Well then...

I want to be in the holiday spirit. And I am, most of the time. But there are moments when it just gets sucked right out of me and then I’m floundering for hours (days?) trying to get it back.

I am over-sensitive. I know this. I accept this. I even try not to be this way but after all these years of being over-sensitive, well, here I am, reading tone into every word people say to me, wondering if they’re mad at me or judging me or whatever. I have a hard time when someone, pretty much anyone, tries to tell me a ‘better’ way to do something. It feels, to me, like they’re saying that the way I’m doing something is WRONG and that makes me more than a little crazy.

So yeah. Being over-sensitive means that my husband any person in my life can’t say much of anything that sounds even a little like a criticism because it will hurt my feelings.

That said, I will also say that I HATE being micro-managed. Even when said ‘manager’ doesn’t even realize he is micro-managing, it kind of pisses me off.

See, I’m kind of gray. I think there are sorts of ways to do something and still have it done life. There are people in my life who are very black and white and if you don’t do something their way, you’re doing it WRONG.

Yeah. So not much fun happening around these parts these days. But it will get better. It always does. Thank goodness.

So yeah, I got nothing.

They Love Me So

I am so ridiculous when it comes to worms. They freak me right the hell out. I can’t stand them. I get all queasy and shivery and jumpy at the mere mention of the disgusting things.

I can’t help it. They’re just so awful. I supposed others react to spiders the same way I react to w*#@s. Yes, I don’t even like the word and the fact that I typed it in the first sentence of this post is how much I am willing to sacrifice for the sake of clarity on this here blog.

So yes. They’re gross. My family is very much aware of my disgust for these creatures.

In fact, Olivia is kind enough not to mention the w word. She’s very fond of stomping on the inch version of the horrific little monsters. She loves how they kind of pop under her shoe. Ick. Ick, ick, ick!! Let me point out right here that Tom is the one who taught her that disgusting game. *Shudder*

Anyway, when she talks about them she calls them ‘inch-doubleyous” so as not to gross me out with the w word. Isn’t she sweet.

After each rain, Tom is kind enough to go out to the garage and sweep the area around the garage door so I don’t have to see what the rain washed up against or even underneath the door. He knows I just can’t take it.

As we were putting the Christmas tree up this past weekend, Alyssa happened to find a nasty surprise on one of the ornaments. She asked me what it was. I glanced down, saw what was probably the rounded corpse of a w#$% and looked away quickly.

I said, “I don’t know for sure but I can’t. You know I can’t even look to see if it’s just fuzz or something because, ewwww. Go get your dad.”

She went to find him while I hid my face and tried not to cry.

I know. I’m so very ridiculous.

Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like bridges very much? There’s this walkway at a nearby mall that is sort of a bridge across the two halls above the food court. I hate that walkway so, so much and yet I make myself walk across it every time we’re at the mall. I get queasy and a little dizzy each time I do it and yet I refuse to let myself be paralyzed by something like that.

And yet…all that mental strength I show when dealing with the bridge/walkway at the mall? I can’t muster it when it comes to creepy crawly worms. I just can’t. I don’t have to deal with those things in day to day life.

Bridges? Can’t always be avoided but in my world, w$%^s can be avoided. At least they can when you have a husband like mine.

Tom followed Alyssa into the room, looked where she pointed at the ornaments, the very place I was pointedly NOT looking at, and he picked up the offending horrible piece of ick and quietly left the room.

And that’s how I know that man loves me.

He never once made fun of the fact that I was quietly losing my mind just a few feet from where he was dealing with awfulness, my hands covering my face so I didn’t have to see what he was doing and my breath hitching ever so slightly as I fought tears of disgust.

Nope, not a single chuckle at my overreaction. Seriously, that’s what I call true love.

The Christmas Tree

Putting up the tree was always a big deal when I was a kid. During my earliest years, we always went and bought a freshly cut tree. It was awesome to smell the tree throughout the house.

I was probably twelve-ish when we got our first artificial tree. Putting it up was similar to putting up the real tree. My mom put on the lights and then let me and my brother have at it with the ornaments.

Back when I thought I’d marry young and have kids a few years later, I thought we’d put up our first tree and then put one ornament on it, the first one we bought together as a married couple.

Yeah, that didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned.

Instead, I didn’t marry until my early thirties. By then, I had quite the collection of Christmas ornaments and so for my and Tom’s first Christmas together, we just put up a tree, slapped the ornaments we had on it and called it good.

When Alyssa was big enough to help, I let her put the ornaments where she would and left them there, so those first few years, we had a very bottom-heavy tree. I loved it because it was ours and I wanted Alyssa to know that whatever she put on the tree stayed where she put it.

This year Olivia and her OCD are driving Alyssa and her own version of OCD crazy. It’s actually pretty fun to watch.

Olivia decided yesterday that she wanted to clump the golden bulbs together on a few branches near the bottom of the tree. She likes being able to look at her reflection in the bulbs.

I honestly didn’t care because again, the tree if for the girls. I’m not all that particular about what goes where. I’m really just glad I’m not doing it all myself.

Alyssa fussed that since Olivia is tall enough, she should be putting the ornaments on the tree higher up and spacing them out.

I gently told her to leave her sister alone, reminding her of trees of Christmas past, when she put them on the low third of the tree and I left them there. I told her about the tree we had the year Olivia was born, when I was too overwhelmed to get many ornaments out so Alyssa used her own toys to as decorations. We had stuffed cats and horses, puzzle pieces, princesses and blocks on that tree. It broke my heart even as it warmed it.

Alyssa rolled her eyes as I told these stories but she also stopped telling Olivia to move the golden bulbs to other places on the tree.

I will let these girls decorate our tree however they want for as long as they’ll do it.

Honestly, I think I’m lucky that my youngest child, who is NINE, still wants to bunch the bulbs up. I love that in so many ways she’s still very much my baby.

Readers

Olivia has discovered Junie B. Jones. This is awesome and horrible all at once.

She can be found reading all the time. Awesome, right?

Sure, except that she wants to read when she’s supposed to be eating, and when she’s supposed to be brushing her teeth and when she’s supposed to be putting on her shoes. Yeah, you get the point. She wants to read all the time and there are times when reading can’t be the priority.

But yay, she’s turning into a reader!!

I do love Junie B. She’s funny and silly and…naughty. And sadly, both of my girls tend to take on some of Junie B.’s less attractive traits when they’re reading her stories.

So we’re dealing with a little naughtiness from Olivia on top of her wanting to read constantly.

But I remind myself that we went through this with Alyssa when she first started reading Junie B. Jones books and she got through it. We all survived the naughtiness and she moved onto to books that didn’t bring out her inner brat.

So there is that.

I tell myself Junie B. Jones chapter books are an awesome gateway to other, longer, less naughty books. So for now, I’m letting her read away, except when I need her to do other things, like you know, sleep or eat.

Wonky

When Olivia was a baby, she had a wonky eye. It was the right one. Whenever she was tired, her eye would ‘wander’ about in its socket, sometimes heading left, sometimes heading right. Mostly, it drifted right.

You couldn’t see the wonk often in real-time but we did capture it in pictures quite often. It was disconcerting to notice it in pictures when I hadn’t noticed it in the moment.

When she was diagnosed with 5p- syndrome, I mentioned the wonky eye and her developmental pediatrician referred us to IU Ophthalmology.

Olivia only went once. They declared her eyes to be healthy and said that the ‘wonkiness’ was just a sign of muscle weakness and since it was really only evident when she was tired, there wasn’t much we could do.

So we did nothing.

She started wearing glasses a year ago in September. At her first appointment, her doctor didn’t even notice any wonkiness.

At her appointment this year, I mentioned that she’d taught herself to cross her eyes. I told the doctor that she’d had to work REALLY hard to do this. It absolutely didn’t come naturally to her.

He applauded her work ethic and said that being able to cross her eyes was actually a sign that the muscles in O’s eyes were getting stronger. He told her to keep working on those muscles.

This is one of those times when you won’t hear a mom (me) telling her child to stop making weird faces. She and I cross our eyes at each other often, just to prove we can.

This child of mine, she never ceases to amaze me. What we all




Crossed eyes and all, she’s so beautiful.

Just Doing It

Here’s the thing…my dad likes to tell me about how my sister tells him that I was this extraordinary mom when Olivia was a baby. Like I went through something amazing that other people wouldn’t have been able to do.

Except, no. That’s not true. Anyone else would have done exactly what Tom and I did when Olivia was a baby. You get through it by living every single day. You wake up, you soothe your screaming baby, you feed your four year old, you soothe the baby again, you feed the four year old again, you try and make the baby nap, you give up on the nap and you feed the four year old yet again.

And you just keep doing that until you don’t have to anymore.

Then you start doing something else.

Each stage of parenting is hard but they’re all a different kind of hard. The infant stage was REALLY hard for me, if only because of the sleep deprivation. And, well, babies are boring. Sure, they’re cute but they’re also boring. Way boring. Just saying.

The toddler stage of parenting has its stressors, what with potty training and weaning and learning to talk and tantrums and ugh, I’m so glad we’re past all that.

But we got through it, special needs and all, because that’s what people do.

We get up every single day, we figure it out and we’re grateful at the end of the day when we’re all together and still breathing.

So when my dad talks about how amazing I am for mothering my children, I kind of want to smack him. I get that he’s trying to give me a compliment. I do get that. And I never actually slap him or even snap at him that duh, I’m their mother, OF COURSE I’m going to mother them. I guess I wish he’d stop making me out to be a saint or a martyr.

I’m neither of those things. I’m a wife and a mom. I’m a daughter and a sister. I’m a friend (though sometimes, not a very good one.) I try to do right by everyone in my life but I fail miserably sometimes. And when that happens, I apologize, try to move forward and do better next time.

I apologize to my girls every single day for lapses in my mothering. They’re kind kids, they forgive me. And I forgive them when they make me crazy in Walmart. (What is it about Walmart? That place makes me insane with rage.)

It’s what we do because we’re human and we love and we live and we’re grateful for reminders to not shake the screaming baby.

To my dad and my sister (neither of whom read here, I’m pretty sure but still…) thank you both for thinking so highly of me. But I promise you, if you’d been given a child with special needs, you both would have handled it just fine. It’s just what you do.

I do not look at Olivia and see special needs. I look at her and see my child, my daughter. One of my greatest loves. I see beauty and grace and adoration. I see strength and intelligence and perseverance. I see my baby, the one who cried and cried and cried and then, one day, she stopped crying and she started laughing and today, there is so much more laughter than tears and that makes those early months so worth it.

I told everyone during those first few screamy months that it would get better.

And guess what? It did. It got so, SO much better.

Actually, Finally Nine

Olivia turned nine a few days ago. We had her birthday party on the Sunday before her actual birthday. My mom hosted the party and fun was had by all.

On the morning of her actual birthday (that’s what she called it leading up to and the day of her birthday) she woke to find that Alyssa and I had blown up 85ish balloons and left them strewn about the house.

Olivia giggled at all the balloons and then stood next to me, wondering if she’d grown overnight. Was she taller now that she was finally REALLY nine, she wondered?

I made her some blueberry pancakes, which she fed entirely to herself, because, yeah, she’s nine now and that means she’s big.

After she ate her breakfast, she helped wash the dishes because nine year olds are big enough to help with chores like that.

Then we went up to get dressed before the Porch girls arrived for an afternoon of fun.

And can I say right here that it drives me CRAZY that kids’ clothes go from a size 7/8 to a 10/12. What happened to the nines? I mean seriously? Where are they?

Olivia is too tall these days for most 7/8 pants but the 10/12 pants we have stored from Alyssa’s days as a pre-teen are too big around the waist.

What the hell?

Olivia is long-waisted with long legs. But she’s also on the thin side, so pants that fit in length are too big around the waist. So…maybe if someone, ANYONE, made pants that were sized to fit an actual nine year old, we’d have pants in our house that would fit her. As it is, she has pants that either fit in length and fall off her waist or fit around the waist and end above her ankle. Not fun in the middle of winter.

So here we go again. I know I bitched about this when Alyssa was nine too.

I’m thinking the winter solution is going to have to be leg-warmers. I will get her several pairs, she can wear them over her too-short pants that still fit around the waist and by the time spring arrives she’ll either fit into the next size up or her 7/8 pants will be short enough to be called carpris.

The things we have to do to appropriately clothe our kids. Sigh.