Christmas Haiku

the small Christmas tree
is raining little light rays,
dripping some delight.

Happy Christmas, and Happy . . . oh, tomorrow will be National Haiku Day . . .

Well. Chech-chem.

We'll pretend I didn't just look that up, and I'm still laboring under the delusion that today is National Haiku Day. And have a happy one!

I'm geeking out over Christmas. The kids are staying in their pajamas all day. I'm feeling fine. Curious George has a great Christmas Special. The whole world is feeling a little special right now! I'm in the Holy Christmas Groove--where it's all about the joy and the people.

I'm also geeking out on some lushious poetry, so I'll leave you with this thought provoking little quote:

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place."
- Rainer M. Rilke

And don't you think it's funny how many, many great quotes have semi-colons in them, yet not many people know how to use them anymore?

It's a wild world out there.

a fine blue
shuffles away the gray and white
in the winter sky

Conversations on the Home Front--Knock Knock

"Okay Mommy, now we're gonna play a game. Iss called knock-knock."
"Okay."
"I say 'knock knock', and you say 'who's there,' and iss really funny."
"Alright. You start."
"Okay. Knock knock!"
"Who's there?"
"A cow jumping on a trampoline. Hehehehe! Iss funny!"
"Alright, my turn. Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Dwain."
"Dwain who?"
"Dwain the bathtub, I'm dwowning!"
"Hahahaha! That's a good one Mommy. Now my turn. Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"A cow jumping on a trampoline and he hits his head on the wall and falls off! Hehahe!"
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Interrupting cow."
" . . . Mommy, whassa interruptin--"
"MOOOOOOOO!"
"Hahahaha! That's funny. My turn. Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"An interrupting cow jumping on a trampoline."

The Give Away

My absolute favorite holiday thing-ish-ness is the nativity. Ever since I was a little girl, I just loved to stare at and re-arrange all the little figures. Then my Mom got her childhood nativity, and so I bat my eyelashes and made of with my childhood nativity.

And poor Mary got broke between one of the many moves we made. You can't have a nativity without Mary. That's for sure.

So I found a slightly sturdier version of a nativity I just adored! I picked it up.

Then this year it was decidedly one of "those" days when we were decorating. My poor husband had to go out to Target twice to just get the lights all worked out. We ran out of push pins, and Bug was just delighted with all the delicate stuff we were putting out--so we had to put a bunch back. And then I opened my nativity box upside down . . . and it broke off one of the spires on a wise-man's crown.

It's a little thing! It shouldn't bug me! Right? Right!

Right . . .

So then I saw that SimpleMom was doing a drawing for a really pretty nativity. I don't twitter anymore, so linking back was all I could do for the two entry-option.

Go on! Check it out. Simple Mom is a great blog, and the nativity is really pretty . . .

Go ahead and enter to win too. I won't be-grudge.

Battle Field Journal--Dec 4th; They DO, In Fact, Have Special Needs

Sigh.

Alright, so strategy #1, of driving myself mad by trying to cram 78 books in my head all at once and changing everything to make it a haven for people on the higher end of the autism spectrum: decided failure. The idiot subject (me) displayed common signs of "burn-out," which, ironically, she knows about because she read warnings about it in all the books she was inhaling.

Strategy #2, of ignoring the diagnosis and just trying to consistently raise them as she would a normal child with maybe just a hint more patience? Well, that's a some-what failure. It works great for some things. It works terribly for others.

And you wanna know where the most problems are right now? No, it's not the one that can't really talk and throws fits when his poor miming with a blanket isn't enough for us to intuit he wants us to build a fort for him . . .

It's my Asperger's child. The one I was completely convinced was normal.

Ha!

Oh well.

We're having trouble with all the school stuff. Okay, and the rest of the stuff too--you know, daily living. I know enough to know that what I'm seeing is because he's AS, but I burned out before I could read enough about Asperger's to really understand what's going on. You see, I started with PDD-NOS first, with the natural assumption that the one lower on the autism spectrum would have more problems.

So now I'm going back over the papers, and websites and books. I'm going to take it slow, and make the changes slowly. I'm going to treat them just like I would normal kids, only with a little more patience (Oh, Lord! Please grant me more patience!). I'm not going to try and antisipate or head off problems. I'm just going to deal with them as they come.

Strategy #3.

Let's see how this works.