Random Tuesday Thoughts

I think I'm still on a Thanksgiving-turkey tryptophan buzz. Hope you're up for some randomness, 'cause that's all you're getting today!

• What a whirlwind of a holiday weekend! Much baking of pies Thursday morning, much gobbling and chattering Thursday evening at Auntie S's place. Different lodgings both Friday and Saturday nights, several sets of family gatherings, whoo!
  
  
• I'm not going to see the movie "Four Christmases." Who needs to go to the theatre to experience multiple family holiday gatherings stacked one atop the other?
  
  
• Joy was a super little traveler. She's so content to ride along in her carseat, especially if we toss her a toy now and then. Rose actually demands more attention than Joy, can you believe?
  
  
• Thursday night we stayed over with Uncle Marathon & Auntie Save-the-Tatas. They have a brand-new kitten that Rose just swooned over (the more so because I have allergies so she can't have a kitty of her own). Joy was willing to give the kitty a pat or two, but she REALLY wanted to play with: the cat toys. We came home with a toy which has a ball & jingle bell on top of a spring growing out of a stand. I am not exaggerating when I say this toy had a catnip-like effect on Joy!!
  
  
• Our Friday visit was to my grandmother, who turned 100 last May. Our visit happened to fall during her move from her retirement apartment across the street into an assisted-living apartment. I want to be not-quite-ready to move into assisted-living when I'm 100... I hope that her new place, bright and sparkling, begins to feel homelike soon.
  
  
• Grandma took us out to dinner Friday night. Joy drank from an open plastic-glass at the Old Country Buffet! Without spilling a drop! Two glasses of lemonade and was asking for more!
  
  
• Saturday we got to see Auntie RatM and Auntie Meerkat -- it had been a long time! We got to take them to the park to play with the girls. Rose swirled herself down the firepole over and over, with great drama. Joy let me guide her in climbing up a somewhat wobbly web-like climber up to the slide platform. What a trooper.
  
  
• More Joy awesomeness, quoting from her OT's update last week: "This kiddo is pretty amazing at motor planning those activities which she's motivated for! ... When [Joy] wants something she's crafty, smart, clever, strong, and fairly precise with her movements. What a great kid!"
  
  
• When I read an update like that, it's no wonder I get confused about labels. In a good way, though.
  
  
• I wonder how many blogposts are waiting for me in my Google Reader? Maybe I'll go find out.

Pumpkin Patch

We have an autumn tradition of four years' duration now. Every fall we take a trip to a nearby farm with a pumpkin patch and corn maze and petting zoo, together with the family that gave us the Joy! book. It's been a delight to look back over the photos across the years and remind ourselves how our girls have grown!

This year we had a special guest, my younger brother (Uncle Schnirelmann) who was visiting from out of state for the weekend.

The first incident of note at this year's visit was the temporary wristband, to mark that you'd paid your entrance fee. Last year when we tried to put the wristband on Joy, she wailed and fought and tried to chew it off until we gave in. This year? Wore it with zero complaint. I think it may have something to do with the other bracelet she wears...

Once we got inside, Joy wasn't too much interested in the petting zoo, or the pumpkins. Like Kayla over at Opposite Kids, Joy found the stimmies more interesting than the main attractions -- she preferred to play with bits of straw or cornstalk from the ground rather than petting animals or noticing pumpkins.

She did really well with the children's corn maze, though (which featured one obvious main path through):


Rose and her friend enjoyed the corn maze as well:


The absolute best thing about the pumpkin patch trip, though, was Uncle Schnirelmann. He and Joy invented a game whereby she would run to him, and he would grab her by the arms and hoist her all the way up his 6-foot-tall frame, to rest her knees on his chest and laugh into each other's faces. They did this all over the farm...


... even in the pumpkin patch itself (much better than scouting for those pesky pumpkins, in a rather picked-over section of the field anyway).


We've yet to carve the pumpkins we brought home, but Rose did successfully engineer getting Joy to make a choice among the options that she drew:


Joy's hand landed on the one at the lower right, with the eyelashes. The cutest of the bunch, to be sure, but the most challenging to carve! I'll post jack-o-lantern pics once we have them.

UPDATE: OK, I only just noticed: there's something at least slightly similar in Joy's body position playing the jump-up game with Uncle Schnirelmann, and mine in the sidebar photo leaping off the bridge. What can I say but... that's my girl! Wild women, we are!

Happy Anniversary UncleDO and AuntLO!

On October 20th, 2007, Joy & Rose officially gained a new auntie by marriage.

They also both got to be flower girls!

Now, there's always a bit of risk entailed in the flower girl thing, and the younger, the riskier. You never quite know how they're going to perform at the actual ceremony! Having a three-year-old in the mix along with her five-year-old sister makes things more than a little unpredictable.

When the three-year-old also has autism and epilepsy, all bets are off.

The happy couple didn't waver as the planning process went along. They were quite definite: they wanted both girls in their wedding, even though they of course knew about the autism and the epilepsy. No, they didn't mind if I walked down the aisle next to Joy to keep things on track. And whatever happened, they assured us, it would be cute and make a good story.

Perhaps you can tell already that AuntLO was the ultimate UN-Bridezilla. We had such fun together figuring out dresses for both girls to coordinate with her ivory & burgundy wedding color-scheme, while simultaneously trying not to break the bank.

It's a rare late-October day in Chicago that comes in with a clear blue sky and over 70 degrees, but that's what they got for their wedding day on October 20 last year:


We had a couple hours drive to get to the church, and Joy did have a pretty big seizure at one point along the way, but we were hopeful that she'd be feeling fairly well recovered by the time we got there and got her all dressed up. (The Oct. 2007 trip to Chicago was one point in our data gathering that, up until this October, travel seemed to trigger seizures.)

Then she had another sizable seizure just as we were walking up to the church. Arghhh! Despite her obvious unhappiness, we went ahead and got both girls dressed up in the church bathroom, and got their lovely little baskets of rose petals, and hoped for the best...

And then while the processional music was playing and we were waiting our turn to walk in, she had another one.

The poor kid. I tried to walk in with her anyway, thinking that maybe she'd be so stunned that she'd just start moving forward and keep going.

Rose flower-girled like a pro, walking slowly and regally and strewing rose-petals "just so" (she'd been reading the Kevin Henkes book Lilly's Big Day for good practice!)

Joy took three steps with me, a little in front of me. Then she flung her petal basket in one direction and went running in the other, between a couple of empty pews. All she wanted to do was escape.

I pursued my sweet baby, picked her up, cuddled her the rest of the way up to the front of the church, circled around and pretty much immediately carried her back down the other aisle out the back of the church -- to await the incipient misery and fuss that always follows soon after a big seizure.

The beautiful old Catholic church building in that old Chicago neighborhood did not, of course, have a cry room. That wasn't on anyone's radar back when the church was built (heck, the term "radar" wasn't even coined until the 1940s!)

Fortunately there was a lovely little fenced grassy yard and garden at the back of the church, and it was so warm we didn't even need a wrap. I followed Joy around, trying to keep her safe through the worst of her reaction until she was a little calmer, and then we snuck back in to grab my purse and brought Rose out as well -- turned out that the full-fledged wedding mass was getting too long for her. So I snapped some photos. Here's Joy:


There was a statue of St. Francis in the middle of the little lawn, about the same height as Joy and shorter than Rose!


I won't post any of the official photographer's shots, from after the ceremony. Not only are they all from the front, Joy doesn't do well with posed photos and wasn't in a particularly cooperative mood.

AuntLO and UncleDO, though, were over the moon. We were so delighted to share in their joy, and touched beyond belief at their insistence on including Joy in their celebration.

Afterwards we discovered in conversations with other guests that, if we didn't tell them about Joy's seizure, they just assumed that she was having a three-year-old moment there in the aisle at the ceremony. Just like any kid might do.

It was cute, and made a good story.

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As part of "and they're living happily ever after," I'd like to mention that AuntLO and UncleDO came to visit us last month. We had a wonderful time, including a family walk by the lake and a restaurant dinner. Here's Rose feeding the ducks during our walk:


We're grateful beyond words for our amazing supportive family. Happy first anniversary, AuntLO and UncleDO. We love you guys!