Kiss My Knits!

Em has re-watched the Phyllis Diller episode of the Muppet Show several times today. Picking up standup tips? Hmm…

I may have mentioned that a couple of weeks ago, Emily tried out for her school talent show. Her talent? Telling jokes. Pretty big for an kid with autism who doesn’t like to make eye contact and routinely tells us that she just doesn’t want to talk right now.

Well, today was the show! I asked Emily how she felt onstage, and she told me, “I felt so, so, so, so, excited!”

Em’s teacher said that onstage, she was very confident and expressive, “like she is when she’s reading sometimes, with the eyebrows and everything” and was loud and clear. (Em does have a very expressive voice when she reads, giving things a lot of appropriate and sometimes dramatic inflection.) Her teacher says that Em got good laughs from the kids.

I asked Emily to tell me a joke that she told at the talent show: “What goes ‘ha ha ha plop plop?’ An audience laughing their heads off!”

Then when they got back to the class, she spontaneously started leading the class in song and dance. It was a song about “thumbs up, thumbs down” that she learned in school. You know, for a kid with Emily’s challenges, she really has shown an affinity for showbiz. She is, at her request, having a week of drama camp this summer.

My baby was born to be a star!

WAY too much to do today, and too little time to do it. So in lieu of a long post about my crappy time with teacher gifts this year, we have one piece of art and one cool link.

“Mom, Dad, the burglar alarm is ringing. A burglar.”

We do not own a burglar alarm, but Emily loves watching burglars in the Sims 2. We have a cheat that permits her to send a burglar to a house, and then a police officer comes, and they get in a cartoon-style fight with a cloud of smoke with the burglar crawling out and being dragged back in, etc. That’s where this drawing comes from, not from any anxiety about our house getting broken in to.

What I love about this picture: she’s facing away, looking at the alarm, and you can see the line across the back of her head representing her hair. It looks like she’s wearing earrings – you can see the backs.

Note the concentric rings coming from the alarm representing noise. All that time in the comic book shop is clearly paying off!

And now, a link that really makes me smile: sneaky, sneaky dolphins.

Have a good one! I gotta get cat food before the cat eats me!

I had to try again, just to wash the taste of that scarf away. And this is better… but I think this technique just isn’t for me. So that’s it for felting with silk hankies.

Moving on, some Emily art! This is two girls playing a clapping game in the vein of “Miss Mary Mack.” The game is called Double Double. I had to look it up since this isn’t one that I did as a child. I guess it’s one Emily does, though, because I got her to demonstrate it for me and she did it correctly and without hesitation.

I like that she properly has them sitting to do it, and that she puts them in profile instead of facing forward with their hands to the side or some such. Good eye.

We heard from her teacher today that Emily is auditioning for the end of year school talent show. Her talent will be telling jokes. She’s going to tell five. Emily’s jokes can be a little surreal sometimes, but I’m confident she’ll do a good job. She tells jokes to her classmates every day as they’re lining up for lunch, and apparently gets good laughs.

She’s always trying to come up with new material at home, then she asks “is that funny?” That’s always a tough line to walk. You want to encourage her, but you don’t want to lie and then have her bomb in front of a non-Mom crowd. I wrote a new joke for her the other day. Wanna hear it? Of course you do!

Q: Why did the hen take her egg to the doctor?
A: It was time for a chick-up!

Thank you! I’ll be here all week! Don’t forget to tip your servers!

Okay, onward to the Jayne hat portion of the day. Hats up for: Dallas, Dallas, and Austria.

Y’all have a good one!

Todays Emily art is full of detail.

Emily’s best friend in class this year is a girl named Lilian. Here she is with Em in art class. She’s always immaculately groomed (smock aside) with earrings and hair bows, etc. So what does this bring out in Emily? Why, the art to the right, of course! “Lilian’s Beauty Salon.” There are some other classmates there, and mentions of others.

Kids’ job is to grow up, and a lot of times in their art you can see them trying to figure it all out, with adult themes love interpreted through childlike eyes. She tells us she has a crush, but apparently it’s not a crush on anyone, she just likes the idea of having one. So it is with encouraging friends to get married. But, apparently, get a makeover first.

I have no idea what’s up with the flower, though. Heh.

Today after picking up my daughter, I noticed not one but two news crews parked outside my daughter’s school. One might be a fluff “end of school” piece. Two means something happened. So I pulled up to the second one and asked what the dealio was. I said, “is this something my daughter should hear? If not, I don’t want to know.” Apparently, someone who wasn’t supposed to be there was exposing themselves. That’s all I got out of them before I started going basically “LA LA LA NOT LISTENING” because, hello, my child was in the back seat.

Em doesn’t seem to know anything about it, thankfully. I haven’t seen anything on the news yet, and I’ve got a call in to Em’s teacher.

In light of events, let’s go with a bad guy-themed picture today: Repo Man. Yes, that is what my daughter said, “repo man.” In this picture, the repo man has come to take the family baby. Note the evil moustache and pleased expression on the villain, as well as the open O mouth of alarm on the mother and, I assume, father. Oh, the humanity!

ETA: I found a news story about the flashing. They got the time wrong by a good hour, and they spelled my kid’s school name wrong. I e-mailed. It’s been a hour and no correction. Journalists today stink!

Emily selected a game today to play with her speech therapist and was not enjoying it.

Em, with a sigh: “I hate this game.”
Therapist: “But you’re the one who picked it out.”
Em, thoughtfully: “Good point.”

Hee! That’s brand new. Also, hilarious.

Today’s Emily art: Sneaky Sam. Looks like she’s tiptoeing. That’s sneaky, all right!

A few weeks ago, Emily and I went to the Schiele Museum while my husband was in Kentucky. My friend Rachel had suggested this. She knew that Emily had developed a keen interest in space, and the Schiele museum has a great planetarium and is only a half hour down the road.

Emily enjoyed the museum all right, but not in the traditional way. She whizzed through the museum at a pace I call “Stropewalking.” It’s when you’re getting to where you’re going and woe betide anyone who gets in your way. It’s named after its creator, my mother. Genes control interesting things.

As soon as they announced the planetarium show, Emily stopped her power tour of the museum, where she’d been basically killing time anyway. We had a GREAT time at the show. The Schiele museum cleverly placed their gift shop outside the planetarium exit, so there was nothing for it but to buy glow-in-the-dark stars. Immediately. I knew where this was going.

Sure enough, when we got home, they had to be put on the ceiling in representations of the actual constellations. I’m not going to have my daughter stand on a ladder and try this, so it fell to me. And so now she has semi-accurate representations of many constellations on her ceiling. Emphasis on the “semi.”

The interesting part is that although the pack came with small and large stars, she wanted to stop when we ran out of small stars. She knew that constellations had both small and large, and she didn’t just want to dump the big ones in there willy nilly. So when I suggested we go back to the planetarium yesterday, she was delighted, not least because she could get more stars to go on her ceiling.

The Spring Sky Show was at 3, but she had her shoes on at noon, and I couldn’t stall her for long. We wound up hitting “Oceans in Space” narrated by Avery Brooks at 1pm. Emily sat upright with great interest. We hit “Dinosaurs” at 2pm – not that great for us, but we watched the stars go since they left them running. Emily listed sideways in her seat. Finally, we hit the Spring Sky Show at 3pm, hosted by “Joe.” Emily was interested, but nobody but an immediate family member would know it, since she was practically on the floor.

Joe’s good. Next time we go, I wanna shoot for a show that Joe’s running.

Emily left the show with more questions than last time, like “Are all stars except the sun in constellations?” And “Do all people live in the Milky Way?” This time, not only did she wants the constellations on the ceiling, but she hit me with questions like, “What were the stars in the Summer Triangle?” She already knew Castor, Pollux, and Sirius, but now her individual star repertoire has expanded to include Deneb, Altair, and Vega. They’re appropriately labeled, with dotted lines connecting them.

I’ve found some things online that I wish I had, like glow in the dark yarn or glow in the dark thread because let’s face it, my pencil marks leave a little to be desired.

Next week the Spring Sky Show ends and the Summer Sky Show stars. Emily has expressed a desire to go back. I’ll get out the stepstool and limber up in preparation.

I’m back on the Jayne horse again now that I can breathe better. Not perfect, but better, and that’s good enough! I’ve got four hats and four kits waiting to go out, so I’ll be hitting the post office momentarily. Actually, only three of those hats are going out. I’m waiting for an e-mail back from a guy in Oregon – I’m missing his address. Hats next up to: CA, MO, CO.

Emily got it into her head earlier this week that we needed to make gelatin. Not “Jell-O,” “gelatin.” This is because she found it hilarious to pronounce the word “juh-LAH-tin.” Ah, jocularity, jocularity. We made some yesterday and she had it last night. “This is DELICIOUS!” she said.

She’s on a cooking spree lately. At her request, we made lemonade yesterday, the only way we always make it – from scratch, with lemons, water, and sugar. Here’s the recipe. Only modification: she doesn’t like pulp, so we squeeze the lemons through a sieve.

Yesterday I looked at her and thought about how much she was growing up, and took a chance. “Would you like to cut the lemons?” So I showed her how you curve your fingers to avoid cutting them. I watched her like a hawk but didn’t really interfere. It could have been really bad – nothing stings like lemon juice in a cut – but she did great. The cuts didn’t exactly bisect the lemons perfectly, but so what? It’ll come with practice. She picked out the bag of lemons at the store, since one of those 2 pound bags gives just about the perfect amount of juice. She didn’t boil the sugar in the water, obviously, but she did pour the cooled syrup into the pitcher. She cut the lemons, and she helped a bit with squeezing, but it’s hard for her little hands. I did the trick where you roll the uncut lemon on the counter to make it easier to squeeze after cutting, but even so, it took some muscle.

Emily poured in the water and the lemon juice and stirred it with a wooden spoon. And she’s been drinking it regularly. I took the opportunity to point out how food we make ourselves tastes so much better. I am a mom, after all. We say these things.

Today’s Emily art is Musical Lin. I don’t know who Lin is, but clearly she enjoys belting out the tunes. Time to get another kit packed up. Hope y’all have a great day!

My allergies are definitely getting better. I can often breathe through my nose now, although I make some alarming sounds doing it. Unfortunately, all the lying on the couch has messed up my back. It’s an old injury that flares up from time to time, usually from neglecting to exercise and keep the muscles strong and limber. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another.

Emily’s EOG tests are done, much to everyone’s relief. “Now I can go to fourth grade!” she says. I have it on good authority that her teacher was going to recommend her for fourth grade regardless of how she did, since the teacher says that’s clearly where she needs to be, so all the angst Em felt was probably for nothing. Well, I suppose it builds character.

Em got to announce the weather over the loudspeaker yesterday morning, to her great pleasure. She likes to get to school early so that she has a better chance of being around when they pick someone to do these things. The bell rings at 7:30, and they ask kids not to arrive before 7:00, but you’d better believe Em’s ready to go at 6:50, standing at the door and staring out like a dog with a full bladder, ready to bolt at the first opportunity.

No, I did not just compare my beautiful child to a dog that needs to pee, and if you thought you read that, you’re mistaken.

Today’s Em art: Mother Nature. It seemed fitting given the pollen. I dig Mother Nature’s groovy frock and boots, and the fact that she has hearts for fingers.

Time to go clean out the freezer. It had something pressing against the door and popped open in the night, and now everything’s ruined. Well, it’ll be an opportunity to start fresh, eh?