Kiss My Knits!

Emily had a dentist appointment today, and she was SO brave. She had expressed to us some anxiety over the water they use to rinse off the toothpaste. She told us it was too cold, so I wonder now if she has sensitive teeth.

In the office, she was clearly afraid, and she cried, but she didn’t try to stop the dentist from doing what she needed to do, event hough she obviously wanted to. Emily was able to express that she wanted “regular” toothpaste (meaning her usual brand and flavor), and then (without them asking) that she used silly strawberry, and she asked if what they had was mint, and if the floss was mint. She hates mint. She told them about the water being too cold, and they wound up wetting a little paper towel and wiping her teeth off. She was much relieved.

The dental hygienist was very good about calming her down. Emily asked about X-rays and the dental hygienist said she didn’t have to have them today. Great! I had prepared her for that, and even showed her what they do (she’s had them before, but still) but if she doesn’t have to have them this time, then that’s fabulous!

Afterward, I went up and thanked the lady for doing such a good job…and then she asked me to sign a waiver saying that we hadn’t had x-rays today even though it had been a year and she was due for them.

WTF?? I get that Emily’s anxiety level was very high, and I told her I understood why she’d told Emily we weren’t having x-rays, but I pointed out that the anxiety level wasn’t going to be any lower next time. I also noted that Emily had a high rate of cavities.

She offered for us to do them today, but I wasn’t going to drag her back in for X-rays after she thought she was done and had put her jacket on. Now that’s trauma. But I also expressed to her that we couldn’t wait for the next appointment in six months. And that I needed to be sure insurance would cover it, since it was a separate visit, AND that we were going to do it on a day with no school, since we weren’t going to miss another one because of this error. I said it a little more nicely than that. A little.

I repeated that I understood why she’d said that, and I appreciated the desire to calm her down, but it wasn’t really doing her any favors or making things better in the long run. So anyway, now she has an appointment for x-rays only at noon on a no-school day.

I get where the dental hygienist was coming from, but it was the wrong decision. If she’d asked me first, I would have told her that. It makes me wonder if she skimped on other dental care in her desire to get Emily out the door. I’ll never know.

I’ve been working very hard lately, and decided I wanted a new icon for those occasions when I’m feeling very Wonder Woman. So here it is, from Rosie the Riveter by Norman Rockwell from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, 1943. The link leads to the Rosie the Riveter site, with a picture of the original painting and info about it.


Here’s the song, a product of its times:

All the day long,
Whether rain or shine,
She’s a part of the assembly line.
She’s making history,
Working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
That little girl will do more than a male will do.
Rosie’s got a boyfriend, Charlie.
Charlie, he’s a Marine.
Rosie is protecting Charlie,
Working overtime on the riveting machine
When they gave her a production “E”,
She was as proud as she could be,
There’s something true about,
Red, white, and blue about,
Rosie the Riveter.

Now pardon me, I’ve got a lot of work to do here on the home front today!

Mom: “You’re the bomb, aren’t you dear?”
Me: “I am!”
Mom: “I just learned that one!”

Hee! Love you, Mom!

Maybe you Heroes fans knew this already, but Adrian Pasdar, who plays Nathan Petrelli on Heroes, has a YouTube account and posts up the periodic videos he makes with his costars. Looks like they’re a close-knit bunch. A close-knit bunch with a lotta downtime between scenes.

I wrote to the DMI website folks, and they wrote back to say that they knew the weird formatting was an issue in Schrute Farms reviews, but until they came up with a global fix, they had manually corrected the Mac users weird entries. They also inadvertently removed my paragraph breaks and I guess the system couldn’t handle RübeKinderArbeitProgramm, so it was changed to FreiKinderArbeitProgramm, but hey! Close enough! It does look better and I appreciate the timely response. Go Team DMI!

Pictured at left, by the way, is the beet o’lantern that I made to go with my review. Let me tell you, it is surprisingly difficult to hollow out a raw beet. Did you know that salt gets out beet juice stains? See, you learned something new today, and it’s going to be a better day because of it!

Over the weekend we bought a bike for Emily. She’s been asking for one. Here she is just after getting it, practicing pedalling while her father helps her balance and steer. It’s a fairly complex task, really, and much as I love Emily, I have to say that coordination is not one of her strong points.

Like all children, she wants to know how to do something NOW. Yesterday she wanted to try to ride with her hands off the handlebars. I also let her steer a little, which turned out to be a mistake, because I now have a scrape on my leg from where her pedal gouged me when the bike lurched to the left. Thank goodness I was wearing long pants. The scrape isn’t so bad, but it’s sore and I feel certain it’s going to bruise. I figured she’d be the one getting banged up riding this thing, not me. Oh well.

I had to put up the “if you ain’t in line, you might not get it by Christmas” note on the Jayne hat page. I’m still working on orders from Sept 10th, so I definitely wouldn’t want anybody to be disappointed should things continue to go slowly. So today, it’s stamping up boxes, writing Ma Cobb notes, packing up kits, and mo’ Jayne hats. I wonder what movie I should watch while doing this. Hmmm…

Hats up for: CO, CO, and CO. Go Colorado!

So I’m well acquainted with the notion that I have to strip out formatting from Word documents when I’m pasting them elsewhere. I have all the autoformatting turned off – something I learned to do the first time I was pasting special event messaging into Dragonrealms and none of the quotation marks showed up. Embarassing!

But I thought I had everything set correctly when I posted up this week’s Dunder Mifflin Infinity task, a review of Schrute Farms. But no, there’s plenty of freaky formatting to go around, and you can’t edit your entries once they’r submitted. I put a fair amount of effort into this – purchasing beets, photographing them, and Photoshopping them into my daughter’s easter egg carton. I even carved a freakin’ beet into a jack o’lantern. My fingers are still stained red. And it’s all for naught!

Darn you, Microsoft! Darn you all to heck!

ETA: Actually, I see another Mac user whose review looks like it’s all in ASCII. So maybe it’s not Word, maybe it’s Mac and Dunder Mifflin Infinity. Get with the times, DMI!

Emily’s class is doing “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from Annie for their Fall musical. Except she didn’t know there was such a thing as Annie. When she found out, she was super excited, so we had to rent it and see it.

She’s been watching it on and off for the past couple of days, doing other things, not really paying much attention, and never actually getting to the end.

Today, she had a very active day. She didn’t get as much sleep as usual last night, and then today she went with her father to Ray’s Splash Planet, then to the mall, so she’s good and tired now. She’s camped on the couch watching Annie and eating popcorn.

Just now, it was revealed that Annie’s parents were dead, something we’d told Emily was probably the case since she was an orphan. But they’re not just dead, they were killed in a fire.

Yikes.

Fire is a fear of Emily’s. She shouts for me to get the stove as soon as the timer goes off, she doesn’t like birthday candles, this is a big worry for her. So now she’s crying off and on, kind of quietly and sadly, and saying that the movie’s almost over. She doesn’t want to stop watching it, because we’ve assured her it has a happy ending, but she’s just so unhappy and tired right now. She wants it to be done.

She is so not ready to watch Bambi.

(My husband, by the way, is in the den with her, and I’m about to go back in – I’m not abandoning my child to blog.)

As sad as this is, it’s still nice to know she has empathy for these sorts of things. So many autistic kids don’t. We’re so lucky in so many ways. And now pardon me, I have to go get some popcorn for a sad little girl.

Greetings from beyond the grave! Yes, I moved to week two of the Couch to 5K podcast and I’m fairly sure that it actually killed me.

The first leg: “This isn’t so bad!”

The second leg: “This is more challenging than last week.”

The third leg: “It may have been too soon to move to week two.”

The fourth leg: “Maybe if I run toward the light…”

Everything else is just a blur. I arrived home with sweat pouring off of me like it was the very first day again. Now that I’ve drunk some water and squeegeed myself off, I’m red faced but much more comfortable. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll do week two again next time or go back to week one. Maybe it’s like childbirth: you have to forget what it was like before you want to do it again.

Yesterday I sent out a mass e-mail telling folks that Jayne hat kits were available again, and a buncha people signed up overnight, so I’m cleaning up, then stuffing envelopes while I watch To Have and Have Not which I snagged from the library yesterday. No worries, there will be no actual Tvini sweat on the yarn.