Backwards Motion

It's been a tough week. Power outages, Mamapop outages, booze outages, oh my. 

And then there's Noah.

Noah...well. Noah has not been receiving any real occupational therapy since school ended, and it's showing. It's showing HARD. 

He's a ball of tics, all of a sudden. A ball of walking, wiggling, finger-chewing, repetitive stimming behaviors. He speaks in scripts, he lives in rituals. He doesn't walk, he runs, while shaking his limbs and making vibrating-like noises with his mouth while every person in the area turns to stare because what the...? Ice cream is too cold, macaroni and cheese is too slimy, using a fork is too hard. He hums and squints and worries about everything. Last night he clapped his hands over his ears when I reached for the faucet because it was all too loud, TOO LOUD. 

He doesn't look me in the eye, anymore. His eyes stare somewhere off in the distance, right above my head. I repeat requests and questions to him, over and over again, before finally shouting his name to get his attention. He snaps back from outer space and seems surprised that I'm even there. 

"What?" he asks.

At camp, he's not participating as much as he used to, choosing instead to escape the group and spend his time doing laps of that strange wiggling-stim-run around the classroom over and over. Any emotional outburst from another child drives him up the wall. He begs to go to the OT room, a request the understaffed room can only occasionally grant, and even then, it's not the same without his therapist there pushing him, giving him what he needs in addition to want he wants. (Which is: Tire swing, all the damn time.) We sent him to the speech-focused camp simply because that's the one we had insurance approval for. Bad call, in retrospect, but...well, there's no rewind button on these things.

We're appealing our insurance's rejection of his OT sessions, of course. We have one more appeal -- this is our third, and we're doing it with help from Jason's company's insurance broker -- and then we get to file a complaint with the state and force yet another review and appeal.

A review and appeal for services Noah received in DECEMBER, by the way. If we're lucky, they'll approve our request for coverage through last...February? March, maybe? Then the process starts all over again, for the next approval of an extension of coverage for therapy that ALREADY HAPPENED. Now that it's obvious that Noah still desperately needs regular OT sessions, I'm guessing we'll be finishing up the appeals process sometime in 2032. 

(Insert crazy back-of-the-throat GAAAHZZZPPPBBBTT sound and a good head-smash against the wall)

I realize, though, that we are lucky -- at least we know what the problem is. We know what's missing and we know how to help. We can pay out of pocket, since the school district program is mostly concerned with his fine-motor skills and not so much the other havoc that dyspraxia wreaks on the rest of his body. It's just...so tough to see some of that hard-fought, so-throughly-documented-just-a-few-months-ago progress go away, but at least we saw it in the first place. He can do it, and so can we. Even Noah knows. He begs me every day when I pick him up from camp: I want to go to OT. I WANT TO GO TO OT. 

I know. And dammit, you're going to go to OT. 

53 Hours

We went to the mall on Sunday, mostly because it was officially Too Damn Hot For Life outside and had run out of other indoor time-killing options. Life lesson time, boys: If you get bored, just go somewhere and buy shit you don't need for awhile.

Anyway. The lights flickered once. Twice. We decided to leave, let the power go out and lead to mass looting at Build-a-Bear. We noticed it was raining really hard through the skylights, but by the time we got outside the sun was shining again.  

The only evidence that a tornado had touched down nearby was...well, there were a lot of leaves all over the ground.

Oh. And shit like this:

 

That brownish...thing? That's the underside of a really big tree that just up and fell over. It peeled off a nice layer of the earth's crust and mantle on its way down, and yes I said MANTLE because BOO-YAH GEOLOGY 101. Preparing me for moments like this and not much else.  

(My drive-by cell-phone photography skillz: YOU LOVE THEM.)

Not surprisingly, we lost power as a result of the storm. As did over 300,000 other homes in our area, which I swear is like, an actual high-density area where actual real people live and work and DVR their favorite TV shows and poop using fancy modern indoor plumbing, as opposed to McHillbillyville, USA or something. I get the sense that Pepco power lines are held together by little more than popsicle sticks and electrical tape and chewed-up gum from all the third-party contractors they hire EVERY TIME we get one of these huge county-wide outages, and each repair leaves everything a bit more rickety and outage-prone than it was in the first place. 

Last time it took 84 hours for our power to be restored. This time we only lost power for about 53 hours. Fifty-three! That's nothing! And the temperatures during the day were only about 90, 91 degrees tops. I don't even see the point in blogging about any of it. What do you take me for, some kind of whiny brat urbanite with no coping skills, or something? 

(DON'T ANSWER THAT.)

Unlike the winter outage, this one at least wasn't...scary, like we all going to contract pneumonia and then get into a terrible car accident when we try to drive to the hospital for medicine for our pneumonia because our fingers fell off from frostbite already scary. This outage was mostly boring and sweaty.

Noah: Mommy, can I watch a show?

Amy: No, sweetie, there's no power, remember?

Noah: Okay. I will watch a DVD instead.

Amy: Um, can't do that either, bud. 

Noah: Okay. How about...the Star Wars game?

Amy: New rule of thumb, Noah. If something 1) lights up, 2) has buttons, or 3) is at all possibly remotely fun, it requires power, and you can't do it right now. 

Noah: Okay. Can I play with your phone?

(And yet, just a few hours later, after the boys were in bed and Jason and I prepared to watch a DVD on his charged-at-work laptop, I totally went I KNOW! We can still catch the Mad Men premiere! You just have to rent it on iTunes or something! Why don't you do that? What? Oh. Right. Never mind. Yeah, we can just watch Idiocracy again, I guess.)

I kept trying to get work done at the coffeeshops and such, but so did everyone else from the 300,000+ powerless households. On Monday I drove to Jodi's house to bask in her recently-restored electricity, only to have it go out again after an hour and a half ("HAAAAA SO LONG SUCKER," I cackled as I left, gaining strength for future evil superdeeds from her misfortune). 

On Tuesday I brought a big-ass wall outlet splitter with me and very politely asked a woman hogging an entire precious outlet with both her laptop and cell phone if she minded if we expanded the outlet's use for everybody, and...actually, it turned out she DID mind, a little bit, as she testily informed me that Panera had "a lot of other outlets" so she "didn't see the point" in using the splitter. When I mentioned that the plugs were actually all full and a bit more in demand than usual because of the power outages, she was like, "power outawhah?" but finally unplugged her shit for 10 measly seconds, then purposely replugged everything in so her chargers covered up more than one plug, just so no one else could use them. I did not like that lady, very much, and thought to myself that she deserved to get blogged about. So. There. 

(Our power came back on last night, but I brought the splitter again today because there are still thousands of people still waiting for theirs. I was heralded as the Smartest, Nicest Person Ever. Which is MORE LIKE IT, INGRATES.)

Anyway. What the outage lacked in DRAMAZZZ, though, it certainly made up in DOLLAH BILLZ, because this is the current state of our once-packed freezer:

 

Okay, for dinner tonight, your menu choices are grated cheddar cheese, some fancy farmers' market flour that you have to keep in the freezer for some reason, a plastic ice pack and those weird flaxseed/spelt waffles that nobody likes. 

This Damned House

(I wrote -- and intended to publish -- this entry on Friday, but Vimeo was taking FOREVER to do whatever technogidgetgabble it does to videos and I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for it and then I got bored and decided to bump this post to today. Which is why I am not bitching about HAVING NO POWER AGAIN, thanks to a fucking TORNADO, like WHAT THE HELL, first a tiny earthquake and now a tornado and I swear to God, there better not be a mildly-inconveniencing volcano next week that like, singes and ruins everybody's hair before BlogHer or something gaaaaah.)

A couple months ago, in a burst of GREATEST MOTHER EVER-fueled delusion, I came across this printable craft thing on Disney's website: a 3D paper version of the house from UP. 

Why would this particular papercraft make me the GREATEST MOTHER EVER? Oh. Oh ho ho ho.

Exhibit A:

So yeah. Noah kind of loves the house from UP. He adores it. He builds version after version out of Legos and Duplos and one day we came home from camp to find that the babysitter had cut his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich into the shape of a house, complete with a little door and chimney, and Noah screamed like it was the Virgin Mary appearing in a bowl of tomato soup. 

Of course, the house from UP is not available in a handy and overpriced plastic version. (You know I checked. A lot.) This little cardboard cut-out version was the closest thing I'd ever seen to an actual, playable house-from-UP toy. And all I needed was a printer!

And...well, some cardstock. Where the hell do you buy cardstock? What is cardstock? Do they sell it at Target? Do I have to go to a craft store? 

(Note: The last time I went to the craft store was when I was in search of a large decorative jingle bell and leather ribbon that sort-of resembled the one in Polar Express, because if there is an obscure prop from a not-widely merchandised children's movie you can bet fine cash money that my child will become completely, utterly obsessed with it.)

But I found and purchased some cardstock. Then I realized the instructions mention a craft knife, which I did not have, but what the hell, I bet the kitchen scissors will work okay. And glue. Surely we already have glue? 

We did not, as it turned out, have any glue other than an ancient bottle of super-adhesive Gorilla Glue, which I was pretty sure is not the ideal choice for this sort of thing, but it was too late, Noah had spotted the print-outs in front of me and was already well into a shit-losing fit of anticipation.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I spent four and a half fucking hours building that house. I spent an hour alone just cutting all the pieces and the insufferable little tabs out. I glued two of my fingers together and lost layers of skin from pretty much all of them. I ultimately ended up reinforcing the insides of that motherfucker with Scotch Tape. It was the most lopsided, pathetic little house you have ever seen.

Noah loved it.

For 15 minutes, anyway, which is how long it took Ezra to get his hands on it and crush it like a balled-up TPS report.

Noah was inconsolable. So I promised to make him another house, just as soon as I procured some better glue. 

The next house was made with Elmer's glue and while I got the construction time down to an even two hours, I was still unable to get the front and back wings of the house to line up properly. That house lasted a few days, at least, before Jason's uncle unwittingly placed it within Ezra's reach and he decided to suck on the chimney for awhile.

By the time I made the third house, I'd upgraded to a deadly-serious pink hobby knife and a special precision-tipped scrapbooker's glue pen, which solved most of the architectural issues but added an hour back onto production time. This house lasted yet another week before Noah insisted on taking it to camp for show & tell. His friends loved it. With a vengeance, unfortunately. Noah was once again despondent, because he'd TRIED to take care of it, he TRIED SO HARD, Mommy, but Miles grabbed it during snack and decided to make it fly and then it fell and the one side is all dented and GRUINED, MOMMY. MY HOUSE IS ALL GRUINED.

And then, with honest-to-God tears in his eyes: Please make me another Carl's House, Mommy. Please.

*sighs*

*looks wistfully out the window at beautiful sunny afternoon*

*loads up the last of the cardstock into the printer*

 

See y'all in a few hours, I guess. This one better be the best one yet.
 

Watch Out, Kobayashi

Or Joey Chestnut, or whoever else out there would like to challenge my toddler to a cupcake-eating contest. 

Child has the cheek capacity of several dozen frosting-crazed squirrels. I SWEAR.

But They're a LIMITED EDITION!

Jason: Here, I got you something.

Amy: YAY I LIKE THINGS.

Amy: (pulls package from shopping bag)

Amy: What the fuck?

Jason: (cackles)

Amy: Jean diapers. You actually bought a pack of THE JEAN DIAPERS.

Jason: You know, for your blog.

Amy: (thinks)

Amy: I get the sense that this could be one of those moments that Ezra will one day point to and say "THAT. RIGHT THERE. IS WHERE SHIT GOT MESSED UP."

Jason: (thinks)

Jason: Maybe. 

Amy: (pulls ridiculous jean-patterned diaper from package)

Amy: OMG THEY HAVE A FAKE ZIPPER FLY ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

Jason: AND POCKETS. DID YOU SEE THE FAKE POCKETS.

Amy & Jason: HA HA HA HA HA.

Amy: We're total cloth diaper snobs now, aren't we?

Jason: Yep. I'll go get the baby.

 

(For the record, Ezra: While the gimmicky diaper was ALL YOUR FATHER'S IDEA, please note that you cannot blame us for your choice of footwear, as the knock-off Crocs are all you. As in, you dug them out of a box of hand-me-downs, put them on all by yourself, and now scream and tantrum if we ever try to take them off or suggest you wear anything else. Last night you tried to wear them to bed.) 

(Don't look at me like that.) 

 

(HEE!)

For Anyone Considering a Second Child

1) One day YOU will be the asshole attempting to maneuver this giant-ass thing around the Home Depot aisles:

 

You go ahead and buy a plunger and some new toilet parts -- nobody can see past the bright orange death of your dignity anyway.

 

(Bonus negative 4,000 points for the matching shoes.)

2) This, constantly:

3) Sometimes, yes, you do get moments like this:

 

But they will always, ALWAYS be immediately followed by moments like this:

 

4) The reason your mother probably said "SOMEBODY IS GOING TO GET HURT!" several dozen times a day is because SOMEBODY IS TOTALLY REALLY GOING TO GET HURT I MEAN IT YOU GUYS STOP THAT.

5) And even, when there is this:

 

It doesn't change the fact that the uncropped version will always, ALWAYS look like this:

I Have Clear Priorities Even In My Sleep

THINGS THAT WOKE ME UP LAST NIGHT:

1) My husband snoring at 12:17 am.

2) A mislabeled calendar reminder making my phone vibrate on the nightstand at 3:00 am instead of pm, which then kept me up another hour because I had to think about OMG THAT THING I HAVE TO DO AT 3:00 PM over and over again.

3) My dog puking at 6:12 am.

THINGS THAT DID NOT WAKE ME UP LAST NIGHT:

1) The 3.4 magnitude earthquake at 5:04 am. Was it fun?

Skater Boy

 

(Clearly having the time of his life here. In fact, I had to BRIBE HIM with a promise of playing a game on my iPhone in exchange for 30 stupid minutes of playing outside. It is a little hot out there today, I'll give him that, but seriously, child. Could you possibly look more miserable?)

 

(I'll take that as a yes.)

THRILLING UPDATE: I'm Still Awake

Who needs sleep? Apparently: ALL OF US. Heavens, but we are a sleep-deprived bunch.

I have a confession: After I wrote yesterday's entry, I was secretly sort-of sure that last night would be different, and that I'd make it through the night without waking. Because! Of course it would! I WHINED TO THE INTERNET ABOUT MY PROBLEMS. That's usually a one-way ticket to a mea culpa the next day about "oh hey! never mind about that thing after all, all good now." 

Ha. Yeah. No.

Instead, because I'd been soooooooo emphatic and smug-ass confident that falling asleep "wasn't the problem," I was awake and wild-eyed until well after midnight. I woke up at 4:30, fell back asleep around 6:15 or so, only to wake up 15 minutes later because the cat decided it was time for a snuggle. I DID NOT PARTICULARLY AGREE.

But seriously, THANK YOU for all your comments and sleep aid ideas. I am definitely going to try several that came up the most (melatonin, tryptophan, anxiety/task lists), possibly see a sleep specialist that local reader Allyson recommended, and I will report back. I know! Sit back down! You're going to sprain something from all this excitement and anticipation.

(My mom emailed me yesterday too, and said "PLEASE be careful about Ambien," which in My Mom's Speak is pretty much the equivalent of me screaming at you guys in all caps and adding lots of OMGWTFBBQ!!!!ONE!!1!!s at the end. It's just how she is. Turns out both she and my dad have taken it at different times, and both of them experienced all the crazy sleep-walking and furniture over-turning and memory-loss stuff you hear about. AND had a really hard time sleeping without it, even after just a couple nights. So...I don't think so, especially since prescription medications and I have not exactly been a great combination in the past. [I'm always the patient who gets that one weird less-than-2%-of-users side effect, like the time I tried the birth control shot and spent the next 72 hours walking into walls and tripping over microscopic cracks in the floor.} Although the idea of like, sleeping and organizing the basement at the same time sounds pretty cool. I'm guessing I wouldn't do anything productive though. I'd probably just pull clothes out of my closet for awhile and then go outside to hurl juice boxes at cars.)

(No, I don't know why I made that whole thing a parenthetical. I tend to do that more when I don't really have a firm grasp on what I plan to write about, and start interrupting myself with random thoughts.)

(And then I feel the need to explain myself, like that. And like this.)

(And again!)

(OH LORDY IT'S GONE OFF THE RAILS NOW.)

(WE PROBABLY ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.)

In summary, I am still tired, but grateful for a fresh list of suggestions. Although it's a shame that "more chocolate pudding cups" wasn't one of them. Although I'd like to see anybody try and let that stop me. 

Who Needs Sleep

backfromthebeachomgzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Everywhere I go today, I am stepping over laundry baskets and suitcases. I think they are reproducing, like tribbles. We didn't take that many suitcases to the beach in the first place, did we? So why are there so many damn suitcases now? Suitcases. Suitcases! 

I haven't been sleeping very well. And I think it might be starting to show. 

Going to sleep is no problem. Not even a little bit. Staying asleep, though, is impossible. I wake up every night around 3 a.m., like clockwork, sometimes even shaking myself awake in the middle of a dream for no discernible reason. And while I used to be able to roll over and go back to sleep, more or less, now my brain clicks on within seconds, all "OH CRAP NOT AGAIN I'M AWAKE QUICK DON'T START THINKING ABOUT THAT THING YOU HAVE TO DO OH DAMN IT ALL TO HELL NOW I'M THINKING ABOUT IT."

And then I start involuntarily composing blog entries and columns and emails or maybe just trying to remember if Mel Gibson actually made any movies I'll miss now that he's...well, YOU KNOW. Do I have a topic for Cafemom this week? What about topic number 4,234,209 for AlphaMom? And Jesus, my own blog, has anything remotely funny happened? Should I scan something? Post a video? What's that noise? Oh my God, I have to email her! Did I reply to that thing? Do I have to pee? Do I really have to pee or just maybe a little and it's not worth getting up for because then I won't be able to get back to sleep and what's that noise and oh  I know I'll sing 99 Bottles of Beer On the Wall to myself like this 99 bottles of oh I know I should post that video of Ezra banging on the crabs with a mallet at the restaurant because that was pretty funny 98 bottles of beer on the wall...

And. So on and so forth, for at least a couple hours, Sometimes I'll fall back asleep, about a half hour before I need to get up anyway. Sometimes I'll get up and try to get some work done, though not surprisingly the few things I've managed to produce at that hour have never, ever actually seen the light of the publish button. (Probably because they resembled the paragraph right above this one, only with a lot more typos and EVEN LESS PUNCTUATION IF YOU CAN EVEN IMAGINE THAT IS POSSIBLE.)

Most of the time, I just lay there, trying to shut my head up and go back to sleep, preferably with the least amount of tossing and turning, since I've started waking Jason up a lot during these fits. He's always sympathetic, but also a zero-to-wide-awake sort of sleeper. If I wake him up, he's up for good too, heading into the office at 5 in the morning while I stubbornly stay put because DAMMIT, SLEEP! SLEEP!

(SLEEP: What, you think you can caps-lock your way into a nap or something? I don't think so, hooker.)

 

Things I've tried: chamomile tea, herbal sleep aids from Whole Foods, different vitamins, Tylenol PM and Unisom, all which seem to be more for the not-a-problem-for-me FALLING asleep, but do nothing for the staying asleep. Our mattress is fantastic and our pillows seem fine. I took long runs at night, then in the morning. No TV before bed. Some TV. Leaving the TV on. Early bedtime, late bedtime. White noise, ear plugs, sleep masks. Covers. No covers. Wine. No wine. Zero caffeine after 2 pm, then 12 pm, then down to ONE MEASLY CUP first thing in the morning which I am sorry, if you take that away from me I will very literally die and then come back to life and kill you too.

This has been going on for six months now. Six months of maybe three or four good hours of sleep a night, and I've always been a girl who needs eight.  And I've hit the wall, and hard. Some days I'm so tired that by lunchtime I literally have nothing left to give anyone -- forget phone calls or big work decisions or taking everyone to the park, I can't even muster up the energy for Facebook, or anything other than standing slackjawed in front of the microwave, wondering why the hell the inside thing isn't doing that...what do you call it...spinning...whirling...thing, only to realize I never hit the Start button. Ah. Yes. That. 

Over vacation I found myself actually reading a magazine ad for Ambien, even though I know I'd be too terrified to ever actually take it. (Continuing down my list of Top All-Time Irrational Fears: 1) Volcanoes, 2) Getting framed and/or wrongfully convicted of murder, 3) ripping my earlobe in half, and 4) getting tricked into ingesting hardcore drugs like meth or oxycontin and getting instantly addicted and living my life in the gutter or in jail with Lindsay Lohan.) 

Still. My kids sleep through the night perfectly and I seem to have completely forgotten how to do it myself. Halp? Plz?