Thoughts From Mud Bay

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I swear that's the last bit of captioned internet crack for a while.

Some favorite and not so favorite moments of my day:

In the bathroom, there are four kids and their mom. Second oldest kid says, "wow, your hair is like Rapunzel!" I say, "Thank you! Yours will be too if you keep growing it like you look like you have been," and her elder sister piped in with "well, mine would be long like yours, but I gave myself a haircut when I was younger." Then, younger brother (3? 4?) pipes up with "Mine is Emily!" He drew some very puzzled looks from his family for that. I'm still not sure what he meant, but it was pretty funny in the moment.

Not so favorite: mother and toddler come into the Co-op during my volunteer shift, mom leaves toddler in the kids' area to play. Toddler begins to scream nonstop for, I swear, 10 minutes before his mom went to check on him. As soon as she checked on him, he peed all over the floor, then started to scream louder. Charming.

I miss Andrew a lot. I went into his bedroom sort of reflexively when I got home, and I need to make the bed because he left a kid-shaped lump there in the blankets. I decided today that we'll need to send him a care package full of "hippy food" (seaweed, crunchy granola, and organic fruit snacks, among other things,) for when he gets back home. I can't quite figure out how to send a tub of the nice miso he really likes without paying an arm and a leg for postage. We sent him away to his granddad's with a partial tub and a little baggy of wakame as cooking self-defense. I'm proud to say that he gained almost exactly 10 lbs and about an inch and 1/2 during the month he was here. I hope I was successful in convincing his mom to try the beginning of the school year without the ADHD meds. (I don't think he's a kid who has ADHD, if anything he has Asperger's Syndrome, and as my screensaver says, "Shit man, all of my friends have Asperger's Syndrome!" He's a large part of the reason that I am going to make part of my thesis about the problems surrounding misdiagnosis of children with special needs.)

And thank goodness I already have a good basis for my thesis at that. I wrote a research paper in 2007 looking at the differences and similarities between Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The overlap that was most striking is in the behaviors that are most effective in the educator when dealing with kids with either of these issues. I will narrow my focus to Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD, because I think that easily half of the kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD are actually dealing with a high-functioning autism, and I'm convinced that the meds for ADHD kids are not beneficial for kids who have an ASD.

I also will, someday, write a grant that will allow me to have gym balls instead of chairs in my classroom.

And I want a pony.

Well, not really. I'd rather have a couple of nice, wool-giving, milk-giving sheep.

Tomorrow (okay, today's,) to-do list:
~Sleep in.
~Clean the house. Yes, all of it.
~Fling the catbox off of a cliff, then burn the cliff. Alternately, empty said catbox and clean thoroughly around where it lives.
~If Cathy has not fixed the vacuum, stare at it sternly and wish I knew how it worked.
~Go to the Co-op's volunteer appreciation party. I hear there will be cake made by Virginia, always a good incentive.

Okaaaay, I lied. I just found this and thought it was hilarious. This is it though!

see Obama pictures