Beautiful Pink-Eyed Girl

Okay, so normally her eyes are brown. This week, they were pink.


Crap.

Hug Abby. Wash hands. Pick up Rachael. Get puked on by coughing baby. Wash me, baby and floor. Play with Abby. Wash hands. Nurse baby. Wash hands. Get puked on by coughing baby. Wash...

You get the idea. We went thru lots of soap, laundry and hand sanitizer this week.

I'm feeling sad. Another blog that I pop in on once in awhile .... trevorshope.blogspot.com ... mom has gotten a diagnosis of LGS for her son. When Abby was first diagnosed with IS, one of my greatest fears was that she would develop LGS. Our lives took a different path, Abby being diagnosed with Autism. Trevor's story reminds me of how truly blessed we are. My heart goes out to you, mom, and your family.

A great link I lifted from her page, however.... For Mommies with SN Kids.

Very wiggly baby getting impatient on my lap...

Pie and Pie Charts... and Introducing Floyd

I'm sorting out my seeds. Am I allowed to start my tomato plants yet? Not until April? At least I can start the begonias in March sometime.

I'm itching to get working in the garden this year. Yes, I will actually have a garden, so I have been promised. The sod-busting started last spring, but never got past the strip alongside the south wall of the house. It's a long, tedious task that should have been completed in the fall so the grass got a chance to rot, except I was either conveniently 12 months pregnant or taking care of a teeny, tiny newborn.

*sigh*

I wish I could have gotten the garden dug last year, I wanted to plant rubarb. Mmmm... strawberry rubarb pie....

I've finally got a few moments to myself for the first time in days (both girls are sleeping), and it's spooky how quiet my house is. Except for the pops, cracks, mysterious thumps (that's Floyd, who seems to have moved from my parents furnace to ours), the clopping of the clothes in the dryer in the basement, the soft signs of a sleeping baby on the monitor... I guess quiet is a relative thing.

We had our "intake report meeting" yesterday for Abby's ABA therapy. It was interesting; it helped quantify just how behind she really is. It's disheartening on one level, seeing in pretty graphs and pie charts, "yes, your child is different". But on one level, it was strangely satisfying and reassuring. I'm not crazy. There really is something different about my child. I have a pie chart to prove it.

Beans and Rice

One thing about trying to save money... you eat a lot of beans and rice. We're Dave Ramsey fans, and he's a great advocate of the beans and rice diet to get out of debt. There's only one problem with that as far as I can see. My husband hates beans. He complains endlessly about them. He will actually skip a meal to get out of eating beans (I suppose that's another money saver). He will tolerate them if I pair them with meat, and while that helps stretch the meat it negates the whole "vegetarian meal" idea.

Fortunately, Abby (the two-year-old) and I love beans and rice. We would eat them nearly every day. I don't really have a point, except to complain about complaints. I'm done now.

I wanted to share a photo, just because I'm trying to learn to use this darn thing:



Aren't they sweet? Not likely to happen again.

Introductions

I finally decided that I needed a captive audience, even if that audience is my own computer and the million trillion bits of data flying around out there.

My name is Carolyn, and I live the middle of the bald prairie, as my Grandmother would call it. I have two children, one of which is "special needs", being diagnosed with Infantile Spasms at age of 7 months, and with Autism Spectrum Disorder at age 25 months (she is currently 32 months old). She also has sensory integration issues. We've literally been to hell and back over the past couple of years with her. I wish I had the foresight to document our journey earlier in the trip.

In addition, I have a 3 month old daughter who appears to be average in every way, and a wonderful husband who also appears to be "normal" in every way :P.

We are practical Catholics, and living our faith has meant the difference between surviving and thriving while traveling on this road instead of crashing and burning. I'm trying very hard to learn to be frugal and to learn the "lost arts" of homesteading. We dearly want to buy farm land some day so I can have my 2 acres of gardens and chickens, even though we've both essentially have lived our entire lives in a city. I guess I'm just a prairie girl at heart.

One of the greatest influences in my life has been my grandmother (sorry mum). Often, you'll see expressions crop up in what has been loving termed "grandma-eze", which reflect her ... ahem... shall we say unique way of expressing herself. My husband just laughs.

We laugh a lot.