Kiss My Knits!

For my daughter’s birthday, she wanted to have a party at “My Gym” with all her classmates. Most of them speak Spanish as their first language, so I dutifully sent out invitations with my phone number, directions, etc., in English with a Spanish translation at the bottom. My Spanish isn’t great, but it’s existent. We also invited some cousins she has here in town. We got no RSVPs except from her kindergarten teacher, who was going to bring her son. We rented out “My Gym” for a party, a three hour block of time at a cost of several hundred dollars. We bought a cake, ice cream, and punch.

You know who showed up? Yep, nobody but the teacher and her kid. It was my daughter, all alone with the music blaring, and me and my husband and my parents, and the kindergarten teacher with her toddler. And none of her friends.

Saddest. thing. Ever.

But kids are resilient. She went outside a number of times during the first half hour looking for folks, but she got over it before 45 minutes were up. We explained to her that her friends wanted to come, but they couldn’t. Most of them didn’t have cars. (Actually, we think that’s true, 75% of her classmates are from Latin America and according to the teacher don’t have a lot of money. I don’t even know if the concept of RSVP – though I didn’t use that term – is universal. Also, this was the day before the pope died, and we think some were probably going to Mass.) We decided that what the hell, we had three hours booked, it’s not like they could suddenly find another birthday party to fit in, so we’d use the place, by gum. And we did. God bless the folks at “My Gym,” they really made sure she had a good time. They offered to halve the fee, but I didn’t feel right doing that since if we hadn’t been there, they definitely could have booked another party that would have paid them full fee – and they did work their keisters off.

That was around April 1st.

Tonight, I got a call from the mother of one of the other kids in Emily’s class. She spoke only Spanish, but I managed to communicate with her well enough to establish that she wanted to know if, because they’re doing some kind of kindergarten graduation thing tomorrow, we were supposed to bring our kids in at 9 when the ceremony started, or bring them in at 7 as usual. I was able to get across the correct info.

I could not figure out why she was calling me, when I’ve never spoken to her before in my life, don’t speak Spanish as well as most of the other parents, and our kids don’t have any special bond besides attending the same class.

Then I realized – she must have kept the invitation which had my phone number on it, and I guess I was the only parent whose phone number she knew.

She kept the invitation from mid-March until now.

1) I admire her resourcefulness in thinking of that resource and utilizing it.
2) I am angry that she chose to not breathe a word about not attending my kid’s party.
3) I am pleased that I was able to summon enough Spanish to communicate with this woman.
4) I’m just damn pissed at the world in general, because my kid is trying to reach out to others but doesn’t know how, and the world isn’t making it any easier.

Time for bed.

School was out today, and my daughter was very active. As a result, I finally became a MOM – I actually had to use the phrase, “Don’t run with scissors!”

Next step: “You’ll put your eye out!”

The Rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions and leave the answers as comments on my own journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Tessima’s questions.

My daughter seems to be on the mend, but now I am sick. It had been a week, I didn’t think she was contagious anymore. Now I have a fever of 101+ and feel like a hermit has taken up residence in my head and have a daughter who is cranky, and my husband HAS to go to work today, at least for a while.

This totally sucks.

Yesterday, I was waiting two cars behind a lady at the drive-up ATM. She was taking freaking forever. I realized that she was older, and maybe was having some trouble with the transaction, so I bit my tongue and thought kind thoughts.

As she drove away, SUV in front of me pulled up to the ATM. The woman inside got out, grabbed the cash that the previous lady had left there, and chased down the car before it got too far away. Yeah, I laughed, and so did SUV lady as she took off running, but when the lady came back to the SUV, I shouted out of my window, “YOU’RE A VERY GOOD PERSON!” and she smiled and waved back.

We were getting the money to go to the Original Pancake House. It’s Spring Break, and I’ve decided that my autistic daughter could benefit from some real life experiences that really, she should have had more of by now. I figured that 10am on a Friday would be good, since the place wouldn’t be too crowded and we could probably get away with a little more “acting up” as I reinforced restaurant rules.

Fine idea in theory, except that it was Good Friday, and everybody was taking the day off and going to the OPH, apparently. We had to wait in the foyer. It was a big crowd, and we were stuffed in pretty tightly. My daughter was not happy. She also had a runny nose, and I felt very much like “that bad mom who is dragging her sick kid out to eat and now we’re all going to get sick too and what is she doing to that kid and BAD MOM!”

There was an older gentleman standing nearby who was also waiting. He gave us a clean tissue and a couple of peppermint candies, “for after she eats.”

It was a very kind gesture, and she did in fact calm down some, maybe because then I could go out of Terror Alert Red mode and calm down myself once I was able to wipe her nose and distract her.

SUV lady could have taken the cash back into the bank, and the older lady might not have realized she was missing it until she needed it.

The older man could have kept his hankie and candy to himself, and a six year old and her mom would have continued to have a bad morning.

I really enjoy moments of “we’re all in this together” which connect strangers. Life can be just that much better if we make the smallest effort. It’s a truth we need to remind ourselves of sometimes, but it’s well-worth remembering.

(Pollyanna mode off, all my cynical friends.)

Got up at 6 with the kiddo. She always wants to get up earlier than that, but we have a rule that we stay in our rooms until 6. I used the extra time to make buttermilk blueberry pancakes, link sausages, and also some boiled eggs as a snack later in the day. Helped my daughter to keep her poor tortured Sims alive for a while. She bought them parrots (not available in Sims 2) and the birds made so much noise that the poor Sims couldn’t even pass out on the lawn in peace.

I let the hubby sleep in, and he came into the kitchen at a hair after 7, clearly ticked off that we were running late. After he took a shower, he had woken up enough to come out of “hibernating bear” mode and gave me a hug and thanked me for the extra time and the food. He is going for a degree online and couldn’t concentrate enough to finish up his work last night. He’s been very tired, and really needed the extra 45 minutes or so of sleep.

We took our daughter to school (she was five minutes late) and the hubby dropped me off outside the house and went on to work eating sausages rolled up in blueberry pancakes.

I’m still exhausted and a touch depressed, as I perpetually am these days, but let’s hope that the good start to the day sets a nice tone.

Met with my daughter’s regular teacher and resources teacher this morning (the rest of her “dream team” was out of school for various reasons) about getting her retested. She went through a pretty substantial battery of tests three years ago, and according to school system rules, it’s time for another.

Even though her resources teacher (someone separate from the classroom who helps her meet her Individual Educational Plan [IEP] goals) assures me that Emily will not have her services cut as a result of this testing, I cannot help but worry. She does better on cut and dry concrete questions than on abstract – “what” as opposed to “why” as it were. What if she has a spectacular day and tests very well? What if she’s talking up a storm and her speech therapy gets cut?

The resources teacher tells me that she doesn’t think there’s any way that can happen, which is both reassuring and saddening. Reassuring because I know in my heart that she needs the extra help and will not thrive in a regular classroom without it, and I want her to have that help. Saddening because it’s a professional saying, “there’s no way your daughter can test well enough to make people think she’s normal.”

There’s a difference between having a thought and hearing it spoken aloud. And I guess somewhere deep down, I harbor the even more secret hope that she might pass for “normal” someday. I don’t like having that hope shot down.

Any mother will tell you that it is not melodramatic to say these meetings are a knife through my heart.

Because I have to look on the bright side of everything, I am focusing on the fact that having to sit in a room with my sleeping daughter and be on “vomit patrol” gave me time to finish up the scarf my mom wanted. She picked out Berocco Optik and said “can you make me a scarf with this? But I don’t want it to look knitted.”

Ooookay.

Anyway, it’s done! Finally, I can get on to all the other projects backed up! Whee!

On a side note, I have noticed that each of the two times (both rather recently) my daughter has gotten very sick to her stomach, it has been the morning after a very long tub bath. I disinfected the tub pretty well last time, having suspected her of drinking tub water when I wasn’t looking, but now I am even more suspicious of a link. I think we may have a germy tub toy. Yuck.

Scarf! Focus on the scarfy positivity!

Dropped the kiddo off at kindergarten this morning, then came back home to paint the inside of a cabinet. We’re trying to figure out if we can just paint our 1960’s era cabinets and still achieve the look we want (namely, a kitchen that’s not stuck a time warp) as opposed to getting them refaced or something more expensive. (I was going to take a picture of the cabinets, but the digital camera seems to have gone missing. That’s not good because I was gonna eBay some stuff later. Phooey.)

Note: Do not use oil based paint unless you have turpentine standing by. The paint got all over my hands. I tried to wash it off as best I could, but that wasn’t very well. While it dried on the cabinet, I thought I’d try to play a game of Katamari Damacy on the new PS2 my hubby got for my birthday (call it a gift to us both) but I managed to crack the CD with my sticky hands. Okay.

But worst still was that when my daughter’s kindergarten teacher called to say that my child had thrown up in the hall on the way back from music class, I had no way of getting the white goop off of my hands. Olive oil helped some.

You remember that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa gets gum in her hair and everybody’s got a suggestion? Yeah, it was like that. Anyway, it’s mostly off my hands, and I feel certain that my daughter’s stomach acid has managed to loosen a good portion of it as well.

Add to that that I had to cancel my optometrist appointment – my glasses are currently down to one earpiece – and you have a not so hot day.

Well, at least there’s “Lost” tonight, right? Right? No?

Well, crud.

ETA: Yes! There is Lost tonight! Yay!

My daughter’s favorite game to play is Sims 2. She loves to create the same families over and over, giving them identical appearances and names, and make insanely large houses for them, all in the same neighborhood. This leads to five identical people all visiting at one house, which is difficult to keep track of, to say the least.

She also likes to create swimming pools and make the Sims dive in repeatedly even when they really just want to lie the hell down and go to sleep. Pee on your own time, pal, you’re diving now!

But the thing she loves more than anything else is to make the little kids do “Miss Mary Mack” with each other. If kids could die in Sims 2, she would have Mary Macked some of them to death by now. This creates a problem, as they skip school to Mary Mack, they neglect their homework to Mary Mack, they don’t eat to Mary Mack. I keep having to find ways to thwart her so that I can stop the social worker from taking the kids away, which would be a bit upsetting, I think. It’s like she’s some capricious god, or that uber-powerful guy in that old Star Trek TOS episode – if you’re a geek, you know the one I mean.

Pity the poor population of Pleasantview, and their families of Starbucks employees, Madeleine replicants, Groovy Girl families, and ragged, Twilight-Zoned out kids. May God have mercy on their digital souls.