Just regular folks.

I was hanging out at Vince’s school this morning – his preschool is on the 4th floor of an office building and after I drop Vince off, I have Edda walk around the corridor which is long and empty and she can toddle around without getting in anyone’s way. Today I was talking to Auntie (all ladies of a certain age are Aunties. I’m an Auntie too which makes me shudder a bit because I like to think of myself as still pre-Auntie. It’s kind of nice, you never have to remember anyone’s name. At Vince’s school, there is the snack Auntie and the potty Auntie and other Aunties who have duties I’m not aware of, perhaps shirt-tucking-in Auntie (I never tuck Vince’s shirt in, but he comes home neater than when he left)) and mentioning that Edda has some autistic tendencies and she was chatting about her neighbor who has a son who is autistic, (everybody I mention autism / mentally retarded to has a nephew, neighbor, son, friend, etc who is autistic or mentally retarded – interesting) and blah, blah, blah, we are chatting away…

Then I realize, I finally get a chance to see Vince in action at school! They usually keep the front door locked and Vince is in a classroom with that door shut – a double barrier between me and my son – but this morning I’m inside the air lock! I tiptoe over to the classroom and look through the glass window to see my little sweetheart. I imagine he’s sweetly singing and clapping to the “Good morning” song. As I look into the door, I see that he has physically grabbed another boy in his class and is hauling this poor boy to another spot in the circle and as he is doing this, he’s telling the teacher that he’s singing the words wrong. Hmmm… This was not in accordance with my fantasy. Next week is parent/teacher conference. I think we’ll hear about this a bit more.

• Ruby is having a sleepover party on Saturday night at a friend’s house! Our dog, our first daughter is having her first slumber party… Well actually, our pet sitter Elaine wants to help us watch Ruby for the month that we are gone from Singapore, but she’s swamped with work and can’t make it out to the boonies here in Choa Chu Kang twice a day. She has a corgi who doesn’t like guests, but Elaine apparently has a pal 10 minutes away from her place who is dog-free right now and is willing to take on Ruby for a month so Elaine can just pop on over for a quick walk. Ruby is going to spend the night for a test run, to make sure that no barking, chewing or unauthorized peeing goes on. Ruby has to be on her best behavior (none of that eating 2 bars of Toblerone or a whole tube of diaper cream and then puking it all up later on carpet the exact opposite color) or else we are totally screwed. Ruby is moving up in the world, hanging out on Orchard Road. Maybe she’ll buy herself a Louis Vuitton wallet (4 outlets within a mile of each other!).
• I finished my mittens for the Olympics! A day late and a dollar short, so I can’t actually collect the cool knitting gold medal, but whatever. Actually, I screwed up on the last row of the mitten and I did it over three times, but in the end I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, so I said, the hell with it and ended my misery and bound-off.
• I pep-talked myself out of a miserable mood at 3 pm today. Jeremy called from work during the miserable mood and he was put on alert, but by the time he got home, I was as chipper as a squirrel. Don’t mess with my acorns.
• I cooked a pound of pork chops today for dinner. Lately, the kids have been just loving the pork chops. Edda likes it minced and mixed with cottage cheese, Vince likes it cut into stripes. The last meal, they were scarfing the chops down so fast that Jeremy and I were nervous about eating any pork, lest the children want more and we would have to deny them because we had selfishly eaten up the rest of the pork. So late last night, I went to the market and by 7:30 pm, the selection had dwindled to almost nothing, all the chops were gone and so I ended up with a pound of shoulder butt (what the hell is that?) and we fried it up with onions tonight and mmmmm, was it good, but the kids ate none of it. None. So more for us and some for Ruby of course.
• It was sunny all day today.
• I had some chocolate cake for lunch and chocolate ice cream for dessert.

When the developmental pediatrician, neurologist and the geneticist all agreed that Edda was significantly delayed in all areas, physically and mentally, I figured, OK, well she’ll probably never learn graduate level fluid dynamics (I never did learn it either – but at least there was a cute guy drinking coffee who always sat in the row behind me), but we’ll start today and slowly teach her how to do everything, first how to walk, next how to walk on grass, next how to climb stairs, next how to run and then, finally, how to dance like Michael Flatley. It was going to be forward – going ahead – making inroads – being the last person in the race (you know, the incredibly stubborn who person spends 24 hours running a marathon because she has no legs, but is dragging herself on a skateboard with her hands…) but at least going forward one step
at a time.

When the geneticist told us which genetic abnormalities they were going to test for, I sat in the doctor’s office and I promised myself that I wouldn’t look up any of the diseases on the internet until the test came back positive for a particular syndrome. Because what’s the use of suffering in advance? But I’m very good at suffering in advance. I love to think about what might happen and then get all stressed about it – on a small scale, it might be worrying about hosting a dinner party for friends and on a large scale, well, it could be the various hideous ways we could all suffer and die, one of which might be in a graduate level fluid dynamics class (low Reynold’s number! scaling arguments, people! Argh, falling over!) Well, I think that promise to myself might have lasted a week? Maybe a week and a half? So now I’ve spent some time looking at some of the various syndromes and basically freaking myself out about what the future might hold for Edda. It turns out that some of these syndromes are degenerative, which means as she gets older, it could get worse. Which, of course, is a bummer for everyone involved.

I don’t want to imply that I’m sad or stressed these days, I’m actually pretty happy. Edda’s walking and becoming steadier on her feet, we are trying to keep her hand out of her mouth because we’ve been noticing that she’s been using it less and less to pick things up and we want to keep the functionality in the hand and I think she’s learning (not to speak, but to understand) a couple words (although I’m always the skeptic). She’s not suffering in any way and so I’m also trying hard not to suffer too much as well.

Whenever things get rough, my favorite thing to do is to find a walk-in closet and camp out there with my down comforter for a few hours. In high school when I was stressed out about a boy or about a test or getting into college, I use to do this late at night with a book while the rest of the house was asleep. When I lived in Austin, there was a wonderful walk-in closet that was exactly the length of my body and I could hang out there and ignore the rest of the world. In Singapore, there are no walk-in closets in my house which I think is a good thing because it makes me resist my depressive tendencies. These days, I’m trying very hard not to spiral out of control emotionally (I don’t want to end up on medication and I don’t think I’ll need to, at least not today) and I’m pretty proud of myself, I’ve been in a good mood all weekend and we’ve been having a lot of fun. I don’t like going to sleep very much at night because I know as soon as I’m asleep, tomorrow will be here and I’m not really sure if I can deal with whatever tomorrow might bring. And when I wake up every morning, I have to give myself a pretty firm pep talk (Doris, it’s going to be a great day, try not to ruin it for everybody else – I usually have to say this to myself a few times – I’m never fully conviced, but I usually try to trick myself into believing it) and usually, it’s a pretty good day. Hooray for Doris!