and not the ones you are thinking of either.  But they just might mean the same thing, and I can assure you that they were in no way scripted or compulsory.  So maybe this is even better?

I felt well enough to venture out of the house today.  We had Occupational Therapy in the morning anyway and Chuck E. Cheese’s has become our Sunday ritual of late, so I figured why not – that’s probably where I got this funk – and anyway, I have $350 buckaroos of “medical care” to back me up so I’m damned sure I’m not contagious anymore.

Right, so I totally kicked ass at Skee-ball.  Why it’s not an Olympic sport I don’t know, I mean if Curling and Ping Pong can make it in…all I’m sayin’ is it should be considered at least.  T hit the jackpot on the “Deal or No Deal” game.  We had mad tickets.  We ate our weight (well, I wouldn’t know because I have banished the scale in favor of the “sweatpants test”) in bad pizza, and T thought it was a good idea to get buffalo wings, at Chuck E. Cheese’s, in North Carolina.  Shudder.

I digress.

The boy was there too!  While T and I ran around like insatiable crack heads looking for our next hit of tickets he happily played with his grandparents.  I tried to impart my Skee-ball wisdom upon him but (just between us) he throws like a girl.

It was fun to rediscover the art of play.  We don’t play nearly as much as we should.  It’s invigorating and liberating and kind of gleeful to let go of the stifling heaviness of the grown up world.

I had such a great time, that I almost forgot that it cost FORTY-FREAKING-DOLLARS.  I also decided not to complain to management about them not having “Whack-a-Mole” anymore.  The boy left with an armful of crappy toys and a “comped” bag of Cotton Candy (which I ate for him; it’s not good for the little one’s teeth you know).  He was only momentarily upset by the fact that we wouldn’t let him get the Gingerbread Man prize.

He went back to Mama and Papa’s house, his favorite place in the world.  Probably because his favorite people in the world live there.  He has such a special relationship with them.  Probably because they do silly things like drawing third “eyes” on themselves, and bake cupcakes with him and watch hours of Sesame Street videos on You Tube.  They’re awesome like that.

Still, when I went to pick him up, he didn’t make a big fuss.  So either he’s resided himself to the inevitability that he must go “home” at some point, or I got some serious mileage out of Taco Night.

We came home, played Sesame Street house for a bit, did bath time, and then we did some reading.

Now that we are in the big boy bed it takes a bit longer for P to get to sleep.  It’s exciting having all that freedom and what not, I get it.  I lay with him and we play “once upon a time”, which is basically me recounting stories to him about when he was smaller.  He loves the “once upon a time” about Mommy and Daddy having a big party and Mommy wearing a whiteish dress and eating Lobster Ravioli.

Bedtime is insanely time consuming.  It’s seriously like a two hour affair, but I absolutely cherish it.  It’s something that is solely “ours”.  At bedtime, Mommy is the coolest person ever, and I’ll gladly DVR American Idol for that.

Tonight, I laid with him for about ten minutes after he fell silent: the slow, heavy, rhythmic sound of his breathe leaving me paralyzed in a state of peace that I could never describe in mere words.

I rose to ever-so-quietly sneak out…

I had my hand on the door handle when I heard the most deliberate whisper of “three little words”.

“Stay here, Mom”.

And I did.

…the caregiver becomes the patient…

I have been pummeled by a virulent case of Strep throat this week.  I literally was unable to leave the bed for 36 hours.  I finally dragged myself to Urgent Care last night and got a script for antibiotics.

I’m not even 50% yet, but starting to believe there is a light at the end of this really painful and debilitating tunnel.

Daddy stayed home with the boy yesterday and did all the domestic tasks while I slept and watched really bad reality television on VH1.  P insisted upon periodically coming upstairs to lay with me “for just a little bit, Daaad”.

Once, he caught me crying (I was really pathetic) and said:

“Don’t cry your eyes, Mommy.  No, no, no!  Okay, I will kiss and make it all better.  Be happy, Mommy.”

He kissed me on the forehead and wouldn’t you know;  It really was all better…

I’m a bit high right now.  It’s not nearly as sordid as you might think.  I bought myself a laminator for Christmas so that I could be a good mom and do schedule cards and folder tasks for P without having to bug my friends at TEACCH to use theirs do it for me.  That and it was one of those impulse “deal of the day” buys on eBay.

Let me tell you though, this thing rivals the best of dry erase markers in the party-hearty/positively toxic office supply world.  If it’s weren’t 20ish degrees I’d open the window to stop my eyes from watering.

The point, were there ever really one, is that I made schedule cards for the boy.  I used a different Sesame Street character for each day.  I even had a super cool self-designed border, but my printer and Publisher didn’t agree on “margins” so I gave up.  Besides I was clearly interrupting what was an “epic” raid in World of Warcraft, with my silly parenting duties, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any failzor.

P completes his first week of full inclusion tomorrow.  He’s doing remarkably well by all accounts.  Still has the PTSD with Mommy coming to pick him up.  Apparently one time I picked him up from school and disrupted a favored activity.  Since then he freaks when he sees me.  The schedule cards are meant to prepare him throughout the day for my arrival.  I hope it helps.  I hate seeing him so upset, and it’s kind of an ego-killer to hear him screaming “No want Mommy!  Want Mommy to go to the trash can!”.

Things at home have been less successful.  I think he’s holding it together so well at school that by early afternoon he’s just exhausted.  Yesterday he had a really rough day.  I finally broke down and filmed his meltdown for our behavioral consult on January 25th.  I watched the video several times, bawling until I finally wore myself out early this morning.  I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything worse than seeing my child locked in emotional turmoil and being helpless to make it all better.

Thankfully, today was wonderful.  I’m so amazed at his ability to rally and recover.  Such remarkable strength in a small package.  I’m looking forward to learning some strategies to help him self-regulate.  It seems that whatever I’m doing (which is trying to talk him through, or hold him) is just exacerbating his frustration.   It would appear that instinct doesn’t apply here either.

In other, unrelated, news.  I’ve applied to return to school to complete my B.A. at Chapel Hill’s Journalism school.  It’s nerve wracking to think that I might not get accepted to the program after working in the field for nearly 10 years.  But at the same time, I’ve got to plan for the future.  I won’t always be able to be “solely” Autism Super Mommy.  It’s a wonderful job, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

I’m savoring every moment for now, even the ones that leave me completely wrecked.  It’s a blessing to have been forced to slow down; to have the chance to be here for these crucial early years.

The air is clearing, or I’ve just developed a tolerance.  P is sleeping in his big boy bed, since Sunday, and it’s pretty much the cutest thing ever.  I think I’ll go sit with him for a while, tell him of my hopes and dreams for his life, and how amazing he is.  After all, it’s not that often I have a captive audience.

New Year’s Day is both my favorite and least favorite day of the year.  Aspiring perfectionists like me LOVE a clean slate, a chance to briefly share our neurosis with the world about “starting over” and kind of blend in for a little while.  But it’s also a major brick wall when you realize that at 5 minutes after midnight you’ve already screwed up and the whole year has gone to hell and you’ll have to wait 364 days, 11 hours and 55 minutes to try again.

I cleaned the house top to bottom on the 30th.  One of those cleanings that I only do when a loved one is in labor.  For some reason when I “nested” I sent about 400 work emails, designed 3 months of ads and flyers, and shop-talked on my cell throughout my labor.  The house was still a remarkable dump.  I’ve found an odd phenom in recent years though, whenever a close friend or family member is in labor, I clean like a mad woman.  Unfortunately, my friends refuse to continue to procreate so I can have a burst of energy and clean baseboards every 9.5 months.  Selfish much?

Yet the New Year has an eerily similar effect.  I am a harried mess of superstition and mania in that week between Christmas and New Year’s eve.  So on the 30th, Peter hung with his favorite posy (Mama and Papa) and I cleaned with fury.  I even painted the baseboards and all of the doors.  Then at midnight I painted the cabinets too, in only a bra and underwear, and with the wrong “sheen” (???) or whatever, cementing the fact that I was truly a crazy woman and should’ve retired at least six hours earlier.

I couldn’t move on the 31st.  Even my hair hurt.  I also couldn’t stay up until midnight, so Gus and I drank some sparkling (shudder) sugar water grape juice, did the countdown, threw a bucket of water out the back door while wearing red underwear and doing the hokey pokey and I was fast asleep by 20:15.

My resolutions were:

• Exercise Daily (broken)
• Eat organically and vegan, only (soooooo broken)
• Lose the 20 lbs I gained since last summer (cough, cough, yeah right!)
• Keep the house in order by tidying up each evening (broken)
• Be the perfect wife (BROKEN), daughter (BROKEN), friend (BROKEN), and mother (BROKEN)

This is why the New Year holiday is so torturous for wannabe perfectionistas like myself.  A big, huge, hurrah about new beginnings and an even bigger fall to defeat.

So I decided that perhaps my resolution should just be to love myself as I am, and stop trying to be everything to everyone.  Oh, and to figure out my bank’s online bill pay.

Yesterday our little family went to the mall for pizza.  P had been complaining about his ear on and off for a few days.  It seemed fine, but he’d start screaming about how he needs to buy a new one (oh were it that easy, dear child) and how he only has one ear.  I had put up a photo of him from a few years ago where he is facing somewhat sideways.  It’s a black and white photo.  You can’t see his left ear very well due to the angle.  Apparently this was really disturbing, and compounding upon all the past ear trauma, we think the current ear freakouts are mostly psychosomatic.  We thought a change of scenery was in order.

At the mall I suddenly became extremely emotional and overwrought.  I was feeding P his pizza and thinking over and over in my head – “This year he’ll be FOUR.  Not a baby anymore.  Oh my god, he’s getting too big too fast.”  It didn’t help that there was a newborn about 10 feet away, I imagine.  I became inconsolable while Gus was off getting his food and had myself a proper New Year’s anxiety attack.

I couldn’t reconcile that my one and only child was becoming more and more independent by the day.  And no, the irony is not lost on me that this is exactly what we’ve been working so hard for, but it was not a moment of reason – it was a moment of sheer and utter panic and loss.

My baby, the one who has needed me so much, but so rarely showed that he “wanted” me.  The infant that I couldn’t hold and sooth, that found solace not in my arms but elsewhere.  The baby that I feel I just found – is slipping into the world of a big boy.  I can’t help but feel robbed.  I just barely had the chance to experience something akin to that kind of bond I was so envious of, and now he’s gone and become a 3.5 year old over night.

While Gus was getting his Greek food, and I was cutting up pieces of pizza and feeding my “little” boy, I cried.  I cried loud and hard.  I drew stares.  I couldn’t breathe.  It was the first panic attack I’ve had in over a year.

And then, as if by some divine provocation, my Autistic toddler saved me from despair.

It went like this:

EB:  “Mommy, you are crying in your eyes.  What a matter, Mommy?”
Me: “It’s okay, P.  Mommy’s just sad because her baby is getting to be such a big boy!”
EB:  <Thoughtful Pause>  “I clean your eyes <wiping my tears>, Mommy.  For you to be happy”

Suddenly, it didn’t matter if he was going to turn four or forty this year.  I knew he’d always be my baby.