Sibling Saturdays.

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Skipping

2011-12-01T17:35:00.000-05:00

Hey, it's DECEMBER first today...

NaBloPoMo is over, FINALLY over, and so I don't have to post today! I can skip it, skip a day, yes! Skippity, skip, skip.

Watch me skipping. Nothing up on the old blog today, nope not me.

But wait...

if I hit publish on this...

then I AM posting.

THIS will go up on my blog...

and it's a post...

so I'm not skipping a day.

But I feel like celebrating having made it through the whole month of November, the posting every day whether I "felt it" or not, the discipline of the daily writing.

And while that felt great? It's also a relief that it's over.

And I want to commemorate my accomplishment by skipping a day.

But I also want to TELL you I'm doing it.

And so by telling you that I'm skipping, here on my blog, I'm writing a post... and therefore NOT skipping.

So I'll just not post anything.

But I WANT to tell you that I'm skipping.

But if I DO tell you, then I'm not skipping.

AAAAAGH!

My head is going to explode.

Wait, this is sounding familiar... very familiar...

Yes, I believe that's it.

A classic logic paradox.

You're welcome and goodnight.

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I will always...

2011-11-30T02:44:00.001-05:00

Ethan, at bedtime this evening was not quite ready to let go of the day. He was in a talkative mood, rare recently as he has been reading until deep drowsiness sets in, sometimes even falling asleep on the sofa, a seven-hundred-plus page tome of Harry Potter's exploits resting spread open upon his slowly rising and falling chest. A comforting weight, perhaps.

But tonight something had him stirred up, and thus my need to talk him back down.

"Mom, will you always love me?" he asked. (Not a chit-chat night, then. Alright.)

Although he has heard the answer a thousand times, he somehow needed to hear it anew tonight, for the thousand and first: "Ethan, these two things are absolutely true: I will always be your Mom, and I will always love you."

"Well," he says being practical about it, "we will love each other until whoever dies first."

(Love AND death. Stirred up, indeed.)

"That had better be me!" I tell him, "But preferably not until I'm an old, old lady."

"A hundred and two?" he suggests.

"Yes, that would do, nicely. And with plenty of grandchildren at my knee." (It's never too early to plant the seeds.)

I tell him the old joke: "Do you know how to live to be 102 years old? Get to 101, and then be very, VERY careful."

(Possibly one of the best unforeseen benefits of having kids: old jokes are new to them and considered hilarious; I get to trot out all my favorite shopworn groaners to an appreciative audience. Win!)

He laughs, but then I round the corner back to serious again.

"And also... you do know, love goes on after death. I still love your Grandpa, my Dad, and he is dead."

"Yes," he nods solemnly, contemplating his blanket, and then looks up, breaks out in a big grin.

"But hugs don't, so hug me now, Mama!" and he opens his arms wide. He opens his arms wide, to me.

In honor of today being the very last day of NaBloPoMo November, I decided to sift through my drafts, resurrect one more post from my zombie files. I had thought of this as a snippet, not quite a full post for wordy, rambling me. But reading it over I realized: "yes, it could be enough."

And thus... it is done. 30 posts in 30 days. Goodnight!

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Heavy

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

"I hope I'm not leaning on you too heavily." my mother said, taking my arm as we slowly made our way through the bustling streets of New York City.

I had just brought my Mom to the doctor for an injection to ease the ache of her arthritic knees. "Of course not," I said "I'm a big, strong woman."

But inside I felt her weight; light on my body, heavy on my soul.

She leans more and more these days. And that's all right, I can bear it; am just weighed down by what it presages, that she is moving farther from independence, closer towards an ending.

We were on our way to the hot chocolate shop just around the corner from her doctor's office, a block, a block and a half away. A short stroll. But for my mother now, taxing.

She has been limited for so long it's easy to forget the energetic middle-aged mother of my youth, the athletic young woman I have heard she once was.

I was just reminded of that this weekend. We were all gathered at her brother, my uncle's house for the holidays, and my cousin Jessie had unearthed my uncle's journal from 1941.

Jess had gone down to the basement storeroom, looking for a bottle of seltzer and instead found an artifact from 70 years ago, from Uncle Walter's 8th grade year, from when he was on the man-boy cusp of 14. (I'm going to blink and my boys will be there, too.)

He hadn't written in it much. Noting the significant year, we went to look up December 7th, the day that will live in infamy, and found... nothing. Entries filled January, trickled into February, and then petered out, an undertaking abandoned.

But in those few short entries at the beginning of the book, there lay a treasure trove.

He wrote of his joy at having walked a pretty girl home after school; musings on the nature of love, sports, and friendship.

And then these two entries about my mother, his beloved big sister:

"I feel lost with out my big sister around. I wait in the store every day just to see and speak to her"

(At this time my mother was 19, had graduated high school and was busy working, but she still came back to her parents' candy store in the evenings.)

"My older sister is a swell gal. My ideal. I wish she was born a boy then we could have some real fun."

As we read these journal entries aloud my mother teared up, as did my uncle. He reminded her of how athletic she had been in her youth. What an influence she had had on him.

"I looked up to you." Walter said. "And whatever you did. I did too: ice skating, tennis, track, basketball, volleyball... I did all that because you did, I followed in your footsteps. I wanted to be like you." His ideal.

My Mom & her "little brother" Walter last spring

It's so hard to picture my frail, slow-moving 89 year-old mother as an athletic teenage girl, but I know she was.

And wasn't she lovely as a young woman?

My mom, Sylvia, at about 20

Since my mother did not have me until she was 38, I never knew her like this. Thank goodness for old photographs.

And journals, left laying around in basement storerooms near soda bottles, waiting to be rediscovered, words reaching out across decades. Words of love, family, friendship.

As I write this post, my son Ethan is reading over my shoulder. "Let me see those diary pages again, Mom" he says. "Is that really something your Uncle Walter wrote about Grandma, so many years ago? She's really his big sister?"

And he reads them again, laughs out loud at the line: "I wish she was born a boy then we could have some real fun."

The past reaching out towards the future. Words traveling across decades, generations.

Words of love, family, friendship.

My son, reading, leans on my shoulder.

I will probably (hopefully) someday lean on him.

Hopefully, not too heavily.

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Monday Listicles: 10 Photos

2011-11-28T23:30:00.000-05:00

This week's Monday Listicles assignment seemed EASY: 10 favorite photos. Piece of cake, I thought. Simple. (But with me, of course, nothing ever is, dip below the surface I must, EVERY. freaking. time.)

Because for me "Photos" brings up my late father, the photographer. Heavy. And also I have such a hard time with the concept "favorite"... favorite for content? For aesthetics? And what if there is one more favored photo of one child than another? That just cannot be. My head spins.

So I have made a decision to STOP the torture (you're welcome) and state unequivocally that these are NOT my all time 10 favorite photos. They are merely 10 that I like a lot and that happened to conveniently and handily reside in my blog's web album or my iPhoto library.

Because I REALLY want to get to bed before midnight tonight, dammit!

So, in NO particular order (oh, this is killing me, but I will be strong and not over-think - for ONCE in my life!) 10 photos that I really like:

My Dad, Jim Steinhardt, around 20

1. My Dad as a young man. Yes, this is also in my sidebar. Here it is again. I really DO love this photo, as I never knew this young man. He was 43 when I was born, already bearded and balding.

My Mom, Sylvia Heimer Steinhardt, around 20

2. My Mother, likewise uncannily (to me) young.

July 29, 2002

3. Me, deliriously happy, holding Ethan on the day my twin boys were born. (Also just plain delirious on morphine for my c-section pain.)

The boys' first big snow day, January 2003

4. Me, Danny & the boys, out enjoying their first big snowfall. They were about 6 months old, and we were near zombies from sleep deprivation. But happy zombies, clearly.

"Mother & Child" 1960, by Jim Steinhardt

5. Yes, of course that's my beautiful raven haired mother and me. I think I'm about 3 months old here. Mom is 38. Still gorgeous, of course.

A bunch of Heimers, Ellis Island, 1920-ish

6. I love this photo of some of my mother's relatives, LITERALLY just off the boat, coming to America. This is two of her father's sisters, a brother, and their father, my mother's grandfather whose name she never knew, she just called him "Zayde" (Yiddish for grandpa).

Jim Steinhardt, 1961 by Bruce Steinhardt

7. This is the most amazing photo my father, taken by my brother who was 19 at the time. I believe it was taken in my father's photo studio. This is how he looks in my earliest memories.

Spanish-American Barber Shop, NYC, 1948 by Jim Steinhardt

8. A photo of my father's. Not one of his more famous or iconic ones, but one of my favorites. I couldn't tell you why. I have a print of this one hanging in my apartment. If you look closely you can see my father, fuzzily, in the mirror, taking the shot.

Lake Champlain, Burlington Vt. 2005

9. I love this picture of 3 year-old Jake by the lake. For a while we went to Vermont every summer to see my cousin Jess and her family. We haven't been in 2 years and I miss those visits terribly

Me at BlogHer11

10. And, just because all these photos have all been sooooooooo meaningful, I thought I would go from the sublime to the ridiculous for my last photo here. Have a laugh. Because this caught my eye as I was scrolling through my options in the "upload" window.

This was taken this summer at the BlogHer11 conference, in the Temple of Swag (I think the official name was the Exposition Hall). At the time Ethan was expressing his utter disdain for all things Bieber, and I took this photo with the JB cutout just to yank his chain.

But then this AMAZING thing happened just last weekend with Anna See (the blogger who lost her son in a tragic accident this fall) involving her surviving daughter getting to meet Justin Bieber on an all expense paid trip to to the AMA awards in LA.

So it is not a completely ridiculous photo after all, but rather, suddenly holds major significance. Reminding me that this big star took time out to meet a little girl grieving for her beloved brother, whose one big wish was to meet the Biebster.

So there it is. 10. Done. And it ain't even midnight yet. (Only 11:30) So, goodnight!

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SOC Sunday: Nothing

2011-11-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

No intro, this week, this just is what it is....

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It's late on Sunday night, and I must admit, I got nothing for you. Four days of Thanksgiving "break" this week have nearly done me in. We had a very full Thursday and Friday and then a nearly empty Saturday & Sunday. Because all of Ethan's friends were away or otherwise busy, he had no playdates and was miserable. Jake spent far too much time on his DS and both kids spent far too much time watching TV. But somehow we survived.

And I would normally just have skipped posting today, but its so close to the end of NaBloPoMo I am not going to stumble and fall mere yards from the finish line. So yeah, I'm picking up that "marathon" metaphor I nearly beat to death in a post comparing special needs parenting to running a marathon at the beginning of this month, and running further with it tonight.

I was hoping I would feel more up, less beaten down by now. Ha! And this is making me realize I need to figure something out before the Winter / New Year's break is upon us, because 10 days cooped up in the apartment with the boys cranky and fighting and glued to loud screens will drive me over the edge.

I might have to take up running - the kind like in the old joke: "Doctor you told me to run 5 miles a day? Yes... well, It's been a week and I'm now 35 miles from home, what do I do?" Because right now 35 miles from home and on my own sounds like heaven.

Of course perspective will return when I've gotten the kids sent off to school and I can go home and get things for me done again... but Oh, Crap, I just remembered I have to take my mother to a doctor's appointment at 11AM tomorrow.

So much for me time.

and so it goes.....

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New to SOCS? It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spell-checking. This is writing in the raw.

You can do it, too! Click on the picture link and let's hear your 5 minutes of brilliance...

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SNSS: New Baby and New Beginnings

2011-11-26T09:17:00.000-05:00

Today's guest, Jessica Severson, of the blog Don't Mind the Mess, is unique as she only has one child. Yet. She is, however, at the time of this posting, pregnant with child number 2, a girl.

Jessica's two and a half year-old son is on the Autism Spectrum, and thus when her daughter is born this winter, she will be born a special needs sibling.

Jessica writes about her parenting journey in blog, both as it pertains to autism and all the usual toddlerish stuff, too. She also writes about the other interesting and entertaining things that cross her mind, including popular culture and yummy recipes. She is funny and intelligent and is a pleasure to read.

Come experience that here, now, as she talks about the hopes and fears that come with the expansion of a family that already includes autism:

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New Baby and New Beginnings - by Jessica Severson

I used to want 4 kids. In the early months after my son was born, I thought 3 wouldn’t be so bad. By the time he was diagnosed with Autism at 17 months, I didn’t know if I could handle 2.

I used to be jealous of families where the Special Needs child was born 2nd or 3rd and it would be easier for them to make family planning decisions. For us, with our first child diagnosed with Special Needs and a heightened risk of any other children also having Special Needs, the decision to have more children was fraught with worry.

I used to think that if I had another child, I would want to wait until my son was in school. I didn’t think I could handle two young children where at least one had Special Needs.

And yet despite all of that, here I am, 6 months pregnant with my second child. My son will be just past 2 and a half when his sister is born.

Even stranger, despite the years I spent worrying about having more children, I feel really happy about it.

The best I can tell is that I have worried about as much as I can. I’ve reached the point where I know I want to try at least one more time. I’ve stopped looking for the perfect time just like I’ve stopped waiting for a perfect child.

It is happening. And if we find ourselves in a worst-case scenario, at least it won’t be anything really new. We have been around the block. We have handled it. We can do it again.

That’s not to say I haven’t worried at all. An early test showed an increased risk of chromosomal defects. Those first few hours after I heard the news were some of the darkest I’ve had. The truth is, no matter how ready I feel to handle another child with Special Needs, the hypothetical idea of it is so different than the actual truth of it.

My amniocentesis came back perfect. But it was a bit of a wake-up call. I was idealizing the prospect of my second child. I was already imagining her as neurotypical and normal. She isn’t an opportunity to do things better, she’s a child just like any other with her own unique set of needs.

Teaching my son to prepare for his sister’s arrival has been more fun than I expected. He has learned the word “baby” and even knows to associate it with my belly. His therapists have included programs where he hugs and kisses a baby doll. We are working on treating things gently. A lot of it is pretty typical 2-year-old stuff.

If anything, I feel lucky that my son will still have the comforting rituals of his therapy hours to get through the early transitions. I feel lucky that my family will be there to provide him with play and structure.

And our decision to have the baby this early means my son will still have his Early Intervention therapy for 5 more months after the baby is born.

There’s never a perfect time to provide your Special Needs child with a sibling. Especially if they bristle at change. But that is what family is for. And knowing that my children will be able to be a support for one another comforts me.

Maybe it won’t happen for decades, but someday they will understand each other. Someday they will be able to stick up for one another. And disability or not, they will be able to relate to each other.

So far I haven’t let my son’s needs get in the way of a vision for the future of my family. What do I really want for all of us? I want us to be close to each other. I want us to trust each other. I want family gatherings to be joyous occasions. I am comforted knowing that my son’s needs don’t have to get in the way of any of that.

I’ve learned from my son that taking things a little bit at a time is the way to go. I don’t expect that to change when his sister comes. If anything, I think I’ll be able to treasure both of them more.

I hope that having two different children means I can appreciate two different personalities. Of course that means two different sets of weaknesses and frustrations, but it also means two different sets of strengths and joys.

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I love how Jessica is sailing forth into this brave new world of parenting more than one child with optimism and a heart full of love, knowing there will be challenges, but preparing to meet them with good cheer and fortitude. It is inspiring.

Also, full disclosure, I actually met Jessica in person at the Boston Bloggy Bootcamp conference last May and she is just as delightful in person as she is on the internet.

Now that you have read Jessica here, you are clearly going to want to follow her home to her blog Don't Mind the Mess and dig in.

You may want to start here, with how the stresses related to parenting and her son's autism lead to a spiraling depression.

Try this post about the guilt that can come on when you and your child are actually doing better, or this one about the day Jessica got the results of her amniocentesis back and found out the new baby was a girl, and OK chromosomally.

Also, go follow her on Twitter where she tweets as @jessicaesquire, go like her (I know you do) on her Facebook fan page, and finally, go see the stuff SHE likes on her Pinterest boards.

Jessica, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and feelings with us here at SNSS, and wishing you much happiness and joy as you bring your new baby girl into your lovely, loving family.

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Post Turkey Day Post

2011-11-25T23:35:00.001-05:00

Today I loaded my 9 year-old boys and my 89 year-old mother into the old jalopy and drove us out to Long Island, my ancestral stomping ground. We were headed to my aunt and uncle, my mother's brother's home in Port Washington, scene of countless hours of cousinly frolic throughout my childhood.

Cousin Jessie and my Mom

They live in a sweet little house at the end of a dead end block with nothing but fields and gentle woods just beyond. My cousins' old elementary school's ball-fields and playgrounds are kitty-corner to their backyard. In short, the perfect place for a family to enjoy a warm November day.

The house, from the path in the fields

My mother loves Autumn leaves

Ephemeral leaf art

I love Autumn leaves, too

We hugged and talked and sat in the yard and walked in the woods and played in the schoolyard and ate delicious leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner (always better the next day, somehow).

Jake loves basketball

So does Ethan

We played guitar and sang songs and recited poetry and talked in silly character voices and made up stories on the spot to entertain each other. Jessie and Annette and I performed yet another rendition of "We Are Juvenile Delinquents," a song that's been in our repertoire since we were 10 and 12.

Jess, Annette & I in 1973 at their house

We stuffed ourselves to the gills and beyond on the amazing desserts mostly made by Annette's 13 year-old daughter Greta, a fantastic cook and aspiring food blogger. (I'm working to get her set up with a blog soon, my Bat Mitzvah gift to her.)

Annette & the beautiful Greta, who is also an amazing baker

A table full of amazing, Greta-made desserts

And then, most amazingly, some documents from deep in my mother and uncle's past were found and examined: my uncle's diary from 1941, when he was a boy of fourteen, and their mother, my grandmother's passport from 1920, the year she fled her native Eastern Europe for America.

Grandma Dunia's Polish passport

Uncle Walter's diary

Wow. There is WAY too much story contained in these two amazing little items for this simple "I'm home tired and happy from spending a day with my family" post.

More stories to come; to come soon, I promise. And now? Goodnight. I hope you, too, are all going to sleep with a belly full of leftover pumpkin pie and a heart full of familial love.

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Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past

2011-11-24T22:30:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving is such a peculiar holiday, actually all about food and family gathering, as opposed to some other thing that is the excuse for that stuff, that is really at the core of most holidays anyway.

Also, it's impossible to approach this day without reflecting on Thanksgivings past, especially if you are someone who is as prone to rumination as I am. (What? Don't tell me you haven't noticed that about me.)

Two years ago, Thanksgiving Day, 2009, was the last time my father came to my home. He was clearly ailing, not himself at all.

The deterioration from September to November was stark, startling. He spent most all of the day sleeping on the sofa, didn't come to the dinner table, woke only to accept a slice of pumpkin pie.

Dad, asleep on our sofa, Thanksgiving 2009.

Dad in a borrowed wheelchair, too weak to walk

Less than two weeks after these pictures were taken, he was in the hospital, and it was the beginning of the end.

Last year was the first Thanksgiving after my father (and my husband's mother) had died. I wrote a post about it on Thanksgiving morning, Regarding a Table Half Full, anticipating a difficult day ahead of us, working hard to find the glass-half-full perspective, connect to my optimist self.

Three generations at Thanksgiving 2011

The day played out pretty much as I had expected it to, was mostly about about getting through it, with a few lovely moments.

The drive was hellish, dinner was delicious. Jake was very well behaved, Ethan was only occasionally obnoxious, and only spilled water. I had my one glass of good red wine and took my post-turkey sofa nap.

My Mom only looked lost and teared up once or twice, was glad overall she came. But she was missing Dad something fierce, I know. I was too.

But I have also been thinking of Thanksgivings past; the distant past of my own childhood, my early years with Danny, the many Thanksgivings we have had with the boys...

One particular Thanksgiving stands out in my memory: Thanksgiving 2001. It was a tense, intense time for a couple of reasons. First, we live in New York City and a scant two months had passed since the destruction of the twin towers on 9-11.

And on a personal front, I was in the middle of the notorious "two week wait" after our first ever IVF attempt. To say I was on an emotional roller coaster, sitting on pins and needles that month would be a massive understatement.

After an initial bout of optimistic euphoria, I was then feeling anxious and worried that the IVF hadn't taken and growing more and more concerned that I wasn't in fact pregnant. I couldn't count on how I was feeling, as nightly injections of progesterone were masking any hormones my body might be producing (or so I had thought).

And then on that Thanksgiving morning? I committed a big no-no. I snuck a home pregnancy test into the bathroom with me and peed on the stick. Never mind that it was ridiculously early, my retrieval and transfer having taken place just the week prior. I couldn't help myself.

Nothing. The same one line I had been seeing monthly for over a year. I was deeply disappointed.

Part of my brain knew it could easily be a false negative, but I took it to heart nevertheless. Lay around on the sofa moping all day, barely dragging my ass into the shower in time to get dressed for dinner at the in-laws.

Somehow I did manage to toss my favorite crushed green velvet dress onto my body and cab crosstown with my husband. But it was hard to shake my funk. I'm sure I was not the most gracious guest. And right after dinner? I parked myself on the second sofa, kitty-corner to the one my elderly father had claimed after the meal for his traditional postprandial nap, and took one myself, thinking I needed to sleep off my bad mood.

In the perfect 20/20 vision of hindsight, I can see: it was the pregnancy hormones kicking in. Because two days later on Saturday morning? I cheated again.

And this time... TWO pink lines! The most beautiful pee-saturated piece of plastic encased fiber the world has ever known, the first time ever I saw that fabulous sight.

And the following year? Twin baby boys at Thanksgiving.

Also? Bringing up Thanksgivings past? A chance to throw in some gratuitous photos of my beautiful children at Thanksgiving. Here's a few from 2006 when the boys were four and my father still a sprightly 89 (same age my mother is now):

E & J getting silly with cousins

Jake, commandeering my rain hat

Mom, Dad & Ethan on the sofa

I am expecting this year it will be a little easier than last, the grief tempered by time, by the now normalcy of my mother being the sole representative of the elder generation at the table. And we will raise our glasses in a toast of remembrance of those no longer among us.

Happy Thanksgiving, Dad. Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

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Wordless Wednesday: Beautiful Boys

2011-11-23T08:35:00.001-05:00

Ethan and his Dad

Yes, I now have Instagram and I (sort of) know how to use it, making me armed & dangerous, shooting everyone and everything in sight and then making my pictures infinitely cooler with the magic filter thingies.

Jake and ball in B&W

So I thought I'd share some of my favorite recent shots of the boys, including Ethan's de-shaggification this past weekend.

Ethan had been growing his hair for a while by now, his last cut just before his birthday in July. It was an experiment, he wanted to see how it would look longer, he also was appreciating the extra warmth as fall was progressing towards winter.

But then last week he told me "Mom, I need a haircut by next Monday." Seems he was about to be videotaped for his drama class at school and the character he's playing needed to look tidier.

Ethan before haircut, shaggy as all get out

Ethan, being shorn

Haircut Managed

Jake didn't really NEED a cut, but on Saturday I had both boys to myself. And there was no way he was going to go to the haircut place and stand around while Ethan got one and NOT have one himself. So he got one too.

Jake mid-cut

Jake admiring his 'do

Ethan & Jake: After

And, as usual, I’m linking up to Wordless / Wordful Wednesdays... at Angry Julie Monday... at 5 Minutes for Mom... at live and love...out loud... at Dagmar*s momsense... at Parenting by Dummies.

And here too!

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Ass Forwards Days

2011-11-22T05:11:00.001-05:00

Jacob has put his underwear on backwards again this morning. It doesn’t happen often anymore, but still, occasionally I will come into the living room prompted by Jake’s “I’m dressed Mommy!” shout-out, to find them on the wrong way.

Then, like this morning, I have to tell him “No, Jake, they’re backwards, let’s get that fixed” and not just the usual “That’s a good start, Jake, how about the shirt and pants, too?”

And it reminded me of last Thanksgiving when I had watched my husband squirming a bit too much in his seat on the way-long car ride up to Putnam county where we were to be feasting at my sister-in-law’s house.

I asked him why he was acting like he has shpilkes and he confessed that HE had put his underwear on backwards that morning, and they were a bit shy of comfortable. He hadn’t noticed until he was taking a quick final pee before setting out. And, as we were running late (as usual), he hadn't wanted to take the time to remove his shoes, get undressed and redressed again.

And I had to laugh. I had thought the whole backwards underwear thing was a factor of Jake's autistic distractedness, I hadn’t realized it was a family tradition.

And, because I never let an opportunity to gently tease my husband go to waste, all day long I kept referring to his awesomely ass forward undershorts. It helped to have a joke running, to undercut the sad that ran through the day on that Thanksgiving, in that shitty year of loss, the first without my father and Dan's mother.

I also took the occasion this morning to notice how tight Jake’s size 10 to 12 underpants are becoming, same as nearly all his clothing. Time soon for my still nine year-old son, my gentle giant, to move up to the next, full-on teenager's size.

I look at Jacob now and so often see parts of my husband's face looking back at me. I did not know Dan as a child, or even a young man; we met when we were shuffling into middle age, and have well grown deeper grizzled in the thirteen years we have been together.

But in the photos of his childhood I see Jacob, as Ethan so recapitulates my youthful visage. Uncanny really, how one is nearly all mine, the other his.

This morning once again watching my son dressing, eating, drawing yet another picture of his beloved Dragon Ball Z Kai characters, I see shades of the teen he is on the precipice of becoming, the man's body he will inhabit in the fast blink of an eye.

This manly illusion broken by his lilting voice: "Mommy can I pet Cocoa now?" His mind and spirit clearly remain so firmly still in the grasp of childhood, of autism; his obsession with the family cat waxing not waning.

"Cocoa, you're my best friend" he tells her, as he hugs her goodbye for the day. And it's true. She is. And I don't let him see the tears that well in my eyes as we don coats, trudge outside in the semi-darkness to await his school bus.

Thankfully they are gone by the time I sweep my hand across his cheek, kissing his tousled head while intoning my daily admonishment: "Listen to your teachers, work hard, no growling in school!"

I start to walk back inside, and then I turn; I turn and wave.

I wave at the darkened windows of the bus, knowing that inside sits my sweet, gentle giant.

My Jacob.

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Monday Listicles: The boat that has sailed

2011-11-21T19:30:00.001-05:00

Last week I so enjoyed making my list of why I don’t do list posts, that I decided this week it would be a hoot to participate in Stasha’s Monday Listicles thingie. But if I was looking for a lighthearted post? Um, wow, did I pick the wrong week to start.

Because for me? This week's list is SO not light and fun, but rather fraught with sadness and regrets and tension and worry about all that is not quite right with my family.

The list: 10 reasons why you do or do not want more children!

I struggle often with the feeling that I really should have had more kids. But that boat has sailed.

So I am splitting this list. Some reasons I wish we could have had more kids and some reasons we are definitively not having them. (And yeah I can never do things the simple way, have to put my own twist on them. My contrarian nature rearing its head again.)

First, the reasons we are not having more kids:

1. We are too old. Specifically ME. (Biology’s a bitch and really not fair - guys can still have kids at 70. Not that they SHOULD, but they CAN.) I am 51. Deep in peri-menopause. My period visits occasionally, but mostly just to wave goodbye and thumb its nose at me.

2. We are too old. It’s not just the biology. We are even too old to adopt. Chasing after a toddler right now? Would probably do me in. And my husband is yet 7 years older than I. Too, too old.

3. Autism. Once you have one the chances of having another increase greatly. Also with parental age. And while having had another typical child would have likely been a boon to the family, another autistic one might well have torn us apart. (Note to my friends with more than one autistic kid: I know you have wonderful families and love all your kids immeasurably. I also know it's tough. I'm just talking about my hopes/fears here.)

4. Money, money, money. We live in a small apartment, barely enough room for the four of us, absolutely not enough room to add another in. About the time I was getting ready to go back to work, we realized Jake was on a different path, and I abandoned my career to become a full time Autism Mom. Money? Is really tight around here.

5. Not just money, but also temperament. While I really would have had 1 or 2 more kids if I could have, my husband, while he loves our sons to pieces? Is just not a kid person. Have a couple of extra kids over on a play-date and his left eye starts twitching. In hell? His job would be kindergarten teacher.

6. We are too old. (Just in case you thought I might be wavering on that one.)

And now, from the department of sad regrets department, why I wish I could have had more kids:

7. I love kids, love being a mom. When the boys were little and they were climbing all over me on the floor I would be laughing away, and my husband would joke that I really had to loosen up and learn to enjoy motherhood more.

8. Amortizing my expertise. I had no idea what I was doing when I had kids & had to figure it all out under the pressure of twins. Just as I would become really good at whatever stage in their development the boys were at, they would move on to the next. If I'd had more kids I could have had some of that "more relaxed because it's old hat the 2nd (3rd, 4th) time around" parenting all my friends with lots of kids talk about.

9. Our family dynamic, with the autism thing? Could really use more kids. Jake really needs a younger sibling to love him unconditionally, look up to him. His dear friends are all 3 and 4 year-olds right now. He loves babies. It would have been great if he'd had one of his own.

10. Ethan could really use a typical brother or sister. Another sibling who is NOT his autistic twin. Someone to play with. And someone to share the burden of caring for his brother when my husband and I are gone, if Jake should still need that.

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So, in an ideal world I would have started younger and had more than 2. Then again, in that world I would also be about 40 pounds lighter, have listened to my mother & become a doctor, and bought Apple stock when it was $5 a share.

But we don’t live in that world, we live in this one, and this is the family I have. And I do so love my boys and our family, just as it is.

So no, we’re not having more kids.

Unless we literally win the lottery, and then with $32 million or so in our pockets? I’d think about adopting a baby girl or two. (Don't worry honey, highly unlikely. HIGHLY unlikely.)

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

SOC Sunday: Rebooting my Mom-self

2011-11-20T12:56:00.000-05:00

How is it humanly possible for Sunday to roll around again so soon? Who is speeding up time and can we please get them to take their foot off the gas pedal? I mean, really, this is getting quite ridiculous. It's like I'm going to blink and it's going to be something CRAZY, like nearly Thanksgiving.

What's that you say? It IS nearly Thanksgiving? No. Shut up. It just turned November. No? Damn.

OK, whatever. It IS Sunday still, right? It hasn't become Monday while I was busy scratching my ankle or anything, right? Good. So here's what's on my mind, straight from my brain to yours with very little filter in between...

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Ethan is pretty unhappy with our plans for today: we're driving out to Queens to attend the 1st birthday party for the baby girl of friends of my husband's and mine. In other words, not about Ethan.

He complained he wouldn't know anyone there but his family. And I decided to not coddle this shit anymore. I told him "you know when I was a kid my parents took me all kinds of places with them, not just kid places - where they went, I went too, I told him, it's family plans and sometimes you just have to suck it up and go along with the program, sometimes it's about you and sometimes its NOT about you and families do things together.

I was goinig to launch into all the cool things we go off to do that are for HIM but realized, I was having a hard time coming up with anything recent. Realized I have been in retreat for some time now.

We Used to do things all the time. go out to museums and parks and other neighborhoods, other boros. I was the "fun mom" always game for adventure. fun fun fun.

When did that drop? When did weekends become always one day inside, each kid attached to their own screens? I know I've been overwhelmed for a while. That the situation between the boys been so not fun for such a long time now - over a year, maybe two (one of benefits of blogging is can go back over time and read old posts see what was going on in my life at various times).

I have written time and again how hard it is to go and do anything with the two kids as they get along so poorly right now, as autism intrudes into our family space so deeply right now.

But I hadn't realized how much I have retreated from trying. And that sucks.

So I want to re-boot the whole enterprise. OK, our old sort-of-easy-to-hang-out family is gone. Done. And now I need to move on, figure out how to create new kinds of fun, make it work for us some how, get out and do.

Because I'm the fun Mom damn it!

OK, now to drag Ethan off to a one year old's birthday party. Sucking it up starts now. (For me, because he's going to be beast, but we're going anyway.)

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New to SOCS? It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spell-checking. This is writing in the raw.

You can do it, too! Click on the picture link and let's hear your 5 minutes of brilliance...

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

SNSS: They are Both “Special”

2011-11-19T10:30:00.001-05:00

Today's guest, Shelley Kramm, is a mover and shaker of the Special Needs Advocate variety. As the Playground Fairy she has been at the forefront of the movement to get inclusive playgrounds built in our communities.

Shelley blogs at I'm Still Standing where she is a font of information, as she writes about wellness and special needs families in general, as well as her own very special family in particular.

And, while Shelley is the mother of older children, she still recalls her daughters' beginnings like it was yesterday.

Come read her reflections of her girls' rocky beginnings and their supportive special relationship today, here:

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They are Both “Special” - by Shelley Kramm

I have 2 daughters one who I would say is “special” and the other with “special needs” and depending on the day over the past 19 years I would say they have each switched those words several times…

Pregnancy and I do not agree; why I am not sure, my mother gave birth to 6 children over the course of 8 years. For me, not so much…

My OB-GYN actually called me “the girl with the little black rain cloud” throughout my first pregnancy. I spent the first trimester throwing up so much I lost 15 pounds.

I found out I was RH negative (the only thing in common with my mother) developed pancreatitis and major gallbladder issues, my amniotic fluid level seemed to drop to all time lows, and then my blood pressure started to rise and protein began to appear in my urine and I developed full blown Preeclampsia/Toxemia and was admitted to the hospital 3 and a half months before my baby was due.

So not like my mother!

To make a long story short, it was a traumatic birth, 36 and a half hours after my water broke with Pitocin I had a c-section and my first daughter was born at 32 weeks weighing 4lbs 6ozs with NO cry! NO sound… Nothing…. She was blue… resuscitated… ventilated… must have been due to the magnesium sulfate that was controlling my blood pressure and her “life.”

We named her “Sarah” meaning “Princess”… Little did I know how that special Princess would turn into a Queen. The doctors told us she would be “deaf, blind, retarded (I hate that word) and never live on her own.” However, 24 hours later she was pulled off of these things in the NICU and two and a half weeks later we both went home to begin childhood.

Three and a half years later, I found myself again in the same predicament of a not so great pregnancy with Preeclampsia/Toxemia and again at around 28 weeks was at my OB-GYN with Sarah when my doctor shook his head and informed me that I wasn’t going anywhere… It was time to check myself into the hospital as the Preeclampsia/Toxemia was getting out of control and I had to be monitored.

There I was with my little child laying in my hospital bed wondering about my next. The birth, after a prior failed induction, we knew would be a c-section. So we prepared as the operating room prepared. And on February 6th six weeks before her due date Hadley entered the world with a cry that I will never forget.

She cried!! I can remember that cry as if it were yesterday as I was so thrilled to hear it thinking “thank god” maybe we would be spared the drama of the last birth and first few hours... However, a preemie and a tiny little baby weighing 3lbs 16ozs; she was the size of a football.

Sarah was waiting to see the outcome patiently; did she have a little brother or sister? And as she was whisked away past Sarah to the NICU I think she wondered… “Uh oh, what does this mean?” Sarah had several friends by now who had new brothers and sisters, but none of them couldn’t “see” their little siblings after they were born…

On Hadley’s 6th day of life she suffered a bilateral brain hemorrhage which changed her life and all of ours in one moment’s time. From that point on Hadley’s life became about medications, and doctors, and monitors, which Sarah didn’t understand. What 3 year old could understand this?

When Hadley finally came home from the hospital, a month later, she had monitors attached to her and a nurse who helped with the therapy and medications. Sarah would walk in and out of Hadley’s room to see her, and every time she walked out she would “smell her hands.”

I’m not sure what that was about and as Sarah grew older I asked her about it, and she, as a lot of children do, just didn’t answer. But I feel that perhaps she thought that there was a “smell” that might rub off on her and therefore she could “catch” what Hadley “had.”

I tried to keep our family life as “normal” as possible, and as our children grew I took them to the local park to play. Not such a great idea, and one day I got pissed off and came home and told my husband this had to change, my children could not play together. My special little daughter Sarah wanted to push her sister around and “play” with her, and this was impossible with woodchips and her stroller/wheelchair.

Hadley’s life was complicated enough with daily visits from physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, cognitive therapists, doctors, and a daily regime of medications which tasted oh so yucky.

Sarah would always defend her little sister’s disability to people who stared at her, children as well as adults. I became the brownie leader for Sarah’s troop and made teaching children about special needs a big part of our weekly lessons as Sarah thought it would help other children learn about special needs children and how they are not so different from themselves. Sarah was always willing to spread the word on how we are all ABLE.

When Sarah was 14 she came to Kenny and me and asked if she could be in a pageant. We had not ever experienced anything like this and wondered where this was coming from, but as we thought about it we realized that Sarah’s whole life she has been either Shelley’s daughter, Kenny’s daughter or Hadley’s sister and she wanted her “thing;” she wanted to show the world she was “special.”

For the remainder of her teen years Sarah competed for numerous titles and was very successful as she showed the world that beauty comes from within and shared her platform of “we are all ABLE.” In 2005 after winning Miss Maryland Teen America she received the title of Miss Continental Teen America and spent the year raising awareness for the disabled.

I thank god everyday for my two daughters and the lessons that they have both taught me on the word “special.”

Shelley's lovely family

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Shelley, I find it so inspiring that your older daughter is such a leader in fostering understanding of people with special needs. Wow, you must be so proud.

And now that you have read Shelley here you're going to want to follow her home to her blog, I'm Still Standing and read her there.

Try starting with this post about How she went from designer to special needs advocate. Or this moving one about what it was like when her daughter got her first wheelchair.

Also read about her work as a Playground Fairy, how she got one of the first inclusive playgrounds in the country designed and built in Maryland.

And, since Shelley has already gone where many of us are about to tread (with great trepidation), you might want to check out her views on raising teens today.

Also? Follow her on Twitter where she tweets as @shelleyellen and go to her Facebook Fan Page for daily inspiration on your life with challenges, and let her know you like her, you really like her.

Shelley, thank you again for sharing your beautiful girls with us here today.

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A Member of the (not so) Secret Grammar Police

2011-11-18T23:22:00.000-05:00

You may or may not know this about me: like a lot of other dorky writers, I'm a bit of a language and grammar nut. I know in this blog I don't always use 100% proper grammar 100% of the time. But I can assure you that 99.9% of the time, if I don't? It's on purpose, for reasons of literary integrity, cadence, emphasis, etc.

A blog is not a formal paper, after all. Sometimes I want it to sound like we're having an intimate conversation, like I'm sitting beside you, whispering my thoughts, inches from you ear. And friends? I don't always speak in complete sentences, with proper grammar, it's true.

But some stuff? The really egregious stuff? Drives me completely batty. Like using the wrong "there, their or they're." Really, people, didn't you learn that in second grade?

See? I instantly become a member of the secret grammar police, schoolmarmish, clucking my tongue and rolling my eyes and generally taking everything you say 50% less seriously if you use certain words wrong. I'm sorry. I know it's elitist. But I can't help myself.

But also, like (I think) all grammarians, I have my favorite, pet non-grammatical phrases. I know they're dead wrong but love them anyway. Like this one: "needs done."

And? "Y''all." Because there is NO plural for you in "proper" English. And it needs one, doesn't it? "Y'all" will suffice.

And then there's punctuation. My blog voice is halfway between literary & conversational, making it sometimes hard to find just the right balance between "proper" and functional.

So often I literally hear the words in my head as I write, and then am scrambling to find a way to make the punctuation work just right so that you will hear them EXACTLY the way that I heard them, too - or as close as you can since you will likely be hearing your own voice reading my words to you.

Unless you are my friend in real life, then you might hear my actual voice talking to you. Or not.

Maybe you hear Katharine Hepburn or Carol Kane or your Aunt Matilda (or Tweetie Bird for that matter) reading my words in your head. I have no control over that. We never really know what is going on inside other people's heads anyway, do we? (OK, digression over, back on topic now...)

But, even though I have no REAL control, I do what I can to clone my voice into your brain. Trying to parse things like: What sort of pause is a dash verses a comma, a comma verses a semi-colon? What level of emphasis is ALL CAPS verses bold verses being set off with *apostrophes*? How much of a shout is *ALL THREE AT ONCE*? (And is that ever justified?)

Also? Correct pronunciation counts. Sorry but it does.

I was raised by New Yorkers who had no New York accents, who were literate and believed that sounding intelligent was a good thing. (Did this get me shunned on the playground from time to time, left as the cheese who stands alone in the games of Farmer in the Dell? Probably, but it was worth it.)

If you said "axe" instead of "ask" around my mother? She would literally turn green, ask who you were planning to chop up. And our next door neighbor kids, who I played with every summer? Their Mom was from South Carolina. Axe, axe, axe away how they pronounced THAT one.

I've learned in the wisdom of my old age to keep my damn mouth shut, to not actually roll my eyes, to keep my polite on; because I really don't need to get into silly altercations about such trivial things after all, do I?

But in my mind? The schoolmarm is quite alive.

Take "nucular." Say that and I immediately shave approximately 30 IQ points right off you. Which is why if I ever hear any of this come out of Ethan's mouth? (And I do.) I get on his case like a tiger. He pushes back: "It's not fair, Mom, Jake says stuff wrong all the time." And that's true.

But Jacob has an excuse. He has autism, and furthermore, his particular flavor of autism is heavy on the language processing deficit stuff. Ethan knows this, knows if he goes on I will ask him the up-shutting question: "Do you really want to trade places with your brother? Because you know, life has actually been very not fair to him. But if you'd really prefer to be the twin with autism..."

And yes, I know this seems like nitpicking. But remember, in the animal kingdom actual nitpicking is an act of friendship and camaraderie. An important part of the social contract among our primate ancestors: you pick my bugs off and and I'll pick yours.

Speaking of which, since no one is proofreading my stuff but me, and sometimes I'll miss things that are obviously a mistake - like dropped apostrophes on "it's" and missing prepositions - if you DO catch something in my blog that needs fixing and isn't a clear style choice? Would you let me know?

I know it's not in the official spirit of blogging - write it and move on - but I *WILL* go back in and correct things in my posts. Sometimes multiple times (but not on Stream of Consciousness Sundays which are supposed to have all mistakes left intact, YIKES).

Because those occasional stray commas? Make me twitch if I find them in my blog. Oh, yeah, it's, fun, being, me. (Twitch.)

Note: This post is one from the Zombie Files. Since yesterday I said that they were "coming soon," I figured I had better make good on that promise, and sooner rather than later.

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Coming Soon: Posts from the Zombie Files

2011-11-17T22:51:00.001-05:00

Tonight when I sat down, way late, to post - short people finally asleep, me awake, house as picked-up-after as it's probably ever going to be tonight (read: not very; but the small-toy-booby-traps have been stowed away, so you probably won't trip over stray crap and kill yourself, either) - I realized, once again... I got nothing.

It had been a busy day: rushing to Jake's school way downtown for our Parent/Teacher conference immediately after dropping Ethan off at his, a half-day for Jacob, Hebrew School after school for Ethan; the kind that leaves me hollowed out by the end.

So I figured it was time to do what I had previously said I would do when this situation arose this month (in which I am foolishly committed to posting every day whether inspiration has visited or not): mine my not-quite-dead draft post archives for gems.

So I opened up my Blog's command center and found this:

That's right, for approximately every three posts I've published there is one unpublished post: poor orphaned child, sitting unfinished, forlorn and abandoned in my queue.

Now some of these are mere wisps of things, half thoughts, hastily jotted down, ideas for posts that I planned to write at some nebulous time in my future. Others are half done things: neither beast nor fowl, full of egregious typos and devoid of form, starting to go somewhere and then stopping, all out of steam.

And then there are the jewels I'm looking for: nearly done posts, just in need of a little polish before they are ready to be sent out into the world. Well, maybe a bit of rewriting and a new ending, but still, close enough to done that its worth the effort to march them to completion.

So, from these 113 draft posts languishing in their not-quite-dead-not-quite-live state, I thought I was going to simply pluck one out to share today. I thought I would just click and find a perfect small near Insta-Post. Just add a little extra verbiage and it's ready to go! Voila!

But then I found that even the "nearly done?" Still take a ridiculous lot of work to bring into a place where I'm willing to let them out of their hidey hole. There's a reason I didn't get these particular bunch finished. They were not easy to wrestle into shape. Damn.

And the ones that were the closest to ready? Were the best of the bunch, those I want to spend the most careful time with, make sure I am bringing them to the height of their potential shiny brilliance (to drag the "polishing up gems" metaphor possibly beyond where it should reasonably go). ADD and perfectionism, it's a heady mix in my brain, I tell you.

So tonight folks, I leave you with this: a post telling you about more posts soon to come. So all those papers I wrote in college about deconstructionism and the such were not in vain, they were preparing me to talk about talking about talking about things. Which just goes to prove that I can prattle on about anything. Yay, me!

And tomorrow? REAL CONTENT, I promise.

(Hey, I'm getting really good at using a lot of words to circle round and round a topic but never really saying anything of consequence - maybe I should go into politics?)

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Listen To Your Mother!

2011-11-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not telling you to do that. (I figure by now you know whether or not your mother is someone it makes sense to listen to.) And I'm not telling your kids (if you ARE a mother) to listen to you - they should be already doing that, like mine always listen to ME. (Yeah, right, and do you want to buy a bridge?)

What I am doing is ANNOUNCING something really IMPORTANT (which is why I am SHOUTING here in ALL CAPS):

The cities and production teams for the ten 2012 Listen To Your Mother shows have just been announced. And... And... YES! I am the producer of the New York City show!

I've been wanting to tell you forever, but couldn't spill the beans, nearly lost my mind waiting for the official announcement. What a RELIEF!

Click above to see the national announcement on the LTYM official site

I'll be working with a wonderful team: besides me as Producer there's the lovely and amazingly talented Amy Wilson who will be the Director, with Holly Fink and Julie Nemitz joining us as Associate Producers.

Also? The folks taking this on in the other nine sites across the country read like a who's who of fabulous blogger/writers. It's truly going to be an amazing series of events. Go to the LTYM announcement post to see who all is on board.

If you don't know what all this is about? Here it is (liberally ~~stolen~~ cribbed from the LTYM site in the words of Ann Imig who started this whole thing):

LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER (LTYM) is a national series of live readings by local writers in celebration of Mother's Day. Born of the creative work of mothers who publish online, each production is directed, produced, and performed by local communities, for local communities.

LTYM began with one show of local writers reading in Madison Wisconsin on Mother’s Day 2010. The video of the show was posted online in its entirety, and so LTYM reached a global audience and garnered a huge response.

Bloggers across the country began asking to host LTYM in their home towns, and so in 2011 Ann took the project national with shows in 5 cities across the country.

The mission of each LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER production is to take the audience on a well-crafted journey that celebrates and validates mothering through giving voice to motherhood–in all of its complexity, diversity, and humor.

LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER aims to support motherhood creatively through artistic expression, and also financially – through contributions to non-profit organizations supporting families in need.

So there you have it! A lot of my bloggy friends participated in this year's show (including the incomparable Alexandra of Good Day Regular People) and got me excited about the idea of bringing it to New York City next spring.

This summer at the BlogHer11 conference in San Diego, there was a LTYM open mike event on Friday evening, and, fortunately, my name was drawn out of the hat to read.

I read a sweet, sad post about time spent with my elderly mother (H is for Holding Hands) and the experience was wonderful. The room was packed; overflowing even with women sprawled on the floor as well as the furniture. And I made some of them cry. And then the next reader made them laugh.

(And then Deb Rox of Deb on the Rocks read a piece that was so funny, she made us all laugh so hard there was a mad rush for the bathroom afterward because some of us *might* have peed our pants a little - definite specific hazard in a room full of women who have had our pelvic girdle kicked from the inside one too many times.)

That's what's so wonderful about this show, it's the whole panoply of the mothering experience, both being and having a mother.

And, oh, did I mention yet that BlogHer is actually a national sponsor of this whole shindig again this year (it just keeps getting better and better) so THANK YOU, BlogHer, you wonderful women you!

So stay tuned for upcoming posts in the future about both the audition process (if you want to be in the show) and the ticket sales (if you want to come see the show). Also? I realized I have told very few tales of my history in the theater (bet you didn't even know I HAD one, right?) so this should cue a bunch of those to be forthcoming soon, too.

Just think: New York City in the late 80's and early 90's, Lower East Side, Off-Off Broadway, performance artists, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival... Hmmmm, some tales to tell, indeed...

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Top Ten Reasons Why I Don't Make Top Ten Lists

2011-11-15T11:18:00.000-05:00

Well, it's now exactly halfway through November, NaBloPoMo month, and so far I am still blogging every day. (Yay, me!) Fellow blogging friends have reminded me that two of the "easy" ways to get a post written when I'm in a hurry and have to toss one out are photo posts (Check! I do those on Wednesdays) and list posts. Hmmmm.

The "List Post" is supposed to be a handy tool in the Bloggers arsenal. (I know I've mixed my metaphors there - so what? It's *my* blog, I can do what I want.)

But you know what? I don't like them, hardly ever do them.

In general, they don't work for me.

Why? (you may ask)

Well, why don't I just make a list for you of my reasons? (Grammar police? Back off - I constructed the sentence that way for a reason. The reason? it pleases me.)

There are a myriad. That's a big number. But we don't have all day, so maybe I'll cut it down to size. Bite size, perhaps - how about 10, a nice even number (and the basis of our numeric system, to boot).

1. Have I mentioned I have ADD? We don't do lists. They're just so... orderly. And my brain is anything but. I'm allergic to lists. How do I get everything done in my life without them, you ask? Good question! (Hint: I don't.)

2. There is a very specific form and structure to "Top 10" list posts and for some reason (*cough* immaturity *cough*) highly structured brings up an oppositional, "you can't tell me what to do" voice in my head and I go into resistance mode. (Hey, I didn't promise these were 10 rational reasons now, did I?)

3. There is no number three. Move on. (Told you these make me oppositional.)

4. I am not a short-form, bullet points kind of gal. I write long, am long-form, not direct and to the point (although the wonderful Elissa did once call me "pithy" and I so teased her about that), I am Queen of the Run-on-Sentence (with parenthetical clauses) after all. And those? Don't make for nice short punchy "top ten" items, you know what I mean?

5. OverdoneOverdoneOverdone. And can I add: overdone? I don't do overdone.

6. That the list post is supposed to be an "easy out"? Feels like cheating, like a short cut. And, unfortunately, I don't do those. I try, but they end up being long-way-rounds, not short cuts, every freaking time. Take guest posts. These are supposed to be easy - hey, someone else is writing them! But then I write these long essay-like intros and linky wraps that involve research and take hours. Also? I promise these are not the first 10 things that popped into my head as I sat down to write this here list. I went back and looked them all over thought "Are they good enough?" And changed them made them better. Because I just can't take the easy way out without somehow making it the hard way. (Fun being me - no?)

7. Tangents. I'm all about the tangents, and lists don't make space for them, you need to proceed right to the next item. Stay on topic. No time for delicious tangents, like the time I...

8. By this point? It feels like homework. I hate homework. I am already doing 4th grade homework every night with Ethan and the same damn 1st grade homework for the third year running with Jacob. Did I mention I hate homework?

9. I never put things in the right order, always think of the really important one after I'm all done.

10. I know I had more reasons. I just can't think of them right now. But I have to come up with one more, make it to 10 item for this damn "Top 10" list because only having 9 is just awkward and feels incomplete. So I'm just going to have to pull something out of my ass, to make up some stupid thing to add in to fill this space up and make it come out to ten. Oh, yeah, that's another reason - I hate "space filler" items. Passionately.

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TEN! Yeah, I did it! OK, maybe this wasn't so bad after all. Maybe it's kind of fun. Maybe I should start doing Stasha's Monday Listicles linky. Maybe I should start doing ALL of the other list sort of memes on the interwebs.

Maybe that's ALL I'm going to do from now on! No need to try to create that magic "flow" or worry about that other writerly stuff, I'll now just list things in the random order they pop out of my brain in, and move on... Whoo hoo! I've been liberated from this "crafting" thing! I'm free! I'm free! I've been set free!

(The authorities have now been called to peel Varda off the ceiling. Don't worry, they will slap her around until she calms down, and her blog and writing will return to it's normal state by tomorrow.)

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I'm a (Guest) Star

2011-11-14T08:19:00.000-05:00

If yesterday I sent you all over the web to read other people's words? Well, today I'm sending you elsewhere to read some of MINE.

That's right, the lovely Alison of Mama Wants This! has invited me to be this week's Guest Star interviewee. She asked, I answered.

So if you want to hear me out on such burning issues as what I love most about being a mom, my favorite time of day, and the color of my underwear (no, she didn't ask that last one, but I'll tell you anyway, as a bonus - purple of course. You're welcome.) head over to Alison's joint today. Clink on the Guest Star logo above, or this link here:

Guest Star: Varda of The Squashed Bologna

And then, once you're over there, have a look around and see what Alison has been up to. Read some other Guest Star posts (I'm in great company). Find out more about Alison's life, over on the other side of the world.

Oh, did I forget to mention that part? One of the loveliest aspects of this whole blogging community thing - I can have a friend like Alison in Malaysia and we can share our lives like we meet for coffee at the local bagelry after school drop off.

So come join me for morning coffee and mom-chat with Alison. Although remember, with the 13 hour time difference, for her, it's a nightcap.

And, Alison? I'm so glad you asked me, I really enjoyed answering your thoughtful questions. Thanks for making me feel like a star.

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Sunday Night Send Off

2011-11-13T21:23:00.001-05:00

Today is the day this NaBloPoMo, this "posting every day this month thing" is finally biting my ass. And it's the 13th already, that means it's nearly mid-month. So really that's not that bad.

What is bad, however, is this: I got nothing today.

I just will. not. post. another. whiny. how-tough-life-is-with-an-autistic-kid. rant.

I. just. will. not.

Which is what you would get if I let loose with a Stream of Consciousness Sunday post tonight. Believe me, I live here in my brain, I know which direction it's going in; nothing good coming out of that tonight, trust me on this one folks.

So I'm going to take a page out of some other blogger's books and use this space to link up some of the beauty and brilliance I have found on the web this week, send you off to read posts on OTHER people's blogs.

Like Schmutzy does with her wonderful "Five Star Friday" weekly collection of wonderful posts (that I have had the honor of being linked up in, multiple times).

Or Kate from The Big Piece of Cake with her "Links I Love" posts on (mostly) Mondays.

Or Jenny, the Bloggess, with her weekly Sunday wrap-up posts containing the "Shit-I-didn’t-come-up-with-but-wish-I-did-because-it’s-kind-of-awesome" list. (In June 2010 Jenny generously linked to my "From Autist to Artist" post and I got over 1000 hits within a few hours, heady stuff.)

It's not because I don't like you and want you here, but because I DO, and won't just slap up any old drivel and call it a post. THAT'S not a post. THESE are posts (go. read.):

Stimey, over at her blog Stimeyland wrote another AMAZING "big thoughts" post about autism again. Read this post here: Not Even Wrong about her son on the autism spectrum and his wonderful teacher and about how important it is to NOT pound our square peg kids into round holes because, as she quotes from my favorite author Paul Collins book Not Even Wrong: "Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg."

Momo over at her blog Momo Fali writes a short, lovely, moving post about feeling lost, and then found. Read this: Rising Above and go give her a cyber-hug, please.

Anna of An Inch of Gray is continuing to rip out our hearts with beautiful posts about her lost son and surviving daughter. This one: Isn't it Ironic, is yet another that must be read. You will find her writing as astonishing as the depth of love that suffuses her blog.

My friend Alysia's beautiful tribute to her Father, now dead 13 years: The Rose

There is MUCH more that is wonderful out there, but four links is about all I got in me tonight. And come back tomorrow, OK, I won't bite (too hard).

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SNSS: You Are My Sunshine

2011-11-12T00:18:00.000-05:00

Even though she is not local, I have had the pleasure of actually meeting up with today's SNSS guest, Diane AKA Momo, TWICE so far this year. And I can attest to her being every bit as lovely in person as she is on her blog, Momo Fali.

Momo is the mother of two children: daughter Ali (source of the blog's title) a typical teenage girl, and her younger brother with a host of special needs. Momo writes beautifully, with much warmth and humor about life with her wonderful family, and her thoughts on the world around her.

To be the mother of both a teenage girl and a boy with multiple health and behavioral issues and to retain a sense of humor? That takes a special person, which Momo certainly is.

So come read this moving post about her children's evolving relationship, now:

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You Are My Sunshine - by Momo

I have two special children.

My daughter, Ali, was born 10 weeks premature and spent five weeks in the hospital. She weighed 2 lbs. 9 oz. when she was born and in 1998, that was one, tiny baby. We spent some time working with a physical therapist, but by 15 months, she had caught up with her peers in size, weight and development.

I have always called her a freak of nature.

When Ali was a toddler, her brother was born 7 weeks premature, with congenital heart defects, urinary reflux, severe GI reflux, eye problems and bad hearing. Special needs took on a whole new meaning. As he grew, we learned of OCD, PDD-NOS and SPD. Acronyms-R-Us!

We spent a lot of time, those first few years after my son’s birth, in and out of the hospital. He was a very sick baby and had 9 surgeries by the time he was 6 years old. Ali’s life was flipped upside down.

I read somewhere, long ago, that in order to make a child feel positively about a new sibling that you should refer to the baby as, “your brother” or “your sister.” I did that a lot and it worked for a long time.

I vividly remember my son being in pain and watching Ali sing to him. She usually chose, “You Are My Sunshine.” She was a fabulous big sister.

Sure, she ran from the room when he would choke and vomit, or excused herself to the hallway at the lab when it was time for a blood draw. I can’t blame the kid for that!

But, more often than not, Ali was a trooper just like her brother; at least during the medical phase of his special needs. When his health became stable, the behavioral issues came to the forefront. His quirks, she merely tolerated.

Then she turned 12 and she tolerated them no more.

Apparently, having a special needs brother is one thing, but having a special needs brother when you’re going through puberty is something else entirely. If you dislike your parents, then you will really dislike your little brother. Throw in odd behavior and it will be downright disdain.

My son not only annoys her, but he is brutally honest. This is fine, at home, when he’s telling her that she’s “bossy” (she is, in a big-sister sort of way), but in public it is clear that she would rather be anywhere but with us, out of fear that her brother will say something embarrassing.

They fight a lot, but there are fleeting moments when I see them playing together and my heart sings. I miss those, “You Are My Sunshine” days. Not the part where my son was so sick, but the part where Ali tried to make it better. Now, he sings to her (because he sings constantly) and she tells him to, “Be quiet! Gosh!”

She loves to read and, on her own, she chose a couple of books from the library about siblings of kids with Asperger’s. When asked, she jumped at the opportunity to sit, privately, with my son’s psychologist to talk about what it’s like to be a special needs sister. She is learning and speaking about her situation at her own pace, on her terms.

But, she will not talk to me about it and that’s okay. She’s almost 13. She doesn’t want to talk to me. You know why? Because she’s not the special needs baby that she used to be.

She’s a regular tween. Her prematurity didn’t affect her as it could have. Other than a couple of minor medical procedures as a toddler, she has grown, completely, into a typical girl. And, that’s a great thing.

Would I love to know what she’s thinking? Yes. Would I love to know what to say and do to let her know that her feelings are perfectly normal? Yes. But, as long as she can talk to someone about it, it doesn’t have to be me.

My job is to let her know that she is loved, to remind her that her brother can’t help embarrassing her and, when she, someday, realizes how fortunate she was to have grown up with a special needs brother, I will welcome her back with open arms.

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I love how Momo understands and accepts that her kids' relationship will change and evolve over time, trusting that it will fall back into a better rhythm someday in the future. And also her acceptance that her daughter may just not want to talk to her mother about everything at this point in her life. (Teenager - how that word strikes anticipatory terror in every parent of a younger kid's heart!)

Also, I have to say, that song "You Are My Sunshine" that serendipitously played a role in both last week's AND this week's SNSS posts? Terrified me as a young child. It made me deeply sad, made me sob and wail. Why? Have you heard the lyrics? "Please don't take my sunshine away... You have shattered all my dreams." But I'm over that now. Sniff.

OK, now that you have read Momo's lovely words here you're going to want to follow her home to her blog, Momo Fali, and read her there.

Try starting with this post about her daughter that tells the story of the blog's name or this one in which Momo shares some of Ali's incipient transformation into a teenager. (Yikes!)

To know more about Momo's son, read this post written to him on his ninth birthday, or this moving piece about the pain of watching him trying to play sports, but not quite being able to keep up, becoming invisible.

Finally, for the funny (which Momo has in spades) read this post about her wasabi gob of death incident when she was in NYC for the BlogHer Writers conference last month, to which I was an actual witness!

Also? Follow her on Twitter where she tweets as @MomoFali and go to her Facebook fan page and let her know you like her, you really like her.

Thank you Momo, for your friendship, and for this lovely, lovely post about your beautiful, special children.

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One day down

2011-11-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

I have come to realize, in hindsight, that life was much easier when the boys were little, when we could just toss them into the double stroller, or later. load up the big backpack and grab the park-toy-bag and head out the door to the local playground and lawn, just across the street from our apartment building.

The boys would run around, play, have a great time. Ethan would find a friend or make a new one and Jake was happy to play by himself exploring his sensory environment, digging in the sand, delighted by the sprinkler or entranced and soothed by the motion of the swings,

Sidewalk chalk, bubbles, rocket balloons, sand toys, bouncy balls of various colors and sizes, juice boxes and crunchy snacks: all we needed for happiness.

They are growing up, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

I really knew how to parent little kids, I had it down pat, or at least was faking it well enough for us to roll along merrily, even with autism aboard.

But now? Oh, man is it complicated. Way too complicated.

Ethan is so social, is desperate to spend all his time with his friends, playing elaborate games with them, involving 10,000 characters with Japanimated names like "Flareon."

And Jake? Wants desperately to play, to interact with other kids, but has one, just ONE, who will give him the time of day. And she's the baby sister of a friend of Ethan's. And, at four, will soon grow too old to play with odd, older boys like Jake.

Managing their social time is complicated. Sometimes impossible. Like today.

Because today was another dreaded school holiday. The first day of an equally dreaded three-day-weekend. And while I had planned and managed Election Day well, filled Ethan's time, made a fun day of it, today was a total mom-fail. I miscalculated, thought I could pick up some mates for Ethan last minute. Big no-go. Everyone was away or busy (scouting friends marching in the Veteran's Day parade, even).

After a too-brief playtime with the upstairs neighbor boys in the morning before they took off early for a long weekend out of town, it was just the brothers, together. All. day. long.

With a tired Mom who had whanged her elbow badly on Wednesday evening and was icing and babying it all day, fairly miserable on strong anti-inflammatory medication and very little sleep (last night, every time I adjusted my sleeping body I hurt my elbow and woke up).

Taking them out somewhere would have been a huge endeavor, fraught with the need to ward off many incidents of near-fratricide; possible multiple swear words being invoked when one of the boys inevitably banged into my tender, throbbing left elbow.

So we spent the whole day inside, the boys attached to their various beloved screens of many colors with loud noises. Me attached to my ice pack and computer, naps snatched when I could.

And then this evening I was able to pack them off for dinner and a movie with friends (yes, Jake's one friend) at THEIR apartment, got a two hour respite. Whoo-hoo!

If I could arrange for a week to take place between today and tomorrow, a week out of time where I could sit on a beach, get a daily massage, drink pink things with tiny umbrellas, read a novel start to finish with minimal interruptions, sleep, sleep, sleep - THEN I would feel ready for the rest of the weekend.

But something tells me that's not likely to happen in this, my non-science-fiction real life. No one is lending me their TARDIS. So I guess I'm just going to have to just suck it up and forge ahead.

One day down, two to go.

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Autism's Little Gifts at Hopeful Parents

2011-11-10T23:15:00.000-05:00

Yep, it's the 10th of the month again, so I'm over at:

where I'm being positive, not negative, and talking about the little gifts my son's autism brings along with it.

So come read me over at Hopeful Parents today as I contemplate Autism's Little Gifts.

Because I just can't do another cranky rant, even though I have plenty of material for that, believe me.

And now? Time to ice my elbow again (don't ask).

(But if you want details, read my Hopeful Parents post.)

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Wordless Wednesday: Matchy-Matchy Boys

2011-11-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

I was going through my photo archives the other day and was struck by many of the pictures from when the boys were little, from when I sometimes dressed them alike and they were still looking very... twin-y. And I thought today I would share...

I loved those yellow sweaters.

Translation of looks: Jake - "Nice to meet ya!" Ethan - "Who are you and what can you do for me?"

And it only took 1/2 hour to get them bundled into these - for 10 minutes of sledding.

Holding hands at 5 months

Two tired little boys at bedtime

9 Months old, on the grass for the first time

My little Telletubbies.

July 4th, 2005 in Vermont

The dudes at 2

Playing together, still occasionally at 5

We used to do this a lot, too: same exact outfit but different colors.

Hanukkah Party, 2008

And that's all folks. See, I can be (nearly) wordless, really!

And, as usual, I’m linking up to Wordless / Wordful Wednesdays... at Angry Julie Monday... at 5 Minutes for Mom... at live and love...out loud... at Dagmar*s momsense... at Parenting by Dummies.

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Morning Light

2011-11-08T08:46:00.001-05:00

One son successfully sent off to school (awakened, toileted, dressed, hugged, breakfasted, lunch packed, homework checked, jacket bundled, bus met, kissed, waved) I head into the boys' room to wake the next, start it all over again, when I remember just in time... election day; public schools closed.

I stop myself with my hand outstretched, pull back.

A wan light is all that seeps into this small back room, originally designated for the maids, brick walled courtyards deemed a sufficient view for those of their station.

It works for our boys, cocooning them from the sounds of New York City that pour, raucous, into the front rooms of our apartment.

Ethan has wrapped himself up pupae-like in his fuzzy blue blanket, the only parts protruding being his head and right arm at the top, one bare foot at the bottom. His arm is draped across his forehead, warding off what creatures of dreams I know not.

I sigh, spend a moment breathing in my son, indulging in one of the great secret pleasures of this mothering life: watching my children sleep.

Nine year-old Ethan has become wary of his mother's lingering eye in wakefulness. "Why are you staring at me, what are you looking at?" he'll ask if my glance overstays. Worried there is scrutiny, judgment. He accepts, skeptically, when I state the mostly true: "Nothing, I just love looking at you."

But while he sleeps, I can feast to my hearts content upon his sweet features that nascent adolescence and testosterone soon will transform.

Like the witch mothers in the Harry Potter books we are reading together, I wish for a magic wand with which to ward off all the hurtful things that may befall my son, making his way across the treacherous waters that lie ahead.

Wand-less, bereft of all but the ordinary magic of mother-love, I make my silent incantations anyway: "Let his heart not be badly broken by the first girl he hands it to; let him find joy in the doings of life and not just the achievement of the brass rings, but may he snatch his fair share of those as well, please."

He breathes in, out.

And I breathe with him, remembering the time I once breathed for him and his brother, when they resided inside me, and I stood in this room expectantly, attempting to conjure their faces from my dreams.

Envying my son the deliciousness of sleeping in, I slip out of his room.

A sink full of dirty dishes beckons.

The tower of boxes, emptied of mittens, fleece and parkas; now filled with summer - tank tops and shorts, sun bleached bathing suits and salt scented beach towels - are impatiently waiting to be carried back to the basement.

But first these words buzzing 'round my head must find purchase. I side-step past the detritus of Jacob's morning, approach the computer.

Sit.

Write.

A few stolen minutes.

Mine.

Mine to just write.

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