The Zoo, Part 2

The kids all had a great time at the zoo, as evidenced by my rockin' photography skills below, but I wanted to share something that happened with one of the workers there.

One of the women who works at the zoo came and tried to cheer Starling up. Starling was bored and probably a bit hungry and we were waiting and being boring. The woman got Starling in a good mood again and started talking to the other kids. Rejeanne ignored her, of course, and I felt the need to say she's autistic lest anyone think she's just rude or something. Someday maybe I won't feel the need to do this.

What happened next might really freak a few people out, but it made me a bit homesick and thankful. This woman just touched Rejeanne really quick and prayed over her in good ol' black church fashion. God bless that dear lady for asking the Lord to let my child speak and be the queen her name stands for. She could have lost her job for doing that. She could have really upset me by doing that. But she did it anyways because the spirit moved her. I miss seeing the church ladies in the fancy hats out there praisin' the Lord. It's not something I saw in Orange County or in Vermillion, SD, but I sure saw a lot of it in Duarte. I was so stunned by this lady that I couldn't even muster up an Amen until she had already gone off to the bathroom to  finish cleaning. I still believe that the good Lord works through the warm, work-roughed loving hands of black women everywhere.

Princess Rejie Cake

Rejeanne and Gary taking in the sights

Cyrus makin' friends

Starling was alert and nearly silent for the entire trip. This kid LOVES the zoo!

The desert dome

Starling, blurry as always since she is never actually still

Jellyfish!

Crimson fixing Rejeanne's hair

The Zoo, Part One

Well, here's something I never do anymore...BLOG!! Life has been happy and moving along. We had the chance to escape winter for a moment at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. I still haven't explored the place thoroughly, but I've decided that it might be the Best Zoo Ever. Parts of the exhibits remind me of Disneyland!

Lee had to go to the zoo as part of a class assignment so we figured I could go down later in the day with the kids and meet him there. It was so much fun!! I (shockingly) remembered to take some pictures. I now remember why I tend to not take pictures.

My kids are fast moving and easily distracted. I am terribly impatient and not a great photographer. This combines into epic photo fail most of the time. But hey, we're weird and so are our family photos!

Could have been awesome, if not for the photographer!

At least the peacock was cooperative

and the spider crabs!

Rejie vs Coyote



Here's Rejeanne



Today is Rejeanne's first full day of school this year. She did NOT want to go today. She pitched a huge fit this morning, but gave up on it once she was in the car. We get to school and, as I'm parking, I see a guy in a coyote mascot suit approaching small children as they head to school.

Here's the Coyote

All I can think is "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She's never going to want to come here again and the fit is going to be HORRIBLE!!!!" So, I decide maybe I should try to warn her, so I ask "Rejeanne, do you want to see the coyote? Look over there, do you want to go see the dog?" Then the most amazing thing happened: she said "want to see dog".

We go over to the school, and the coyote approaches, and I tell him not to, so he just stayed put and knelt down. Not only did Rejeanne smile and approach him, she offered him her Gary.

Here's Gary

Rejeanne was smiling and gesturing, almost like she was excited there was someone to interact with who didn't talk to her and didn't expect her to talk back. The coyote snuggled Gary and offered the snail back to her. She took it, then coyote opened his arms for a hug, and she demurred, so then he put his hand up for a high-five. She was all about that and gave him a high-five. Then we walked into school.

I was fighting back the happy tears. This was so amazing!

Decisions, Decisions...

So, I took about a year just contemplating whether or not to keep doing a blog. As far as I can tell, the main person who reads it is my ex-husband's wife and I'm still not really sure how I feel about that.

Anyways, obviously I just decided I may as well keep blogging. I have such a bad memory that it's good to have this spot to remind me of how cute my kids were back when, after I've forgotten.

A lot of things that were up in the air have been mostly settled. We are definitely staying put in our little town for at least four more years, so that is a big thing off of my mind. I love it here. Crimson has successfully conquered her first year of middle school with the best grades of her life. That's a pretty big accomplishment in my mind! The best part is that it was entirely self-motivated. That's one awesome life skill and she's really blessed to have that one!

Rejeanne has made so much progress. She's starting to express herself more verbally which is very exciting for me. She's also engaging other kids more. I wonder if the two are connected at all. Either way, she's really growing and doing well. She's still an impish little sweetheart.

Cyrus makes me laugh so much. He totally has my personality, so I now understand how I infuriate people all the time. Sorry about that. He gets over stuff so fast and he's constantly in motion, both body and mouth! He's my little buddy and I love him to bits! He hurt himself yesterday and I think he pulled a groin muscle. He kept insisting a freckle was an ant bite because he was hurting right under the freckle from the muscle. He said he felt good enough to go to the park, but after 20 minutes he comes over to me and says "Mama, I lost my run!!" So it turns out he's hurt himself enough that he's not able to run, which really seemed to annoy and perplex him. I guess things aren't as much fun if you can't run everywhere!

I guess the other big news in life is that I'm having another baby this summer. I'm due on Cyrus' birthday and he's very excited about getting a baby for his birthday. Of course, he's been planning his birthday wish list AND his birthday party since January. I've never seen such a thing before. Hopefully it will live up to expectations!

The other big thing is that my oldest daughter Kellie is turning 18 this month. It's hard for me to believe. I love her deeply. She's a beautiful, complicated, talented, kind, lovely girl...woman? Yikes! She's tough and I think she's awesome. I'm seriously blessed to have her in my life.

Maybe someday I'll get all five in the same room. You never know, it could happen!

Rejeanne's Photographic Escapade

While no one was paying attention for all of 10 minutes, Rejeanne took up photography. First, she laid in Crimson's bean bag chair and figured out how to turn the camera on and take a picture:

Then, she ran out to the hallway mirror to watch herself taking pictures or maybe to try a self-portrait. Since she doesn't really talk about her motivations, we just have to guess about these:

Once she felt she had mastered the classic "self-portrait in the mirror" so popular for the youngsters on Facebook, she convinced the most beloved poriferan in her life to pose for her camera:

Rejeanne's Hair

I finally broke down and took Rejeanne for a haircut. She was NOT happy about it, but she does seem happy with the end result. She looks awfully cute with this short hair, but it is sad that she had to get it cut after we have been growing it for 4 years. Today was her very first haircut ever!

She hates having her hair brushed. She hates having it styled. It is super dry and super fine and gets horribly tangled and/or breaks off in the prairie wind. I think we will have a happier Rejie now.

Pics tomorrow!

Gymnastics

Today, Rejeanne did this:

I think Rejeanne is amazing. I really do. I've been wanting to get her to try gymnastics because it is a way she can be up high and doing wild stuff without getting in trouble. She has incredible balance, too! Unfortunately, with any endeavor, there is the autism in the way of immediate satisfaction. It usually requires a few sessions of her curled into a ball howling before she's willing to even take a look at what you want her to do. With this grand gymnastics experiment, I thought if I could try to prep her with YouTube videos of gymnasts doing awesome stuff, it might make her more willing to participate when she saw the equipment.

I don't know if it was the prep, the actual full night's sleep she had last night, or just purely the grace of God, but Rejeanne actually warmed up and participated at her FIRST gymnastics class!!! She rolled the ball, went into the ball pit, spent a TON of time on the balance beam, got on the tramp, and was SO FLIPPIN' HAPPY!! She was chattering the whole time. She let a stranger pick her up out of the ball pit. She said she had fun. She was so excited. I seriously almost started crying. I can't remember the last time she was so happy, talkative and engaged. I'm so thankful for the upper elementary principal/gym coach, the gymnastics student and the parks dept who all had a hand in giving Rejeanne a chance to do this.

I wish I had thought to get a video of it. Maybe I will try to sneak one next time!

The Cool Part of Autism

In the split second it took me to click the comment link on Flying Tomato's page, Rejeanne saw the critter in the fern. I've never seen someone find a hidden object so fast in my entire life. I clicked away from this image so fast, I would never have even thought she could have seen the picture, much less the dragonfly! How did I know she saw it? As soon as I clicked away, I hear Rejeanne say "Wormy the Butterfly under the tree". The second I heard her say that, I clicked back to the pic and said "Where is it?" and she hopped on my lap and put her finger right to the dragonfly, then ran off.

My child is AMAZING! :)

Here's the pic (somewhat cut off by blogger uploading for some reason) for the curious.

Rejie Speaks!

Rejeanne has been speaking the occasional sentence lately to actually communicate with us. She's also been saying "Spongebob" about 8 million times a day for no apparent reason.

Anyways, I start up Google Earth and Rejie sees the Earth pic as it is loading and this is what happens:

R: "MOON!!!!"
me: "No Rejie, that's Earth. Earth!"
R: "Moon!"
me: "Earth!"
Lee: "Well, it's kinda like the Moon"
R: "KINDA MOON!!!"

Good enough.

Yay!

Much to my surprise, they went ahead and did the IEP today and it went really, really well. As long as the discussions make it on to the final IEP, I think we are good! This is soooooooooooo great because we really did not want to move! :)

Jellyfish, Jellyfish, JELLYFISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The title of this post is a phrase heard in our house at least 6 times a day. Rejeanne is completely obsessed with jellyfish and butterflies right now. Here are some objects she yells "JELLYFISH!!!!" at:

Of course, this all started with Spongebob jellyfish.


And she can recognize a real jellyfish.


And the Jellyfish hat.


And she thinks my lamp is very jellyfishy.


And then she sees the logo on my tights and says "JELLYFISH!!!!" and we are like, "uh...not a jellyfish!"


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.
.

But when ya turn it upside down...JELLYFISH!!!!!!!!! I love Rejie :)

Video!!!!!!

I'm so excited :) I got Rejeanne to mostly sing the ABC song on video. It's an awful video because she was sitting on my lap and I realized she was singing the song all the way through again, so I grabbed the camera and tried for a reprise!

Rejie Sings!

So, Rejeanne can sing a plethora of songs from Spongebob, either in full or in part, but lately we've been singing the ABC Song to her just randomly around the house. Usually when you finish singing she says "siiiing!" and that's it. Today, she sang the whole dang song start to finish. She has an amazing memory and I'm so happy she's able to show a little piece of what she has stashed up there!!

Cookies

I'm seriously considering using the word "cookies" as a substitute for more colorful vernacular. Not only have cookies played a part in my fatness, but my 3 year old has decided there are "cookies" and "bad cookies". I suppose I should be proud of the fact that she has figured out that cookies go in one end and come out transformed as "bad cookies" on the the other end, but this is not especially comforting at 1am.

In my house, if you hear "cookies!!!!" when you open a door to check on what should be a sleeping child around midnight, something really awful is happening.

Tonight, Rejeanne spent time doing business on the floor in her room, then decided the walls were in need of decoration. My artist used the "naughty baked goods" to create two walls of wonder, which my husband did not have the foresight to photograph for you all.

Of course, since she also decided to practice her capital letters (Rs, Ns & As) in feces on her bedroom walls, I also get to tell the preschool about this wonderous event. Sometimes, I would just like to tell them "You really don't want to know what goes on at home. Can we just skip this whole 'communication folder' thing??"

So, should I just be excited that she is making clear capital letters or does the fact they were written in crap completely overshadow the educational advance? I mean, spelling is great and all, but if it's done in poop I'm not sure that it should really count.

bah.

Halloween Pt. 1

Our Halloween was pretty low key this year with all of us being some form of sick, but we did manage to get to the branch Halloween party at least!

Taking photos of Rejeanne is always a challenge. She likes to hide her face most of the time from the camera, plus she is fast moving and prone to making odd faces just in the nick of time. I think I did okay this year though!

Photo update

Moving has sucked! We do have a really nice neighbor though who has two kids (4 & 2). I thought she was single, but her husband is actually in med school and gone for a few months with that. They're in their last year, so she'll be gone in May, but it is nice to have a normal neighbor (other than Andie).

Anyways, moving and scholastic calamity aside, here's some of the latest photos. Not much to talk about so I figure the pics will do!

So Very Talc-ey

When Rejeanne gets mad, she usually creates a great deal of screaming and drama. Today, she got mad, then got fairly quiet. Since it was near naptime, Lee thought she had put herself to bed. Moms, you guys all know what silence means! Especially with two:



Please notice all the particulate matter in the air obscuring your view of my blinds. My camera ain't blurry, folks; Rejeanne just has a cloud around her.



Baby brother seems to be enjoying himself, despite his powdery coating.



It looks like she dumped the whole container on his head!


You can't tell in the pics, but she stripped nude for the festivities and was doing simultaneous jump-twirls on my very powdered bed. Wheeeeeee