Home and Kids

First, the house news. The seller called us last night, and she is selling us the house for sure. She said that she was selling us the house, even if someone else showed up and offered her more money, and she was willing to wait as long as we needed to get everything covered and closed. So if we wind up having to wait for the settlement to come in, she's fine with that.

In kid news: A is doing well in school, and is offering an occasional 2-word phrase now. It's still pretty garbled most of the time, and we don't always understand him the first few times, but he's trying. He is also stuck on repeating phrases from movies. Right now it's a quote from Milo and Otis: "Mommy mommy mommy mommy." "I'm not your mommy! You're a chicken you know!" ~ which comes out as "mommy mommy mommy mommy tu ta mommy chicken know." Over....and over....and over....he really likes that part of the movie, where the chick hatches and thinks Otis the dog is his mommy. A has also started a rather interesting self-stim: he raises up his shirt and twists his nipples.

Yes, you read that right.

Over the summer, when it was hovering around the 100 degree mark for the weeks upon weeks that it did, we let him run around in his shorts and no shirt. One day, he discovered "buttons?" on his chest. We told him, "No, those are your nipples." And ever since, he will go for them multiple times a day. Doesn't matter where we are; church, home, grocery store, school, wherever. We tell him, "no, put your shirt down," which he grudgingly does, then he'll reach in the top of his shirt (stretching out the collar) to do it some more.

He has a new teacher at school this year, fresh out of college, and she left us a query about it in our communication notebook we pass back and forth. Her suggestion was to tie his shirt down with a weighted vest to prohibit that behaviour. Since he freaks whenever we put a jacket on him, I advised her against that option. I think this is just a phase that will end, like his incessant chewing finally ceased, and that the vest will cause more problems and disruptions in the short term outweighing any possible benefit. I'm not embarrassed by it, but it is interesting trying to explain what he's doing to other people who don't know him and ask. It's just a part of his stim right now, that we're trying to reduce by distracting him with other activities. That works best for him right now.

He is not currently involved in ABA therapy, because his therapist is having complications with a pregnancy and is in a local hospital until at least the end of October, hopefully November sometime so she can give birth to a healthy baby boy. So if you guys want to pray for Miss Jenny, she'll take all the prayers she can get.

K is fine; she is a wild child. The more people around, the more flirty and show-off-y (and LOUD) she becomes. She loves to dance and is trying to learn how to jump. In the words of the receptionist at the hospital in D.C., "she is BUSY. Oh my goodness! You have your hands full!" (Incidentally, the hospital visit was not for her, but for her daddy who just had corrective eye surgery). She climbs with abandon, and I have recently found her on top of the dining room table several times, all the way up on brother's double bed (which is on a frame), and trying to climb onto the window sill while the window was open on the second floor (heart attack time). She is greased lightning, it only takes her a couple of seconds while I help A go potty to get up there. She has shoved a dining room chair into the kitchen and started to get up on the counters a couple of times, but I rather emphatically deterred her both times.

Her vocabulary is tremendous, increasing daily, and she is already showing signs of being very generous and empathetic. The other day, A had a cold and was at the doctor's office (which he hates). They were attempting to take his blood pressure and look in his ears, and I had to pin him down to the table so they could get their readings. He was screaming, "NO NO NO NO NO" the entire time, and K started to cry because A was upset, she kept saying, "A--, oh, no" and looking very sadly at him. Also, yesterday morning we gave her a cup of juice. She took a sip, then went over and opened up the dishwasher, pulled out one of A's cups, and took it to her daddy asking, "A-- milk?" This surprised the snot out of Z and me, she did this out of her own initiative.

Another day, another unexpected joy.