Outnumbered 4 to 1

Yes, that is me.  Every human being in my home has an Autism/Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis.......except me.  Still trying to wrap my head around that one, so I don't have much to say right now.

My Marvelous Monkey

Angry Bird is ready to take on the Bad Piggies!

My Pretty Puppies...

Champion Blue Heaven Chickadee...."Dixie"

Champion Blue Heaven Silver Lace...."Lacy"

Bed hogs, foot warmers, toast crust mercenaries, and sweet girls extraordinaire!

Preparation Year/Sabbatical Year

As I was gearing up for 2013, about two weeks into January, which is pretty normal timing for me, I realized that this year is going to be one of THE BIG ONES.  By the end of 2013, Dolly will be a teenager and almost ready for seminary.  By the end of 2013, Caveman will be twelve, and old enough to hold the Aaronic Priesthood.  By the end of 2013, Monkey will be eight, and old enough to be baptized and confirmed a member of the church.  And all my procrastinations and missed opportunities started to look like a much bigger pile than the days when we actually had family prayer, scripture study, read the church magazines, Family Home Evening, sang or listened to "church" music, etc. etc. etc.

That feeling of inadequacy and unpreparedness combined with our 2013 Stake theme of "Real Growth" got me started.  Considering the special needs status of my three kids and our success rate with standard scriptures, we're starting with the illustrated stories of each of the standard works.  We are also going to read the standard works, but the strategy is to:

1. Read and or view the Doctrine and Covenants Stories chapters, to get a good overview and understanding.
2. Listen to the recorded scriptures online while reading from our own copies. This keeps us on track to finish all four standard works in a year, and gives us a peaceful evening activity that doesn't involve arguing or whining.  Excellent practice for reading as well, especially for Monkey who is an excellent reader but not great at decoding or strategies for unfamiliar words. He wants to "know" it, rather than figure it out, and this is an excellent way to beef up his vocabulary.
3. Track progress on bookmarks with each chapter of each book in a grid.  Feeling of accomplishment, anyone? I printed those out this afternoon.

I am considering getting the transparent picture clue "Scripture Stickers" for the kids as well, but I haven't put all the ones I bought into mine yet, because while I can still read the text through the picture as you're supposed to, I can't tell what the picture is once it's on top of the text.  That defeats the purpose of using the picture to remember the Scripture Mastery scriptures anyway. Any thoughts, readers?

A couple of years ago when I was serving in the ward Relief Society presidency, someone brought up the idea of a "sabbatical year" being a longstanding tradition, not only of college professors going off on research trips, but of spiritual renewal and rededication, of getting one's spiritual "house" in order.  That's what we need, and what I'm trying to accomplish.  She had a nice set of activities and monthly themes I need to look up, if they're still in my files, or find something similar online, but I think we have a good start.  I just need to put to use the many tools that I have in my hands every day!

The Caveman Cometh...Part 2

As I was reading the last post, I realized 1) that I'd run out of pictures, and 2) the post that was supposed to be about an epiphany was getting pretty detailed on negative parts of Caveman's issues.  But here is the light at the end of the tunnel.  I expect that the Epiphany post, which was supposed to be about my real epiphany on Epiphany Sunday will be much delayed.  I will try to include more pictures, though.  And if you didn't read Part 1, go back and do that.

When we got him home from the hospital, it was still a pretty rocky ride for a while.  Most of the rage was gone, but as the extraneous meds worked their way out of his system (one took 3 weeks to step-down safely) we saw his natural cheerfulness and exuberance for life and his capacity to love come back.  It was a very touching time, and very difficult still in many ways. He was still volatile, and very insecure.  We were working with a neuropsychologist to get a full profile done and a formal diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome, and he went through all those tests as the meds were working their way out of his system.  I am not sure now that those (very expensive) results are valid, he is so different.  Asperger's, yes, but the subtests and skills?  Not so sure.

As spring progressed, we really got used to being able to talk to him, have long conversations, and enjoy his company, in short to feel like a family again.  He continued to attend the ED/BD program at school, with no mainstreaming except for special areas like PE and Art.  There was one horrible day when someone hurt his feelings badly on the bus, and he could not deal with it appropriately, but in general he improved rapidly.  One of the biggest differences we could see is that he immediately lost 15 pounds.  Really, over 15 pounds in two and a half weeks.   From this to this.




My Caveman

Who wants his hair cut like "Commander Gree" from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but only once.

Part 1:The Caveman Cometh...Out the Other Side of Turmoil

 My Caveman is now ten years old.  He is a uniquely wonderful and amazing creature, and sometimes I think he should be in the zoo, either for everyone to marvel at the marvelous critter he is, or to control his goofiness and give me a break!

His journey is a difficult one and the changes that have happened to him in the last year are intense.  We have struggled for years with trying to help him with his social interactions.  He is incredibly social and friendly one-on-one and never fails to make an impression.  He has an incredible smile and puts so much energy into reading facial expressions and responding to adults he makes you feel incredibly important and loved just by saying "Hi, how are you?" He can be a little overwhelming for age-mates.

 With peers or in groups of any size, though, he gets overwhelmed and cannot read the social cues that should tell him what is being accepted and what is turning off his compatriots in conversation and play.  Add to that the difficulty he has getting overstimulated and forgetting that rules exist--you know those rules about personal space and other people's feelings--and he can get really out of his depth socially in no time at all.

Over the years we've tried lots of therapies even as we've struggled to get a comprehensive diagnosis and plan for his future.  Play therapy, Occupational Therapy, neurofeedback, counseling with both social workers and psychologists, speech and social language groups, group therapy, extended school year, etc.  He is complex and contradictory, with emotions way too big for his body, but apparently the Autism Spectrum has a spot for him.  Asperger's Syndrome is different for everyone, but I highly recommend Be Different by John Elder Robison.  Also Autism Everyday by Alyson Beytien for a practical approach to dealing with daily issues without getting too technical. Next up on my reading list are Freaks, Geeks and Asperger's  and Pretending to Be Normal. There are so many more books out there now than there used to be on AS, and lots of controversy with the changes in diagnostic guidelines, but these two are wonderful.  Especially for us, getting started with older kids (Dolly is newly diagnosed with Asperger's at age 12 and My Favorite Alien has self-diagnosed as we've gone through interviews, ratings scales and checklists for the kids' diagnostic process).

Last summer Caveman was taking two different anxiety medications, a non-stimulant ADHD med and a mood stabilizer.  His doctor at the time was absolutely convinced he was medicating appropriately, but we felt that the combination was too much and the meds were working against each other.  Each had worked well initially and then gradually lost effectiveness, but he still had very wild mood swings and some episodes of violent rage.  Looking back it seems obvious, but at the time things were changing so gradually it was hard to see the pattern.  As fall passed, he was becoming more depressed and self-destructive, more frustrated and angry.  He was defiant and obstructive to any plan that wasn't his origination.  It was painful to address any conversation to him, because an angry, defiant retort would come back and a long argument would ensue for any small direction.  He was filled with rage and severely depressed, and talked about hurting himself.

In early December he went to school and told his teachers we had beaten him.  We had restrained him, because he had been flinging himself against the wall repeatedly, less than two feet from a window on one side and the Christmas tree covered in glass ornaments on the other.  It was a horrible episode, but in no way a beating.  The school knew him and us well enough to alert us that they were calling family services.  We called his psychiatrist and he advised immediate hospitalization.

The last week and a half before school got out for Christmas, Caveman was in the hospital behavioral unit.  There are options for adolescents, but for pediatric patients, there are very few, so he was a full hour away. I had just started back to work, at two holiday retail positions. The Monkey was having a birthday in just four days.  We were working really hard on keeping Christmas on-budget.  It was horrible.

Both of my "new" jobs flexed enough that we could go and visit him on the very strict schedule-1 hour drive up, 1 hour of visit, if we were on time, and 1 hour drive home...without him.  The Alien's job gave him almost a month of combined work from home and time off so we didn't have to "farm out" the Dolly and the Monkey.  The church helped with groceries and friends made meals and hugged me when I cried.  I cried a lot.  I screamed sometimes. I cried a lot more.

Caveman didn't make progress.  More and more meds, hours of different therapies, nothing was making a difference, much.  The general consensus was that his anxieties about being in the hospital were making it too difficult for the therapies to help.  After a few days, a different psychiatrist came in for the holidays, and he was more receptive to taking meds AWAY instead of just adding more.  And things started to get better.  Not quickly, and he moved to the half-day program without really having made much progress.  And even there, he was still having severe difficulties some days.  They once had to put him into a padded isolation room to stop his physical outburst...then had to go in and pull him away from the window he was trying to break.  Gradually the medications made their way out of his system and a message got through-if you're good enough at following the program, you get to STAY HOME.  His last three days were picture-perfect and he came home to stay the weekend before school started back up.

Odds and Ends of Our News

When last we met, things were interesting in the home of My Favorite Alien, The MOM, The Dolly, The Caveman, and the Monkey.  The MOM had recently gone  back to work, and things were finding their way to a new "normal".  Fast forward 5 months (yes, I feel guilty).

The daycare I have been working for laid me off for the summer (bummer) and we had a very nice vacation to see Grandma and Poppa B. in Idaho.  We took the long way out and saw Mount Rushmore, which was new for all of us. The highlights of the trip, aside from the beautiful scenery and wonderful "grandparent time" were visiting with cousins and going fishing with the kids' very own brand-new poles.  The lowlights were not catching anything but ourselves on our hooks, and thieves breaking into our van in Omaha on the way home, stealing our DVD player and Monkey's backpack.  He is still very angry about that, and I don't blame him.  I was too caught up in trying to get the broken window fixed (it was Sunday morning, so we were on our own) and get home without any children getting sucked out the window, so we didn't even realize his backpack was missing until we were almost home.  He lost some great books, his cash in his brand-new wallet, and a few toys.  I think he's maddest about the motorcycle-handlebar-type learning toy he had just bought at a thrift store and never gotten to use.  Poor Monkey.

Our ward boundaries were changed right after we got back, our ward became the "leaven in the loaves" and parts of "us" got redistributed into SIX other wards.  We now drive farther, to a nicer building.  Dolly and Monkey are adapting very well, Caveman and I not so much.  He is one of only 2 kids in his primary class, and it's awkward being outnumbered by adults-sets off his anxiety.  And don't get me started on Webelos.  If you let them run wild for 15 minutes before starting, you'll never get my Aspie back under control, you've removed all rules.  And if I've told you that, don't expect me to let you do that to him again.

So Dolly is doing swimmingly in 7th grade, and took 8th place in the district for 7th grade girls in Cross Country!  Caveman is enjoying having a best friend in 5th grade and had a smashing time at a birthday party.  Monkey is with the best teacher in the universe and doing very well academically, but may end up with social problems similar to Dolly and Caveman.  I will write a thoughtful post on Asperger's Syndrome before too long, but not tonight.

I am back at work at the daycare, teaching a language I do not speak and driving a bus, as well as supervising school-agers until they get on their bus.  I had asked for more hours and not gotten them, now that Monkey is in school full day.  So when the school district called for an interview on the application I put in over the summer (while laid off), I didn't hesitate to go in.  And I'm hired!!  I am the new Teaching Assistant at the high school multi-needs special education class!  I won't start till around the first of November, so still transitions to go through.  I have qualms about leaving where I have been working in the middle of a year, but I am leaving all my lesson plans and materials, and since I walked in to an empty plastic tub and no guidance or materials at all, I am working on not feeling bad.

I am also taking classes to get the Learning Behavior Specialist I endorsement added to my teaching certificate, which will enable me to teach special education. I must confess that 4 1/2 hours of class, 1/1/2 hours of drive time and several chapters of reading per week, plus , 25 hours of observation for the 8 week class have been extremely difficult.  It is with great delight that I report that I finished my final exam tonight in under an hour and came home to my family. Two more classes and the state exam and I will be done, probably in April.

My Favorite Alien is now working on getting me to ride motorcycles with him.  I have a helmet (from my birthday) and a very nice armored jacket (early Christmas) and we are planning on my getting into the training class in the spring through the local junior college.  We need something to do together, and this is his pick.  I used to ride all the time in high school, but it has been.....a long time.....

More updates coming soon, I hope, but here were the highlights!

Going Bananas

We love bananas.  We love BANANAS! WE LOVE BANANAS!  Our kids eat so many bananas, up to 10 pounds in a typical week, that we sometimes believe they truly are monkeys.  When we're not checking their pants to see if we need to cut tail-holes, sometimes we get more bananas of a certain ripeness than we can finish before they get yucky.  I personally like them a good bit greener than most of the rest of the household, so when I see big bunches of yellow ones, I start to think about banana bread and banana cake and all.

Today, on the other hand, we were also blessed with more apples than we're going to finish, so we pulled out the good old food dehydrator.  It's been a while since we used it (probably before the move in '06) so I took a look on the internet for some helpful hints.  We haven't had good luck with dried bananas, they are just too sticky and grayish for anyone to enjoy, but apples have turned out well in the past.  This time I hoped to find a "dip" that would help the bananas look appetizing without adding too much extra "stuff". 


After reading a few recipes/blogs/etc. I ended up with a dilute solution of lemon juice and Tang (out of OJ and not going to the store at that point)  We dipped 'em and dried 'em, and the house smelled LOVELY all day long.  One set of bananas got too dark (Dolly still ate them) and the others were still gummy, but not grayish.  They sure tasted citrusy, though.  A qualified success!  The apples were very tasty all around, but only Dolly and I would eat them.

Blogspot is refusing to upload my pictures, which was the entire point to this post, and is very frustrating.  There are some really cute pix of Dolly doing the fruit dip, but you are spared the ones of me in my "lazy Saturday" hair and red face doing the same thing.  Insert imagination here!

Life Goes On, and EVERYTHING Changes

After 12 years of being a stay-at-home mom, with all the joys and frustrations that it has brought, crises survived, and some of them averted, I have gone back to work.  Not entirely voluntarily, not entirely willingly, and not entirely satisfactorily, but I have done it.  And no one has died.  Yet.

It all started in the fall when the kids were back to school and I was mostly recuperated from my sinus surgery. I had applied without success to the local school districts as a special education TA, and at online tutoring and educational materials review companies.  No dice.  Twelve years out of the job market is a high hurdle to get over.  Not to mention that every Principal I ever worked for is retired and hard to contact.  So I went and applied for holiday retail jobs, both with online applications and in person.  I soon figured out that online works better, because they actually do contact you.  Soon enough I was hired by both Kohl's department store, and by Payless ShoeSource, where I had worked for a year or so, over a decade ago.  Did I intend to have two jobs?  No, but when Kohl's hadn't scheduled me significantly for 3 weeks, I accepted the second job.  Then I went crazy.

Fast forward 3 months, past trials and turmoils that I will blog about later, and things are totally different again.  I am working 6am to 11:30 am at a local branch of a nationwide chain of daycare centers.  My job starts with filling bleach/water bottles and delivering breakfast to the rooms, then "floating" between rooms as they need me.  On the negative side, it's stinking early in the cold dark winter morning when I roll reluctantly out of bed and I don't see my kids in the mornings at all. On the positive side, The Alien is successfully getting the kids out of bed and off to school each day, I can still get chores and errands done before they get home, and I'm only paying half of my paycheck for someone to watch The Monkey while I'm there.

While I often get sent to spend a few minutes in a room where they are "over ratio" for a few minutes before a second teacher is scheduled to arrive, I am usually only in two rooms: one where intake happens for everyone age 3 and over, and a half-hour stint in the gym with the "school-agers" before they get on their buses and go to school.  Then at 9:30 I teach Spanish.  Yes, Spanish. No, I'm not a Spanish speaker.  Spanish story time at the library is a huge help--thanks, Sue-the-librarian!  The job was described as VERY early Spanish, "just one step more than Dora the Explorer".

It's amazing to me how much my attitude toward life has changed and how much it challenges me to be doing so much supervision and so little actual teaching.  I really miss having the opportunity to teach much actual curriculum-especially science!  On the other hand, it's been challenging and exciting to develop a curriculum from scratch, in such an unfamiliar subject, for such young students.  I am remembering amazing amounts of things long-buried in my head after so many years of teaching in a very multilingual school.  I love finding a new song to sing each week and the books to go with that theme, and getting to know the children. Teaching a new language in the far corner of the very noisy Exploratorium with the constant traffic, is to say the least, challenging.

I have taken steps toward renewing my teaching certificate, which will take a while, and hopefully getting an additional endorsement in the process to make it more likely I can teach public school again, but for now this is it.  Do I love it? No. Do I hate it? No.  Is it paying a couple of bills with limited sacrifice? Yes.  And so for now, this is the new deal!

Going to Goodwill for Great Stuff

I can't bring myself to use coupons.  For pizza delivery, or a buy-one, get-one at the shoe store, sure.  But the grocery store? Very rarely.  They give me anxiety.  Either I didn't clip the right one, or I didn't bring the right one, or I don't like that product better than the generic anyway, or I have to make an extra trip to a second store, or.....you get the idea.  Too many rules.  And don't even get me started on those people who do "extreme couponing".  That approaches a mental illness, in my opinion.  It's too much work!  Running to too many stores, on the right dates, buying insane quantities, being the "early bird" shopper or getting the limited-time-only deal is not on my agenda.

At the same time, we live frugal lives.  I have made a lot of financial and material sacrifices in order to be the stay-home mom I believe my kids need.  I don't shop much because it's hard for me to say "no" to a good deal if it's not in the budget.  If I don't have a list, I don't go to the store.  And if I do go, I try really hard to stick to the list.  We try to buy only what we need, not whatever looks good today or would be a fun thing to have.

I went to get the taxes done last year and had donation receipts from Goodwill to claim.  Our tax preparer shared a story about immigrating to the US as a child and his family starting over financially.  I believe his exact words about purchasing clothing at Goodwill were "and then I knew we were destitute."  I can sympathize with his feeling of radical change in circumstances, but for me shopping secondhand is a totally different experience.


I love to dress my kids in hand-me-downs, because while they look great, if they get painted on, or gluey, or messed up playing in the mud, it's not a financial hardship.  We can have a wider variety of styles, and a wider array of choices in the closet than I could find in the number of store trips I get before I run out of patience and money.  I get beautiful holiday dresses for my daughter at garage sales, for less than the price of dry cleaning one of them.  I use Freecycle and other recycling sites to find toys, clothes and books.  We use the library A LOT.  So it feels really neat to go go to Goodwill or a yard sale and find beautiful things, often brand-new things, at a guilt-free price.

Most notably:

• Black stretch wool, satin pinstriped slacks from The Limited, with $98 store price tag attached, $3.99.  After I shortened them, they are probably the best fitting, most comfortable slacks I've EVER owned.
• Plum suede, knee high,cuffed boots for my daughter, never worn and still tied together from original store, $3.99.Not practical enough to pay full price, but a real fashion trophy she will enjoy, and I will enjoy watching her wear!  These became part of her costume for Seussical, the Musical Jr.
• Chocolate brown microfiber velour couch, full-size and factory-new, $325.  A perfect match for our living room with the antique piano in the same deep brown!
• Plaid purple windbreaker for my daughter, Kohl's store tags attached, $3.99
• The exact same royal blue leather purse I drooled over at Kohl's, but didn't buy, unused with matching wallet still attached by manufaturer  for $4.99.  I smile every time I see it.  Perfect size, perfect color, and doesn't fall off my shoulder!
• A beautiful winter coat for Caveman, green and black with LOTS of pockets, like new, $4.99
• Gorgeous lime green silk blazer/blouse with chinese figures on it, with designer/manufacturer tags attached, $6.99 (that one I came back for twice-when it was still there on the 3rd visit I knew it was for me. It was in the Halloween costumes!)  Like the suede boots, something I thoroughly enjoy the uniqueness of without paying the price.
• Brand-new brown loafers one size up for Monkey-boy, $3.99 Church shoes are so easy to get there, they so seldom get worn out before they are outgrown-and that makes it hard to pay full price for them, too.
• Like-new black dress shoes for Caveman, $4.99 in the same trip.
•  Antique, teak desk (or maybe it is a buffet with out the hutch) in lovely condition, $12.99.  Made a perfect computer table for the two boys' gaming computers (for Christmas) and still looks pretty in the family room.
• Student desks for both of the big kids' bedrooms for homework, art/drawing, etc. $12.99 each.

I don't always find the department store overstock items, but when I do it's a score!

On a slightly different note, Flylady (look her up if you don't know who that is) published a letter she got once from a follower of her home organization method that made me a fan of donating to Goodwill (or Deseret Industries, St. Vincent De Paul etc. Goodwill is just closest here).  The general idea was that getting rid of your clutter was really important because having too many "things" holds you back from enjoying the things that are most important.  She said that holding on to "stuff" created chaos in your home and life and that giving up what you no longer need or use gives you freedom.  The points that hit home to me though were that holding on to things:

• prevents you from accepting new blessings into your life because you're "full" or "busy"
• prevents things that were once blessings to you, but are now not needed, from blessing someone else,  and
• can even be a sign of a lack of faith.  Faith that the Lord will provide you the new blessings that you need at the time that you need them.

Having personally seen this last part in action, I know that letting go of things you can't use, or don't use can be a great blessing.  And that the Lord does indeed help us find what we need, when we need it, if we ask.  

Repost from Flappinessis....

http://flappinessis.com/2011/12/28/dear-shopper-staring-at-my-child-having-a-meltdown-in-the-grocery-store/

I don't know the rules for reposting this, and hope I am not violating copyright.  I have purposely not copied the post itself, but directed through the URL in order to avoid that, but I was so impressed with the post I had to share.

If you are the parent of a special needs child, if you have ever looked askance at a child behaving "diferently" in public (and who hasn't?) you need to read this post!

Look Me In The Eye: What will the new DSM definition of autism mean to us?

Look Me In The Eye: What will the new DSM definition of autism mean to us?

I've Fallen Off the Face of the Earth......

Ok, that would be too convenient an excuse, wouldn't it?  I have NOT fallen off the face of the Earth.  I have NOT been kidnapped by pirates, aliens, or roving packs of wild apes, wolves, or hedgehogs/armadillos/fruitbats in disguise.  What I HAVE been doing is getting my family to and from an impromptu Idaho vacation including 3000 driving miles, a transmission repair in the middle of  Nowhere, Wyoming and some wonderful family time, friend time with Ange, and new mountain scenery (score!).  Getting ready for school to start on a shoestring budget, and everyone settled into a routine with three kids going to three different schools on three radically different schedules.  All of this while frequently (almost constantly) dizzy and fighting a wickedly persistent fatigue and gearing up for sinus surgery.

BUT.....The results of the long-awaited and much-anticipated sinus surgery (on the day before my birthday) are starting to show.  My nose is almost back to non-swollen normal proportions, and best of all, I AM NOT DIZZY ALL THE TIME ANYMORE!!!  Seriously, I feel better than I had in years.  I am in control of my own body again, I have the energy to pay attention to things and people again (not necessarily in that order).  I have actually still been awake at midnight not once, but TWICE this week, instead of being dragged in a half-congealed state upstairs to bed at 9pm because I'm too dizzy to get there on my own.  I am still tender and sore in there, and the stitches inside my left nostril are more than slightly annoying, but I feel like I have my life back.  I feel like I have my mind back.  I feel like I have my SELF back.  I can walk up the stairs without having to carefully place each foot.  I can bounce up the stairs like a kid.  I can go to the grocery store without running out of steam halfway through the produce section.  The children are beginning to stop watching for me to grab the wall and running to be my crutches.

Many thanks to those who have put up with my inconsistencies, never knowing if I would actually be in a condition to go to an evening event or activity. I am grateful for my visiting teachers who kept us fed while I was recuperating from the surgery.  Never ending gratitude to the Alien who held our family together and functioned as Breadwinner, Dad and more than half of Mom so many days.  Thanks to my kids who seldom complained when mom was too dizzy to do household tasks, take them fun places, or finish everything I'd promised.  Thanks to whomever introduced me to the concept of a "Yoyo Dinner" " (You're On Your Own-which works great when there are leftovers and sandwich-makings and everyone wants something different anyway).  Thank you to the Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon who listened when I said I didn't care if he was sure the surgery would fix the dizziness, I needed it done because I couldn't stand to hear one more doctor/specialist tell me their own special version of "There's nothing wrong with you, go home"  and I didn't want to live on my couch anymore. Thank you so much for all who prayed for me and cared about me and my family and drove me to events and places I would have missed otherwise without making a public spectacle of me.  And most of all, thank you, Lord for this marvelous blessing.

Sister Okazaki

I am reposting this from "Casa Camisas", because she said it all so well. I like her comments, and I too loved Sister Chieko .

One of my favorite people, Chieko Okazaki, passed away last week. I think I was 11 or 12 when she was in the general RS presidency, and used to get so excited when it was her turn to speak in LDS General Conferences -- her talks were always interesting, always engaging. I usually don't like trite online tributes to people who didn't really know me, but I came across a quotation from one of her talks (it's from a BYU devotional, years ago) and it touched me so much that I wanted to share. Sis. Okazaki was a person with a very strong personal relationship with Christ, and in this passage, she expounds on how women in particular can grow closer to Him:
"Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It’s our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don’t think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don’t experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism.
Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He’s been there. He’s been lower than all that. He’s not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don’t need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief."

A Brief List of "Do"s and "Don'ts" for a Successful Cub Scout Day Camp

Here are a few observations from our week (so far) of Cub Scout Day Camp here in the wild woods of the Illinois suburbs with the Caveman.

DO pack multiple sets of rain gear on a stormy day, just in case some kid in your den doesn't have any.
DON'T hand the only adult size set to a kid in another den whom  you won't see again for a week.  You will be soaked to the skin.  All day.  And also look like the only person in camp who wasn't prepared.

DO teach your child to read directions carefully.
DO your best to teach your child to keep his hands to himself.
DON'T forget to teach your child that an "epipen" is not a "pen".
DON'T (as a camp director) leave a "lost and found" epipen sitting on a table for two days in front of 350 cub scouts.  SOMEONE will follow the directions.
DO try not to laugh when the camp director calls you and tells you your kid just shot himself up with adrenaline because ......well, isn't it obvious?

Construction Zone!

And the first big  project in the "new" house has begun.  Here is our stain comparison.

Can you guess what's going to happen here?  We're building custom bookshelves in the bedroom (happy happy dance of joy)!  They're going to start with some red oak kitchen "upper" cabinets, set onto a base on the floor, with pine bookshelves going all the way up to the ceiling, 10 feet wide.  So here are the stain colors on the two different woods, so that we can have it close to matching our current furniture.  We're using a color called "Ipswich Pine", which is of course, after bringing home 8 new colors to try, the one we already had on hand from another project.

So here's the "before" set.  The room still has contractor primer on the walls, at 12 years old.  The rest of the house was professionally (and very tastefully) painted right before we bought it, and I must confess to being pretty intimidated about doing any painting myself (as well as enjoying the fact that it didn't have to be done!)  We have a vaulted ceiling and that inset where the cedar chest and bookshelves are is the new construction zone.  The carpet will come up and the baseboards will disappear to give the cabinets a really solid base, and the shelves will be secured to the wall with cleats, and have an open back to the painted wall.

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Can I tell you how NOT fun it is to try and paint a ceiling, times 3 because it's not FLAT!
Luckily, I just had to hold the light and reload the paint roller, as the Alien is taller than me!

This took a lot more paint and time than we'd actually planned, but it's coming along nicely.   

And here's the first glimpse of the new color!  It actually turned out to be the same as the lower half of Caveman's room.  The primer and ceiling white went on just fine, but when I opened up the can of this stuff, it's like pudding!  We're having a hard time getting it smooth, and it's taking two coats to be really even.  We got all the way around the room twice with a two-gallon bucket of KILZ primer, but it's going to take at least 3 gallons to get the color on evenly.  Anybody have a guess, is it like that because it's so dark?  It's certainly thicker than the other times we've used the same brand of paint.

I will post more pictures later, but I want to go ahead and publish before I forget for another three months.....

Playing Catch-Up

Piano Recital--52 kids!!  And we survived sitting through the whole wonderful (but long) thing!  Caveman is in the white shirt facing the camera, and Dolly is in turquoise on the far right.

Yeah, yeah, it's been simply AGES since I put up a blog post.  And that's one of the reasons I procrastinated starting a blog in the first place, that I only seem to have worthwhile thoughts to post when I'm walking the dogs, and then when I get home, POOF!  They evaporate.  Well, that and the real fear that I would neglect it, and therefore feel guilty.  Mostly the guilt thing.

So what have I been doing while I wasn't blogging?  Well, I mostly did a lot of not much, but I do have some accomplishments to show off.  Here is a cute checked dress I made for the Dolly, out of fabric I've been saving since she was tiny and never seemed to get around to it.  Now that she's ELEVEN she's about to outgrow all the yardages I have on hand, so I got them out and here are the results. One checkered dress, one mother/daughter set in blue velvet, and a nightshirt and shorts out of pink plaid flannel.  I know, I can't believe I bought that, either.  You know how I feel about pink.

So what else has been up?  Two medical crises, well, ok, an allergy attack and some hip x-rays and physical therapy.  The Caveman has a narrowing of a cartilage disk in the lumbar area of his back, and it's causing a curvature.  He's enjoying all the fun and games at physical therapy, and we go back to the orthopedic surgeon in June.

The Monkeychild had a virus and an allergy at the same time, and WHOOMP! here is the reaction.  It was a very uncomfortable four days till it started to get better.  He had to undergo a whole series of prick tests for allergens (again!) and came up negative on everything.

Dolly had her birthday celebration at a local nature museum, and found a new friend in the butterfly haven.  It stuck around for over 20 minutes and had to be removed by a museum volunteer.

A few holidays, a field trip or two, and that's what we've been up to!

Twas the night before Christmas......