Author: Doris

Many years ago, when we were first dating, I bought Jeremy a new copper bowl, which, as I recall, was very expensive, but I was in the swoon of new love and I wanted very much to impress him. I bought him a copper bowl because he mentioned to me that a copper bowl is properly used to make beaten egg whites; the copper in the bowl helps stabilize the foamy egg whites (or you can use cream of tartar). And I thought it was the perfect gift – a combination of chemistry and cooking, both things which Jeremy liked.

We’ve owned this bowl for about 14.5 years and we’ve used it maybe 4 or 5 times. This is what I consider a very poor return on my investment (but we did get married, so maybe the return on investment is just fine). Turns out Jeremy hates making cakes in which the eggs have to be separated and beaten. Jeremy is usually not adverse to making complex baking recipes, so this admission surprised me.

I also found out about 4 weeks ago that Jeremy does not actually like salad very much (we usually have salad 3-4 times a week! for 15 years!). Who is this mystery man that I’m married to? Maybe tomorrow I will learn that he’s actually a huge college football fan. Will the surprises never end?

An unscheduled Saturday that was (and perhaps still is) headed towards disaster. We all love each other, but an aimless weekend day together sometimes sends us into fits of bickering. So we needed to get out of the house. Headed to the local ice cream parlor and then the adjacent park. It was not an entirely satisfying excursion. We came in grumpy and left grumpy. But we all had some ice cream, so maybe I should count it as a success,

Ruby says – I’m cute! Give me some ice cream!

Jeremy is covered in hives. After he gets any sort of cold, as he’s recovering, his whole body turns into one big itchy swollen hive. It’s getting worse now, he wasn’t even really that sick this time, at least not enough to tell me and this is day 3 of the post-sickness hive reaction. Poor guy.

I haven’t been in the mood to take photos. I’m not really sure why except for the fact that I’ve really been busy. So no photos today. I have been searching all day for the perfect snack. I have not been able to figure out what it is…

Vince is so odd to me sometimes, he’s so much more social than either me or Jeremy. This weekend, he’s planning, pretty much on his own, his own party (with a theme: Lego) for 3 or 4 pals. He has activities planned, lunch planned, things that both Jeremy and I are suppose to do for the party; the first of which was to email the invites. Last night, we sent out the emails and we got all these replys which indicated that the parents had already heard about the party via their own kids’ excitement from Vince’s own hype during school that day.

Edda has been sleeping better these days, I think the Prevacid has been helping, especially with the falling asleep part. And her gut seems to be moving smoothly. I’ve been encouraged by her improvement to reach out and grasp something this year, I’m wondering if I should try and help her relearn how to finger feed. That would be a biggie.

Ruby passed her off-leash test in our fair city last weekend. Jeremy bragged that she was the best of the bunch. I think she got some BBQ as a reward for passing the 2nd year in a row!

I am still a little wound up today, I’m trying to dial down my anxiety a notch. It’s mainly about work, but I’m also trying to diet to lose the 5-7 pounds that make my pants too tight and the diet compounds the anxiety. It feels like I haven’t really left the house since Monday and I get a little twitchy if I’m in the house too much.

It’s not really true that I haven’t left the house, I went to Edda’s IEP meeting which was really just a formality to add the eye-gaze computer stuff to next year’s IEP goals. We gathered Edda’s teacher, the AAC person from the county, the principal and assistant principal of the school and a reading specialist and me at the meeting which was held in the principal’s office. A little surprised to have all these people there – of course, the principal had never heard of eye-gaze communicators, she runs a school of 500 typical kids and maybe 8 or 10 special needs kids, so it was fun explaining it to her. The principal is a hoot, I had never met her before this particular IEP meeting, very fun and engaging and extremely supportive of everything that goes on in Edda’s classroom and also encourages a lot of mixing back and forth between the typical classrooms and the special needs classrooms.

I’m very excited to tell you that RSRT has somehow managed to get their hands on a YAZ plaque signed by Vince Clarke and are auctioning it off to raise funds for research on Rett. I’m a huge Erasure fan, how do you think we decided on Vince’s name? (just kidding!) Bidding is over $1000, pretty impressive. Ahh, memories of 1988! I wish we could have gotten our hands on Obama’s old car..

I have been running around like crazy this week. I’m a little overwhelmed. Work is crazy for both Jeremy and me. Kids have lots of activities. Blah, blah, blah.

Jeremy did a wonderful thing for me for Mother’s Day – he took my desk and tried to hide all the cords! This is what it looked like before (I don’t have after pictures right now)…

Vince learned how to cast a fishing rod. No fish were caught.

We introduced Vince to Jiffy Pop:

S’mores:

A camping essential – checking one’s Blackberry:

Sleeping in a tent.

Morning hike:

Right after hip hop, we went camping! We went to Greenbriar State Park which has a little man made beach along a lake. Edda’s favorite part of camping was this little beach front. All the other parts of camping, Edda is not really a fan of.

Went to Vince’s hip hop performance this weekend. That boy likes to perform. We signed Vince up for this particular dance class because my neighbor is the dance director at this school and her own boys were taking this class and Vince really likes to get his groove on. My neighbor (who has 3 kids, one who is itty-bitty) did perform in some of the hip hop dances and she was AMAZING! Makes me want to sign up to dance hip hop!

Take a bow!

This was the first time we took Edda to a sit-down performance. As opposed to a play or a classical music performance or even a movie, I thought Edda could be a little noisy and it wouldn’t matter so much. We brought along an iTouch loaded with her favorite videos. She started out asleep

we made it through the show!

Jeremy was in Minneapolis this week for work. The photos are his.

Edda’s eating and sleeping better these days. We are reading the Tale of Despereaux together.

I felt guilty this week because I wasn’t able to make the IRSF congressional testimony on Wed the 12th. I had this elaborate plan to make it downtown with Edda to make the 2pm – 5:30 pm testimony, but with Jeremy traveling and the tile guy in the house all day – I just couldn’t make it happen. Oh well.

Vince was doing homework this morning (last minute, of course). Ten spelling words. Write a sentence for each word. Spent a lot of time trying to figure out ten three-word sentences.

I went to Edda’s school today for Play Day (i.e. Field Day w/o the competition part)! Actually, I only had time to go in for lunch, so I missed all games in the morning. Edda had a nice time running around and playing with all the K-2 kids (I saw the photos!). When I got there, I saw a couple of very wet dad volunteers who had signed up to get soaked with garden hoses by the kids; since it was only about 55 F degrees today, they wore raincoats and rain pants and gamely got sprayed endlessly by small children. Nice.

I know I’ve said before that visiting Edda’s school always seems bittersweet for me, but not this time. I had a BLAST! There were a few 5th grade volunteers who helped out during the morning games.

I got to order lunch from the cafeteria, the infamous, Chips Ole. I miss the school lunches of my youth – where you got a real tray with separate compartments and nothing was packaged. Oh well.

I had a blast because all the kids made me smile. I struggled a lot with Edda’s kindergarten placement as I know lots of parents do, but Edda’s classroom is so full of love, fun, wackiness and great kids, it was nice to get to hang out today with them. Edda is in a self-contained special needs classroom, but all during lunch, kids from the typical classroom filtered in and out (kids who had signed up on some sign up sheet), bringing cupcakes for a birthday celebration, dancing the Cotton Eye Joe, laughing at the McDonald’s filet o fish song and holding everyone’s hands and laughing and laughing. (Yes, Edda was asleep during the first 10 minutes of lunch…)

When I see these typical kids giving up their recess to hang out with a bunch of special needs kids, I get all verklepmt. I hope their mothers know how much their children mean to Edda and me!