Little LE is exactly one month away from turning 4.   I am convinced that she is gifted.  In its own way, its as challenging raising my little LE as it is raising a child with Asperger’s.  Right now, I am faced with the challenge of perfectionism.  Her brain processing power is ahead of her fine motor skills.  She knows the way she wants something to look, the way it “should” look.  When she is unable to match it in reality, she gets very upset.  Temper tantrum, scribbling all over her art / note, crying upset. She is heart-breakingly hard on herself.

Moments after drawing this person, she drew a big X from corner to corner to corner because “her stripes and dot dress is wrong”.  At her age, the “average” kid is still making “tadpoles”, with legs sprouting from the head.  The emergence of a torso is a 5-6 year old skill, with making the trunk longer than it is wide an even later milestone.  I’m just amazed at her precocious ability (she scores around 6 years, 3 months on the Goodenough Draw a Person Test), and she is freaking out and destroying it because its “wrong”.

It does no good to tell her that it is all right, or that it is perfect just the way it is.  She *knows* it isn’t (in her mind), and she just gets more upset.   We’ve read Beautiful Oops more than a few times.  In moments of calm “rationality”, we’ll talk about art, and how there really are no mistakes in art.  How she is only three and she is still learning to use her hands, and it’s ok if the 2 points of a “w” don’t line up exactly right now (or whatever). I’ve tried to model making mistakes and different coping skills.  I try to acknowledge the work that went into something, rather than just praising the result.  I’m not entirely sure what else to do.

My lap-band is being removed next week.  I’ve had nothing but increasingly frequent problems with my stomach for the past several months – reflux-y burning esophagus pain, harder time than normal keeping food down, bloated-ness, and abdominal pain, lots of pain.  I couldn’t even drink a sip of water without it hurting to the nth degree a week ago.  A trip to the emergency room, some medication, a mostlly liquid diet, a visit with a surgeon, and I’m now losing my band.

I have a love – hate relationship with the idea.  While I haven’t worked the band in a long time, I have managed to maintain my weight loss without gaining anything back which I mainly attribute to the band.  I’d like to think that I’ve learned some good habits and taught my brain what appropriate portions should be – but I am terrified that I’m going to balloon 100 pounds back on within moments of the bands removal.

Which is ironic since I also can’t stop thinking about the foods that I’ll be able to eat again.  Some many years ago I made a list of my favorite foods that I’d hate to give up.  I did give up over half of them because I couldn’t eat them with the band; anything bready or gooey sticky like melted cheese were impossible for me to eat.

The list as it was — and I can say that despite the passing years, this would still be a pretty accruate list.

1. Fresh Bread (warm from the oven, slathered in butter; esp. my Gram’s)
2. Clam Chowder
3. Cheese (especially melted, on almost anything)
4. Tacos with Homemade (fried) Corn Tortilla Shells
5. Rib Eye Steak
6. Bacon
7. Reuben Sandwich
8. Vine Ripened Tomatoes, topped with Mayo
9. Bennigan’s Monte Cristo Sandwich
10. Avocados
11. Fried Razor Clams (NOT clam strips) & herb aioli
12. Stuffing from inside the Thanksgiving Turkey

Textures could play havoc as well.  Meats were touch and go.  So the only things from my list I could eat reliably were clam chowder (my mom’s brothy clam soup, really), tomatoes, and avocados.

So here I am, worried about the consequences to my weight, but also plotting the best bread to bake as soon as I am well enough to knead.  (And I don’t even like to bake! )

I usuallt try to avoid cliches, but sometimes it’s an idea that’s just engrained and there are no better words for it.

pinterest just went to a “new look” and for me, it probably heralds the end of my using it (pretty much what happened with polyvore).  I can handle learning the new layout.  It looks fine to me (not that there was anything wrong with it before IMO) but I no longer have the ability to right click and “open in new tab” from any board (including my “home” which is basically the “board” of all the new pins from those whom I follow).   I’ve always gone through my new pins daily (or more than daily ), opening likely looking pins in new tabs.  I absolutely WILL NOT re-pin something until I verify that the pin is actually linked to an appropriate source.  Sometimes what I thought looked interesting is less so once I look more closely.  Either way, I’ll browse through my new pins, opening tabs as I go to look at once I have scanned through all my new pins.  Not anymore.  This loss of functionality is crippling to me.

I also can’t right click and open up the board that a pin came from (linked at the bottom of the pin).  When I am doing a search and get a screenful of pins, I frequently want to open the whole board (in a new tab!), not just the pin.  Can’t do it.  I have to click into the board in my main browsing screen.  Then if I want more details on a pin, I have to click into that as well.  Now I am 3 deep from my initial search result.  When I finally get to hit back, back, back, about half the time the search has reset to the top of the screen and I have to scroll back through to find my place.

I generally dislike the whiny complainers who post on game / company forums and think so much of themselves that they think thier ”This sux and I will no longer be a customer” comments carry any weight with said company, so I have refrained from whining to pinterest, other than filling out a polite feedback form.  So that’s why you got to listen to me now

R.I.P Pinterest?

Over the last year or so, light tables have been a big deal in the momma blogger / homeschool scene.   It’s funny because we’ve been playing with light a very long time, although certainly not with a fancy, big table.  I have a very old LightTracer box picked up years and years ago for tracing images for scrapping.  It is not as versatile as the ones I have seen out there in blogland.  I wouldn’t want to bring in anything wet or messy on it.    We’ve played with see through pony beads and petri dishes, translucent geo tiles, layering tissue paper,  and those multi colored flat vase filler marbles.   As overhead projectors become a thing of the past due to document cameras and smart boards, etc, I keep an eye on the clearance section of educational supply web sites.  I’ve picked up a bunch of accessories designed for the overhead for rock bottom prices — dominos, word tiles, base 10 pieces, and so on.

Today Little LE was making sentences with a word tiles.  At 46 months she is recognizing about 2 dozen words (family names, some basic sight words, and some CVC words like cat, sun, etc), but most of the words were unfamiliar.  She’d put together a “sentence” and then have me read it and laugh at its silliness.

We’ve been doing a fair amount of salt dough creation.  Right now we are working on an Easter egg tree.  We made salt dough eggs, and have painted them a base color.  We’ll be adding accents later.  Kidlet and I will be exploring glass etching to decorate the vase we are using to hold the twig “tree”.

A sheet like this comes home each week with the words circled that Kidlet needs to study.  (The errors in capitalization are mine.  waterproof and evaporation aren’t capitalized on the actual weekly sheet, but my app “auto-corrected” them for me, oops).

BUT, the homework is photocopied from a SF spelling practice book, so the 4 pages a week of spelling homework are on the first 12 words of the 30 (sometimes it includes the first 3 challenge words, but not always).  The 12 words my kid almost never needs to study.  Can you guess how well it goes over that he has to do the dreaded writing to “study” words that he doesn’t need to study?

So we come up with different solutions for practicing the words that he “needs” to study (tbh, he generally only gets 4-5 words that he actually doesn’t know how to spell, even when its all “challenge words” ).  I’ll have him use a set of alphabet stamps to spell his words, or type them on the computer using different fun fonts. Sometimes I will pull out the gel bag (ziploc bag with cheap hair gel, food coloring and glitter) and have him draw the letters in that. I will have him use the words in sentences, the sillier the better (typed up ont he computer of course). Some days I let him give me the spelling test, and he has to correct it.  We’ll use magnet letters or scrabble tiles, or do oral spelling bees.  We’ll twist pipe cleaners into letter shapes to spell the words. I try to be creative and come up with different things each week.

On days where I know that I am volunteering first thing in the morning, and I will be the one pulling and correcting the homework (the teacher only keeps track of IF they did it, now how they scored on it), I don’t even make him suffer through those worksheets.  (don’t judge!)  However, even on days where Lil L is headed to child care, I sometimes have trouble getting the kids out of the house early enough to drop her off first.  I have to take Kidlet in, then take Lil L to KinderCare, and then come back to Kidlet’s school to volunteer.  So I present the homework most days, even if I *think* that I’ll be the one checking it in.

Is it really *that* hard to click on the individual blog entry when linking from a blog to pinterest?  It’s quite annoying to click a pinterest link that looks so very interesting to discover you are at the blog home page, or on an archive page, in either case, no idea where the original post is located.  (or to a tumblr feed, or a google search page, etc).  Almost as useful — linking to an embedded picture, so the pinterest link pulls up some bp1.blogspot.com address, instead of the actual blog where you might find information about the picture.

You really gotta wonder if people are actually trying to access the links they are re-pinning.

Only pin / re-pin to an original source!

Lil L is 32 months.  Kidlet just turned 8.

A Few of Lil L’s recent activities.  You can see her poor scraggly hair a bit in some of these.  My daughter inherited *my* hair, which means its very thin, very fine, and tangles if you breathe on it.  This is no exaggeration.  No amount of leave in conditioner, de-tangling spray, etc does any good.  We get giant clumps of rats nest hair, and combing it is a NIGHTMARE.  She tends to have greasy looking hair around the house, because I saturate it in conditioner and let it just sit on the head in the hopes that just maybe THIS time it will make a difference.  (it doesn’t =0)

Playdough mats (L for her name, although she can spell it now)

I bought this button art on a super sale for Christmas 2010, but had it put up until she could actually use it.  We pulled it out a few months ago, and she loves snapping the buttons in place.  She often wants to use it without one of the included patterns, but this time was using them.  She decided that she wanted her boat to have eyes, color coding on the picture mat notwithstanding.

Making sculptures from Crayola Model Magic, buttons, tiny letter dice (from inside mini boggle games from Oriental Trading that were 50% off since they were “less than perfect” which doesn’t matter for this!).  She did her name first without assistance, then asked how to spell mommy, daddy and her brothers name, then she found the letters on the dice and pushed them in.

Showing off her “P” work.

While mommy and kidlet were dyeing some rice  (below) for a later project, she is playing with a sensory bin (mainly a mix of brown and wild rices that I had bought in bulk and everyone in our family hated it the one time I made it) with measuring cups, containers, and funnels.  The bin WAS full when she started; throwing the rice about is so much fun.

We used gel food coloring (since that is what I had on hand) and a bit of rubbing alcohol.  I don’t know what purpose that serves exactly, but we were happy with the vibrant colors that came out of it.

Kidlet has been working on idioms.  That is a tough one when you have asperger’s.  I had seen a display of idiom worksheets onpinterest (can’t find that link now to credit them).  But they didn’t share the sheet they used, just the image of finished results, so I created one.

We have done a few of them (ants in your pants, let the cat out of the bag), which I meant to show here, but didn’t get them scanned.  I put the idiom in at the top, and then have him draw what he thinks it would look like if it meant exactly what it said.  Then we talk about what it really means, and add the definition and use.  Then I have him write a sentence using the idiom.

What’s new?

Kidlet officially has Asperger’s with major sensory processing issues (not that we didn’t already know that for months).  I will leave it at that un-emotionally changred sentence for now.  I assure you, reality is far from un-emotional.

Kidlet informed me some time ago that cute bento lunches were not appropriate for his age (whatever!).  I still pack his meals in laptop lunchboxes or bento boxes, but they aren’t worth photographing.

Baby L is no baby!  Not quite 3, but way “too” bright.  I have struggled with tot school because her knowledge exceeds her age. Far exceeds it.  She has known her alphabet (and not just singing it, but being able to identify letters at random, upper and lower) for a year and knows the sounds of most letters, counts to 30 on her own (and rocognizes, in random order written numbers to 20, plus the 10′s to 100), can tell you how many objects are in a group without actually counting them, up to 5 easily, knows all her colors, all the basic shapes, can expand on patterns, sorts by at least 2 different criteria (round & blue for instance), and on and on.

Her motor skills are age 2, so much writing isn’t possible (although we have been doing various pre-writing activities and fine motor activities with tweezers and eyedroppers, etc to prepare her), and she certainly isn’t holding writing utensils correctly, or able to use scissors.  And emotionally she is 2.  She isn’t ready for more advanced “work”, and it’s been VERY challenging for mom to find activities that will interest the 2 year old who has the”academic” knowledge of a 4 year old and are actually doable by said 2 year old.

Emotionally, I am a wreck, and physically, there hasn’t been a lot of change.  I’ve lost maybe 15 pounds since Baby L was born.

So very busy.   I’ve been fighting with my meds, and they finally seem to be getting me close to normal.  I have some motivation and I’m not laying on the couch half the day.  I’m not spending a ton of time on the computer.  About the only thing online I’ve been up to lately is playing with Polyvore.  It’s fun, its like scrapbooking with clothes or playing with paper dolls.  I can browse there on the iPad, so I don’t have to be AT the computer, except to make a set, but can check in with my contacts from time to time while hanging with the kids.

Lately I have been using it to try and organize a capsule wardrobe plan because *fanfare please*, I have started losing weight again.  I’ve been stuck for so long, but now I am inching back down the scale.  I’m at my lowest since before I got married (in ’98), although not quite down to where I was when I met DH in ’96.  Almost though.

When you lose so slowly, its hard to see it, which makes it hard to celebrate.  I tried on my wedding dress though, and while not falling off me, there is definitely some room in there.  I am also able to fit into my “inspiration shirt” that has been hanging in my bathroom (a 3x from coldwater creek).  NSV are the best.

I spent a few days this past week cleaning out my closet.  I’d been wearing the same old clothes that I’ve had forever, even from my highest weight.  I had sizes ranging up to 38.  Pants were almost literally falling off me, and the shirts were like tents.   I’ve continued to wear what I could and put off buying much because it seems crazy to spend a ton of money on clothes that will again (knock wood) be too big in another year.

However, I decided it was time to ditch them and get an interim wardrobe.  They say that keeping the big clothes around makes it too easy to fall back into old habits. Besides, its difficult to feel good about how far I have come when I still LOOK like I weigh 375 pounds because I’m wearing baggy, oversized clothes that only make me look bigger than I am.

My mom was in town for a couple days (DH is gone to Chicago for 2 weeks for work, and she wanted to give me a break), so I had a (relatively) neutral judge on what still looked OK and could stay in the closet and what was ridiculously big and needs to be donated to Goodwill.  I ended up with 5 large black garbage bags full of discards.  My closet is still a little barren, but I think I can get by with just a little shopping, accessorizing with things that I haven’t shrunk out of (ie, bags, shoes, scarves, jewelry, etc!).

Since my old inspiration shirt is now a wearable part of my wardrobe, I have purchased a new inspiration shirt.  It’s an XL from J.Crew.  It’s suprisingly close to fitting.  Once I can wear it, I will be in basically NORMAL sizes. (OK, for all you 2′s out there, it doesn’t seem normal, but from someone that was facing having to shop online because she was bulging out of 38s, the largest found locally, the prospect of being able to get even the largest size of a normal store is liberating).