punchdrunkmom

In which we decorate for Halloween, and also some kind of bizarre preppy luau

Today the boy and I were making Halloween decorations. I cut out pumpkin, bat and ghost shapes and he made faces on them.

“What should I cut out next?” I asked him.

“A fruit bat,” he replied.

Where does he learn these things?

“A fruit bat?” I asked.

“A scary fruit bat,” he confirmed.

So I just cut out a regular bat because I don’t know from fruit bats. My college major was advertising.

“Here’s your fruit bat,” I said, hoping I was not revealing my ignorance.

My bat must have been a passable imitation, because Kai began to draw the face.

“Eyes,” he said.

He drew two circles.

“And happy,” he said.

He drew a smile on the scary fruit bat.

“And coconuts,” he said, and drew several circles.

Wait. What?

“Coconuts?” I asked. “Why coconuts?”

He ignored my question and brought me a new sheet of paper.

“What should we make now?” I asked.

“A costume pumpkin,” he replied.

“Coming right up.”

Unfamiliar with pumpkin varietals (again--advertising), I simply did the best I could.

“Eyes,” he said.

He drew two circles for eyes.

“Triangle nose,” he said.

“It looks awesome,” I said.

“And…coconuts!”

Coconuts. Right.

Artibeus jamaicensis coconutus

Next we made a ghost.

Kai drew the face.

“Does he need coconuts?” I asked.

“That’s silly,” he said.

“Silly? He doesn’t need coconuts?”

“You’re a coconut,” he said, poking me in the sternum with his forefinger.

“I’m a what?”

He went back to his ghost.

“Needs stripes.”

Indeed.

 

You can just call me Ma Judy. It's like Ma Barker, only with 50% more germs.

At drop-off on Friday, Kai refused to get out of the car, so one of the volunteers got crafty.

“Do you want to see my pumpkin?” she asked, pulling something from her pocket. It was a little jack-o-lantern made out of felt, about the size of an egg.

“A punkin’?” Kai asked, intrigued.

He crawled from his seat and out the door and reached for the pumpkin for a closer look.

“Oh, no, it’s not for holding,” she told him. “It’s my special pumpkin and it’s for looking at.”

Best of luck with that, I thought, and as soon as the woman shut the door to the car, I was out of there. Ryan had pink eye and I had to get to the doctor.

At the doctor’s office, I told the receptionist that Ryan had pink eye, and did they want us to wait in isolation somewhere?

The receptionist did want us to wait someplace away from the other children who were all there for walk-in hours. We were shown to an exam room, where we played a game on the iPad to pass the time.

A nurse opened the door to the exam room to ask what we were doing there. I explained that we were placed there because of Ryan’s pink eye. The nurse said, “I see,” and shut the door.

Soon another nurse showed up. “I’m going to have to ask you to wait with the other kids in the waiting room,” she said.

“Oh. Okay,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d want to keep Ryan away from the others since Ryan is so contagious.”

I have a friend whose kid had pink eye, and their doctor’s office didn’t even want her to come in. She got a prescription over the phone. They didn’t want her kid getting pink eye cooties all over the office. MY doctor’s office, however, had no such compunction.

The nurse rolled her eyes at me. “All those kids are sick with something,” she said.

Right.

So we went to wait with the other children, Ryan touching everything she could find. Someone’s baby was crawling around after her, climbing in the chair she had just vacated, showing his mother a book Ryan had been looking at. Screw it, I thought, flipping through TMZ on my iPhone. I tried to protect these children, but apparently at our pediatrician, we like the waiting room to be a big petri dish. That’s just great. I hoped no one showed up with meningitis or ebola. (Should we wait in isolation? No—you can have a seat next to that family bitten by a monkey with Herpes B.)

Ryan thrust a toy dinosaur into my face.

“Roar!” she said, just as they called her name.

Turns out she does have pink eye. You’re welcome, everyone in the waiting room.

As I strapped her in the car, she grinned at me.

“Roar!” she said, thrusting the dinosaur in my face.

The dinosaur. That she stole. From the doctor’s office.  I don’t even know how she did it. I sighed, taking it from her and smearing it with a Clorox wipe and handing it back.

Later, after we picked Kai up and popped popcorn and turned on Nickelodeon, Kai started digging around in his pocket, and pulled out the following:

Face, meet palm. 

 

In which the boy begins his life of crime

After I strapped Kai in to the car seat Monday, he unzipped the front compartment of his backpack.

“Look inna backpack,” he said, and pulled out a Lucite car filled with water and shiny bits, very much like a snow globe in car form.

I took it from him to inspect it more closely. I wasn’t sure what this car was for. I mean, sometimes he comes home with minor gifts from school. Little books, say, or an eraser. This, however, was out of the ordinary.

The words “Las Vegas” were stamped on the top of the car, which was filled with tiny coins and chips and glitter and bills.

My first thought was that his teacher had gone to Las Vegas and for some reason had given him a souvenir.

This, of course, was because I was I in complete denial.

For one thing, I know that his teacher did not go to Vegas over the break.

Would a classmate have brought it back for him? If so, who? Certainly not any of the ones I know, as we are all Facebook friends and I know exactly how they spent their breaks.

“Kai, who gave you that car?” I asked, the last vestige of denial fading into sad realization.

“Put it inna backpack,” he said, and I sighed. He’d clearly stolen it from someone. This was, of course, my fault because I didn’t punish him for the snow globe he stole from the Portland airport.

Using my powers of typing an e-mail, I managed to locate the owner of the car (Kai’s teacher) and told her we’d bring it back the next day.

“Kai,” we’re going to have to give this back and say we’re sorry to Ms. Monica,” I told him.

“Sorry,” he said absentmindedly. Max and Ruby was on, which apparently requires his full attention.

“No, not to me,” I corrected him. “To Ms. Monica.”

“Monica,” he said, with the same lifelike quality a zombie might use to say, “brains.”

Right.

:::

Today, I took both children to the allergist, and while the doctor and I talked about Ryan, Kai played with a tiny toy fishing pole. This time, I had the foresight to check his pockets before we left.

“Kai, this doesn’t belong to you,” I said, extracting the fishing pole.

He kissed me, which is Kai-speak for “I’m sorry,” and also “I want to distract you from my bad behavior,” and also, “Can I please have back that thing you just took away?”

But as I was (am) adamant that the boy shouldn’t just steal everything that’s not nailed down, I placed the toy on the counter as we were leaving the office.

Just then, Kai had a thought.

“I need sticker,” he said to the receptionist.

He picked out a Dora for himself and a Thomas for Ryan, and then remembered that the allergist has lollipops, which required a careful selection process, and then I chivvied them out the door with much grunting and pushing and stuffing of limbs in coats.

When we got home, Kai reached into his pocket.

He pulled out the fishing pole. He had obviously used the whole sticker thing as a ruse to divert my attention.

I sighed. “Kai,” I said, “We don’t take things that don’t belong to us.”

I placed the toy on a high shelf and wondered when on Earth I’d find time to give it back to our doctor, and what’s going to happen if we ever find ourselves in real trouble. At the very least, we're going to need a faster car.

 

The long night's journey into day

Kai got up at 2:30 am this morning and I couldn’t get him to go back to sleep.

I heard him banging his new plastic hammer on the new tin tool box I’d purchased for him to keep him out of Scott’s toolbox. Until last night I was totally pleased with myself about the toolbox, as he lost interest in Scott's wrenches and instead pretended to fix things with his "scubadriver" and the "see saw." Now, however, I was cursing myself for letting him sleep with them. I hauled myself out of bed to see what was going on, but the truth is that I already knew what was going on.

Sometimes he’s just up in the middle of the night. There’s a long explanation involving autistic kids yeast in their systems, but at 2:30 in the morning, the whys and hows don’t matter.

This hasn’t happened for a long time, though it used to be a regular occurrence. Kai wouldn’t go to sleep. He would just be up until he finally got so tired that he would fall asleep where he stood:

And sometimes, he wouldn’t stay asleep. A lot of kids on the spectrum have sleep problems, and it took us a long time to find any kind of solution.

The advice we got was well-meaning but useless.

“You should establish a bedtime routine.”

We’ve had a bedtime routine since birth: bath, story, bed by eight. Next?

My personal favorite, since it implied that this was a behavioral problem and therefore entirely my fault was, “I’m sorry, but you have to be a Nazi about it.”

I see. Very good. And do what exactly?

Me: Kai, I am now the sleep nazi.

Kai: I need a popsicle.

Me: Right. And right after that, you will acknowledge that I’m the sleep nazi.

Kai: Popsicle.

Then our OT suggested we try melatonin to get him to go to sleep, and the results were nothing short of miraculous. For the first time, we would put him to bed and he’d just...fall asleep. We still haven’t solved the problem of staying asleep, however, and will occasionally find him awake at 3 am, talking to himself, playing with his Potato Heads. Or his brand new tools.

Which was what he was playing with when I went in to his room.

“Kai, it’s not time for tools, it’s time for sleep,” I said.

“Time for tools,” he replied.

Right.

I went upstairs to get the melatonin, hoping to get him back to sleep, although the melatonin doesn’t seem to work in these circumstances. It’s like trying to calm a stampeding elephant by offering him some chamomile tea. I dosed him nonetheless, and stumbled back to bed. 3 am rolled around. 3:30, 4. I couldn’t get comfortable in bed, pillows becoming bricks under my head. I could still hear him banging his hammer and talking to himself, and if the melatonin didn’t put him under, nothing would.

My alarm went off at 5:24 am (Jack and Diane) and I banged a fist onto the snooze button, but there was nothing for it, as I had to teach a class at 6:15.

“Hi, Mommy,” Kai said as I walked passed his room.

“You want to come upstairs?” I asked him. The sitter could watch him after I left.

He climbed into bed. “How about sleep?” he said, burying himself under his heavy down comforter and rolling on his side to face the wall.

How about sleep, indeed.

:::

I remember how slowly time passed when I was a kid, how an hour seemed like an eon. I wonder what goes on in his head, the voices that make it impossible for him to close his eyes and sleep, the only soul awake in wee hours, the darkest and loneliest part of the night. I wonder if he’ll remember this when he’s grown, and if he was scared or bored or angry or frustrated. Maybe it’s cruel for me to go back to my own bed as long as sleep is eluding us both, and I feel guilty in addition to being tired as hell.

Meanwhile:

It's 10 o'clock in the morning.

Behind the Cheddar Curtain

We showed up early for Kai’s occupational therapy on Monday, mostly because the cleaning lady was early and she was upstairs at the same time we were upstairs and I know from experience that it’s impossible to clean anything near Kai and Ryan when they are conscious.

The therapy center we go to is way out in the suburbs, a trek I make with Kai because we like our therapist, Emily, and also because autism resources in the city of Chicago proper are surprisingly limited. You can go out to Naperville and find DAN! Doctors and yoga centers for autistic children and all kinds of stuff, the trade-off being that you are in Naperville.

Anyway, I decided to let the kids run around at a playground I’ve passed a million times out there, one of those parks tucked into a tree-lined residential neighborhood. I parked on a street full of small but well-tended homes with pumpkins on the porches, the lawns covered in crunchy yellow leaves. A splashy October sun warmed the air and children, off from school for Columbus Day, rode bikes in driveways. It was the very picture of suburbia.

I herded the kids along a path leading to the playground, and noticed right away that there were a lot of Green Bay Packers fans there. At least five children of elementary school age all wearing green shirts with yellow Gs on them, and a caregiver, perhaps their mother, wearing her own Brett Favre jersey (Packers, not Jets or Vikings). There were other families there, too—a couple of mothers chatting while one nursed a baby, their children ranging from about two to eight.

Kai and Ryan went on the swings and the slide, navigating around the bigger kids and past the little ones. The trees rained down leaves with each gentle gust of wind. It was a great day to spend some time at the park.

And then I got distracted by Ryan, who tried to escape the playground in order to investigate someone’s red wagon, and when she was satisfied with its wheels and the comfort of its seats and the prevalence of its cup holders, we held hands to go back into the playground area. I scanned the equipment for Kai, but I didn’t see him.

Past experience told me that he was probably on the one piece of equipment that blocked him from view, in this case the tube slide, but when I poled my head in there, all I saw were some unfamiliar shoes in a size huge.

The Packer kids were all on the metal platform at the top of the slide.

“Are there any kids in the slide up there?” I asked.

“No,” answered one.

“I’m looking for my son,” I said, thinking that they’d be able to tell me if one of their ranks was not one of their own.

“Maybe he ran away,” one kid said helpfully.

I gave him a mom look that said I don’t appreciate your comment, you smart alecky little shit. Or at least that’s what I tried to convey. It’s possible that it closely resembles Brenda, get your paws off my husband, you skank, because the mechanics are kind of the same, but no matter. It’s not friendly, in any case.

One of the Packer girls piped up at that point. “There’s some kid over there,” she said. “Maybe that’s him.”

I looked in the direction she was pointing and there was Kai, 50 yards away climbing a tree. I left Ryan climbing up the jungle gym to the slide while I went to retrieve the boy, and was just making my way back when I heard a loud smacking sound.

“Oh, no!” said one of the Packer kids, but not an “oh, no” of horror, rather with the same tone you might use when you see something both unfortunate AND funny, like “Oh, no, a bird just pooped all over Brenda's brand-new Mercedes.”

When I reached Ryan, she was on her hands and knees at the bottom of a step, clearly having been knocked/pushed down that step by one of the Packers, her face red from the long, held exhale that comes before the storm.

“Shit, you guys,” was all I could think to say as I reached her and picked her up. She began to wail in earnest. “Was she pushed?”

One of the Packers said with a smile, “I didn’t push her.” He turned to one of his fellows. “Did you?”

“I didn’t push her,” the other one said.

“Me neither,” said another.

Right. No one saw nothin’. I’ve seen Goodfellas.

Ryan buried her head in my shoulder. “Come on, you guys,” I said to my children. “It’s time to go see Emily.”

“Go see Emily!” Kai chirped.

The chatting mothers had stopped their conversation and watched as the three of us walked by, their own children staring wide-eyed.

The Packer mom looked up from her manifesto or whatever she was reading as I walked by.

“She all right?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said tersely. No thanks to your little gang of juvenile delinquents, lady.

I loaded the kids in the car, and as I pulled away, Ryan still crying in her car seat, I made a mental note to go to Target and get the kids some Bears jerseys.

 

 

Triple Threat

Really, I thought I was just being paranoid.

I mean, sometimes it crosses my mind that I read too much into things, that I look for trouble with the kids. And, mothering being my full time job and needing to find some meaning in my work beyond my obvious love for my children, perhaps I am trying to justify my life choices by wanting to be oh-so-careful about…you know. Stuff. And granted, there’s been a lot of stuff: pneumonias and asthmas and allergies and ear infections. And autism.

I picked up the phone to call Early Intervention for Ryan last month.

“And who referred you?” the intake coordinator asked.

I got the same question yesterday when I called the ENT for Kai, who I think needs another set of ear tubes.

“And who referred you?” the nurse asked.

“No one,” I answered in both cases. “This was my own idea.”

As Ryan’s evaluation date neared, I actually considered calling it off. The reason I called in the first place was because she didn’t really label stuff.

Me: What’s this? Ryan? What’s this? This is a cup.

Ryan: Okay.

But then Ryan asked a speech therapist at Kai’s therapy center how she was doing.

“Why, I’m doing great, thank you!” she replied to Ryan. “How old is this child?” She was clearly impressed.

“Would you believe I called Early Intervention on her today?” I asked.

Her look told me that she didn’t believe it.

Plus, I’ve been hearing more and more speech from her.

Me: What’s this?

Ryan: Diaper!

And I almost called it off again.

And then it was evaluation day, and they were here and they were asking me questions. Does she show different emotions? Yes. Does she eat with a spoon? Yes. Does she know her body parts? No. Does she know her colors? No. Can she problem solve and sort objects? Apparently no.

Ryan qualified for speech therapy. She qualified for occupational therapy. And she qualified for developmental therapy. Even Kai didn’t get developmental therapy. Kai, I guess, could sort objects.

“Are you worried about Spectrum?” I asked them.

They are not. I’m not, either, but then, I kind of thought the therapists would tell me I was wasting their time today.

“You called E.I. because you thought there might be a concern,” my speech therapist reminded me. “It’s good that you called.”

Yes. It’s good that I called.

And so, here we go again.

I’m kind of getting sick of being right.

 

In which I graciously accept the nomination for Mom of the Year

My crime was taking a shower. It wasn’t like a full shower with a fancy hair washin’ even, just the half-shower where you wash your bangs and put the rest in a bun when you’re done. But I got distracted by the still-packed suitcases from the Portland trip and realized that it contained a bag of dirty laundry and inside that bag was yet another bag of—ahem—wet underwear (the boy’s, not mine. I swear), and so I tossed a load into the washer and untangled phone chargers and stowed toiletries. Then Ryan woke up and I had to change her diaper and find her socks and, ahead of her speech evaluation tomorrow, quiz her on a few things around the room: Ock! (sock) Jabbie! (jammies) Beh! (bear). I was putting on her shoes when I heard a thin cry of distress from the last known location of the boy.

Scott doesn’t leave Kai unattended, ever. Not to shower, never. But I do, because if I want to take a shower between the hours of 7 am and 8 pm, I have to. There’s something depressing about being in the same clothes at night that you went for a run in that morning. Something gross and depressing. So sometimes, I leave him watching Dora and go take a shower. Like I did today.

I hustled Ryan to her feet and went to find Kai, hearing again a distress call, though I couldn’t make out the words. Ryan didn’t want to come upstairs with me, so I went up alone. I quickly scanned the room, but I didn’t see him. And then I heard him again.

“Mommy, I’m stuck your hand.”

It was coming from the direction of the porch, and that’s where I found him, lying on his belly on the table with his arm through the umbrella hole.

“I’m stuck your hand,” he repeated. Kai-speak for “my hand is stuck.”

I wondered just how stuck he was and if I’d have to call the fire department, or at the very least coat his arm in Dawn, but I eased his arm out of the hole with very little trouble.

His arm was red, but otherwise functional.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He seemed to remember something just then, and stood on the table and reached into his back pocket, which today was located in the front side because all of his clothes were on backwards. He pulled out an egg. Amazingly, this egg was still intact despite bearing the boy’s weight while he was stuck in the hole.

He handed the egg to me, and reached into a front pocket for a second one.

“I need eggs,” he said.

Obviously. I didn’t even ask why he’d put eggs in his pocket.

“Well, let’s go inside then,” I answered, scanning the street for cops. I wondered how long he’d been out there, arm stuck and calling for his mother, perhaps prompting a helpful neighbor to call the police.

He climbed up on the counter next to the stove to watch me cook his eggs. As I was melting the butter in the pan, I remembered Ryan. There was no sound coming from downstairs, a sure sign of trouble.

“Ryan?” I called. “Ryan!”

I listened, but she didn’t answer.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Kai, and ran down the steps, just a quick trip to collect her, but she wasn’t in the family room where I’d last seen her. I started to call for her as I trotted into Kai’s room, the bathroom, her room, my room. No Ryan.

“RYAN!” I called, working backwards from room to room, checking behind doors, the toilets, starting to get a little panicky. “Where are you?”

I took the stairs two at time. “RYAN!”

And I found her, lying on her belly watching Toy Story 2 on Kai’s iPad. I have no idea when she came upstairs. Meanwhile, Kai was leaning over the now-hot egg pan, squeezing food coloring into the pool of melted and sizzling butter.

“Orange eggs,” he said.

I lifted him down, sending a silent prayer of thanks upward that the cops didn’t come while I searched for my missing daughter and left my pre-schooler presiding over an open flame. 

As I served him his orange eggs, I passed by the giant bucket I’d purchased at the Container Store to hold all of Kai’s costumes, and discovered the meager contents of my refrigerator had been placed inside:

And I decided that next time I need a shower, I’ll just wait until Scott gets home.

 

In which we come to understand that I don't set a very good example

“Put it inna pocket,” Kai said.

I turned to wait for him.

“Come on, child,” I said, impatient to get to our gate.

Kai was doing a pretty awesome job of walking by himself in the airport. He stood with me all through security, waited patiently while they tested the diaper cream and his nebulizer to see if either was a bomb. When we stopped in a newsstand for a bottle of water, he never left my side despite the draw of the M&Ms and Dora coloring books.

He lagged behind me as we were leaving though, talking about putting something in his pocket, which I assumed was some change he’d found on the floor.

At the gate, I pulled out the nebulizer and gave him a breathing treatment, my normal travel anxiety ratcheded up a notch or two when they called for the As to line up to board the flight. I willed the medicine to hurry up, already as Business Select was allowed to board.

The flight wasn’t full, and I was hoping that we could get a seat for Ryan, who was flying as a “lap infant,” two words that definitely no longer apply to her. I was going to find the first empty row, put Kai in the window seat and Ryan in the middle, then turn my back to the boarding passengers so no one would ask me if Ryan had a ticket. No one wanted to sit in our row, anyway, I reasoned.

The As began to board the flight. We had to line up with the other families. Right now.

I turned off Kai’s nebulizer and herded the children toward the gate, shoving water and iPhones and jackets into bags, yanking out boarding passes, dolling out lollipops, and as we were standing on the jetway, Kai pulled something out of his pocket.

A tiny snow globe with a model of Portland inside.

“Kai, where did you get that?” I asked, reaching for it.

He held it close, refusing to let me take it from him. “My turn,” he said, and put it back into his pocket.

Kai had shoplifted his very first souvenir.

What should I do? I thought. None of my choices were good. I could take it away, but my hands were already overly full of Ryan and backpacks and strollers. I could make him take it back, but I’d already given up my boarding passes.

So in the end, I did nothing, concentrating instead on how to get a seat for Ryan on this plane. A seat I didn’t pay for. And I did get that seat, which brought the grand total of things the Judy family stole on the way home from Portland to two.