Pile of Kittens

Pile of Kittens
Originally uploaded by peter_hasselbom

It is called Tea and Devons, after all. Not mine, but freakishly adorable still.

Good? I'll show you good...

I got sick. A's doing better. I'm doing better. We're crazy busy for the holidays, as I'm sure you all are.

It's pouring rain here. Yesterday, C and I attempted to mail off the Christmas goodness and found a self-service postal office kiosk--with no place to put the packages. So we bought all the postage and slapped labels on things and left them all in the car for shipping on Monday.

This morning, C's late. Our local post office isn't open when we swing by and they don't have a nifty package drop either. A falls asleep on the way home from dropping off C, and I'm thrilled because I've got a list. Bake a quick-bread for his speech therapist, who is coming at 1pm. Wrap presents. Sew stockings. Whip up a gingerbread house dough. Identify any last-minute giftees and figure out last-minute presents. Put together a grocery store list for Xmas. I'm thrilled in the way only mothers of toddlers can be when their sweet cherubs are conked out.

We pull into the garage, and A wakes up.

I snuggle and cuddle and coax and A won't go back to sleep.

Fine. Now I'm mad and snarly mommy. I'm sick. I'd like to sleep. I'd like to be anything other than in charge of a Christmas cornucopia of errands in the pouring rain with a sick toddler, but here I am. Back in the car, off to the post office. We get a spot next to the door, but I am in a bad enough mood that I do not care. A doesn't want to put on his raincoat but no, he has no choice and he is standing beside the boxes on the sidewalk as I run from the trunk to the car in the rain.

It takes me three trips to unload all the boxes. A is screaming and having a tantrum. I have to wait in line because one of the boxes is too big, even though we've already paid for postage. The other people in line look at my snotty, screaming toddler and my red nose and treat us like we have the plague, which I guess we do.

Back in the car. We've got a little under two hours, so we'll go to the grocery store, get our supplies for Christmas, and be able to get a gift for the speech therapist in one swoop.

Now, unless I have driven in a car with you, which is pretty a limited number of people because I really hate to drive, you may not be aware that I turn into Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver when I drive. There's a constant stream-of-consciousness incoherent, delusional rambling commentary every time I get behind the wheel. My most flagrant, eyebrow-lifting obscenity happens when I'm driving. I try to rein it in, of course, since the boy, but when that baby lets something obscene fly there will be no question at all where he learned it.

The underground parking garage is full, with vultures circling. I go up to the uncovered parking lot, since I'm not made of sugar (definitely not today), and I start listening to myself as I pass by parking space. I'm in so much of a snit that I'm saying things like, "Oh, yeah, great space there, should be a handicapped but it's not, and I drove right past it. And by the time I come back, there'll be some idiot there. And there's a great space, parallel that I could get into easy, but no, I'm driving right by it. Oh, that space I saw before, yes, that's full now too."

And I listen to myself, really listen, and I then I start laughing. I am being presented with numerous opportunities to be helped and I am passing by each one with my delusional ranting. I have already benefited from the largess of the universe by getting a spot near the door at the post office and three people who held the door open for me each time.

I apologize to A, and tell him I'm going to be a more cheerful mommy, and turn into the back parking lot and get a space right by the door. Not ten feet from that, under the awnings, is the only Trader Joe's cart that is dry. Bone-dry. And I say thank you to the universe, thank you for being kind to me and giving me two good parking spots in Hillcrest in one hour, a dry place to put my child's bottom, and an appreciation that, even with the Christmas cornucopia and colds and lack of naps, my life's pretty darn good.

I got the speech therapist a big box of Rocher, and I am glad I did, because she brought A a book. And now I am going to go sit with some chai and sew a stocking by the lights of our Christmas tree.

Sick again

A's sick. Again. I'm pretty sick of him being sick. He's sick of it too. He didn't sleep much last night. He's napping fitfully today. He gets a hit of albuterol, a little bit of food, and then he sleeps for a time. Then the albuterol wears off; it's time for another dose, and the whole cycle starts again.

It's been pouring rain here, which means we're cooped up and sick. Not much else to say. Christmas preparations are taking a backseat to baby care, so if your cards and packages are late, this is why.

Disneyland Hiatus

Oh yes, my friends, we went to the big D yet again. It's the Year of Disney here, or at least the fall and winter of Disney. The kid loves Disneyland. We love Disneyland. It's relatively close. We got a great discount on the hotel with our annual pass.

What does A love?

• Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters - now he's figured out he can shoot
  
• Winnie the Pooh
• Tarzan's Treehouse - a surprise to both of us, Tarzan was a big hit
• Haunted Mansion Holiday
• it's a small world
  
• Autopia - Stupid cars on a track. A drove, which means he turned the wheel back and forth as far as the track would let him while I pushed the gas pedal. He loved it. Laughed the whole time.
• the teacups - boy howdy
  
• Peter Pan
• the Carousel
• Dumbo
• Astro Orbiter (although C and I discovered that this is probably the most uncomfortable ride in all of Disney and I had to operate the lifting gear with my feet)
• Alice in Wonderland

We finally saw the Billy Hill and the Hillbillies show at the Golden Horseshoe, so I was pleased. The parks are beautiful at holiday time, really amazingly decorated. We saw the holiday parade, which has extremely cool wooden toy soldiers who actually play their instruments, which is very neat. The much-vaunted snow on Main Street is actually foam, disappointing for those of us who know snow, but the holiday fireworks show is pretty dazzling. And it's a small world is so much better with the holiday carols mixed in so it's not one incessant song over and over again.

The baby swap, more formally referred to as the "rider switch," is possibly the most fabulous thing in the universe. If two people with a baby want to ride something like Space Mountain, one person goes while another person waits, then they switch. The pass allows the person who waited to bypass the line and go pretty much straight to the ride.

The parks were more crowded than we would have liked due to Cast Member Holiday Party days, but we actually walked onto most things with little or no wait. Longest wait: Peter Pan. Fastpasses really help. We rode Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain a lot. I love BTM at night. We rode Indy a lot too; I got to go through all three doors of mystery and satisfied my curiosity that they all look the same.

We discovered too late the legal loophole created by the conjunction of Fastpass and the Rider Switch, but my friends with babies, let me tell you how to work this system. I believe this is legitimate, even though it felt a little sneaky to C and me:

1. You and your smoochie-person pick out two different rides with Fastpass.
2. Get one Fastpass from each ride. It helps if the Fastpasses ripen about the same time.
   
3. Once it's Fastpass time, go to the first ride and ask for a rider switch pass.
4. When the nice cast member directs the first rider to the line, whip out your Fastpass and get in the fast lane.
5. The second rider uses the rider switch pass to bypass the line.
6. Go to the second ride and repeat. Voila! Two rides done as Fastpasses for the price of one Fastpass each. You can double your line-bypassing this way.
   

Also, those of you with more than one kid should be aware that the Rider Switch Pass acts as a Fastpass for two people, so if you've got a friend or another kid who can ride the coaster (Hi, E!) , they can ride twice, once with their own Fastpass, and once with the Rider Switch Pass.

But it was fun, and it was fun to have C off of work, and when A drank too much Jamba Juice and threw up on the carpet of our hotel room, it was fun to call housekeeping and have them come clean it up (with a tip, of course, but it's not like I packed the Nature's Miracle carpet cleaner in my overnight bag, what else were we supposed to do?).

A was so tired he fell asleep at 4PM on Wednesday (3PM, but we woke him up to ride Buzz Lightyear two more times before we left) and slept until the alarm went off at 6AM Thursday morning.

What else? He had preschool today; they painted and played outside and had speech therapy and he cried when I said it was time to go home. So he's enjoying preschool. His teachers tell me he is so sweet and they only have to show him how to do something once and he's got it. Yes, I know. It's a little frightening. Good when it's painting with cookie cutters, bad when it's watering the Christmas tree.

First Day of Preschool

I didn't see him off; his dad did, so I should probably get a guest-blog from him.

But I picked him up. The teacher reported that they played with shaving cream and glue; they played outside on the playground. He dug in the sandbox with another kid and heeded his teachers when they told him to keep the sand in the sandbox. He sat during circle time and paid attention.

The teachers said A did great; he's so even-tempered and easy-going. No tears, no upsets, just a cheerful little guy. Really, he had an excellent first day.

I can't believe he's old enough for preschool.

Preschool #2: the marshmallow that broke the camel's back

A's feeling better. Friday is our official check-up, but he is ornery and running around and happy with only vestiges of a runny nose.

Today we went to check out the other preschool vying for contention as the place where A goes to get enriched twice a week. On paper, it sounds fine: focused on kids with speech issues, small classes, structured play, 1-to-3 teacher-student ratio. I thought it sounded like it was better suited to A's needs, actually.

Physically: It's small. There's no outside area to play in, no play structures. There are some climbing things inside, but not a lot. It seems clean and the toys are in good shape.

We're twenty minutes late because I got lost. (It's in an obscure area, and I get lost easily.) We join in time for circle time, which is more of a semi-circle but that's not the point. They sing some songs, which is more of the teacher singing sometimes with a CD while the kids sit in their chairs.

I notice that most of the kids (five others) don't seem to be having any fun. A has fun with the singing.

Then circle time is over and it's activity time. They're doing snowman pictures, gluing pieces of paper together to make a snowman. The kids sit in a half-circle while a teacher comes by and gives them something to glue to their paper. The kids don't pick what to glue or are given working glue to play with, just pieces to stick to the paper. The snowmen all look suspiciously the same when they're done.

A is bored. He wants to play with the toys.

The teacher announces snack time, and I think, "Hmm, maybe this will re-capture his attention." The snack is Juicy Juice grape juice box, Scooby Snack cookies shaped like dog biscuits, and strawberry marshmallows. Sugar, sugar, and more sugar. Only my indoctrination as a consummately and sometimes detrimentally polite citizen keeps me from yanking him out of the chair, out the door, and home to our organic-o-rama of low-fat yogurt, apple slices, and diluted organic juice.

A eats his marshmallow and cookie and asks for another. He eats the second cookie but not the second marshmallow. The juice box is history.

They begin to play a game, a matching game, match your card to a picture on the poster. A goes first and quickly. Then he gets bored waiting for it to be his turn again (because it takes about ten minutes, people, to go through six kids who don't all match things yet). He heads over to the bookshelf, picks out a book, and starts flipping through it. (Ah, yes, that would be my son.)

The teacher takes the book away and tells him to sit in his chair. She tells him not to do things by saying, "Thank you," in that "Thank you, you're done now," way. This is not how we say thank you in our household. Thank you is what we say when A complies with what we've asked him to do. She takes the book away and he's pissed. I calm him down, but he doesn't want to sit in the chair.

Then it's story time, so they get to move from the chairs to a big stuffed animal and listen to a story, then it's the bye-bye song, where the kids individually get farewelled and get to leave the teacher's sitting kingdom to wait for their parents. A is farewelled first, picks up the book the teacher took away from him, and sits behind her, looking at the pages. I subdue the compulsion to give him a high-five and a fruit leather for subverting the paradigm.

I talk to the teachers after class, if nothing else to make sure this was a typical day, typical activities, typical snack, but the whole time I'm thinking: it didn't look like the kids had any fun. It's way too early to teach A that school is no fun. An hour and half is too long to expect my two-year-old to sit quietly without serious entertainment.

And I pretty much outright despise anyone who scolds a child for looking at books.

So tomorrow, he'll start at preschool #1. The snack there was bagels and cream cheese and healthy Goldfish knock-off crackers and they specifically asked me not to bring cookies or candy as a snack for him. I feel a lot more comfortable leaving him there.

We are thankful for nebulizers

Thanksgiving kind of petered out around here, and I feel like we need a couple days to recover from the weekend.

Thursday A was very sick with a head cold, so sick he couldn't sleep. We didn't do our fancy Thanksgiving dinner because A and I both felt like crap. C spent Thursday night holding A upright so he could try and sleep. It didn't really work. A and I both got sick enough from coughing Wednesday night that we both threw up. I spent most of the night on the couch so I could sleep.

By Friday morning, A was lethargic and not breathing really well, so I called the doctor's office when they opened. They didn't have any appointments until 1:20PM.

"Well," I said, "I guess the emergency room wouldn't see us before then if we left now and I'd rather he saw you guys."

"Just come on in," she said. "Bring him in and we'll look at him." We were there about twenty minutes later.

If you've ever waited at a doctor's office, you'll appreciate how serious it is when you show up and are immediately shown to a room and have a nurse come in to take an oxygen reading, about 92-93%. The nurse then says, "The doctor will be right with you; you're next."

Then the doctor comes in, not our regular one but one we like, the one who makes jokes and plays with the kids, although A is not interested in playing at all. A gets three albuterol treatments, one with oxygen. After second, the doctor prepares us that if the third treatment doesn't have a measurable effect, A will be spending the night in the hospital.

But it does work. We're given a scary list of things to watch for changes that indicate A needs to be hospitalized immediately (color, shoulders, belly, the hollow at the base of his throat), we're sent home with the nebulizer and prescriptions for albuterol and steriods, with instructions to treat him every two hours through the day and night andcome back tomorrow for a check-up. Diagnosis is bronchiolitis, with the definite possibility that he has asthma on the horizon.

We go to the drugstore. We get a boatload of albuterol. We give him treatments every two hours. He hates it. He cries and yells. But he is breathing and smiling and getting more towards his normal self. He sleeps more that night.

Saturday, we get to see our actual doctor. She says to decrease the frequency to every four to six hours and come back for a check-up next week.

Now he seems a lot better, although he still does not care for the treatments. We spent the rest of our weekend (Saturday afternoon-Sunday) doing errands, cleaning up the vomit from the rug (which still smells, sigh), getting and putting up a Christmas tree.

So what am I thankful for? Air. Being able to breathe. A getting better. Good doctors. The nurse who heard the tension in my voice and got us in without an appointment. A husband who spent many nights sitting up with a sick boy so I could sleep. A boy who is sleeping, finally.

Lastly, I am thankful for our health insurance, because I'm pretty sure the line-item for that visit would have been in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, including the equipment we were sent home with. A's life literally depended on the treatments he received. They weren't optional or elective. And we came home only worried about his recovery, not how we were going to pay for a staggering doctor's bill. We're worried about him having asthma, but we're not making financial decisions based on paying for a possible future chronic health problem out of pocket. I can't imagine how making any parent worry about finances when their kids are sick makes this a better country.

Preschool #1

A just finished his speech therapy, during which he said absolutely nothing, but he picked up a fire engine for a week and his play is "fabulous." (I think the fire engine will have batteries before the weekend gets very long.)

I never realized until we started going through all this that play could be graded and assessed.

This morning A and I headed to a preschool for a test-run. I was concerned because he didn't sleep well and I think the cold has boomeranged back on him. He started motioning and pointing the minute we saw the playground, and then he didn't hesitate to run right into the room and start playing with a toy garage once we got there.

This is a regular preschool that has some developmentally disabled kids mainstreamed in the classroom. The DD kids have two teachers who specifically watch and guide them among the other two teachers for the regular kids in the room. It would be for two hours, twice a week.

The preschool itself seemed to be pretty loosely structured: free play time, snack, music/dance time, and then a special visit from the speech therapist (not ours). The time they would have spent on the playground today was spent with the speech therapist. He had a grand old time. I was concerned because all the art on the walls seemed to be from the regular kids, but I asked and was told that the DD kids always have the option to put their art up but most parents just take it home with them.

What else? The teacher asked me if I'd like the speech therapist to do an evaluation of A, and I said, no, not really, he's been evaluated a lot. The speech therapist took a minute at the end to ask me if I really had no concerns because she thought he certainly should see someone for his speech. I explained that no, he's been evaluated about six times by now, he's tracking here for expressive and there for receptive, and we've been prompting two- and three-syllables from him, pressing on two and celebrating three.

A had to be dragged to the car, crying. I think this preschool's certainly a contender, but there's still one other one I'd like to see.

He's sick. We did Costco and IKEA (his idea; he kept frantically pointing at IKEA and would not let up, so we went, jeez) and he fell asleep by the time we pulled into the garage; unfortunately, he wouldn't sleep for longer than half an hour before he'd wake up, crying and sniffling. He took a two-hour nap in half-hour increments with me rubbing his back. He may be sleeping in the car seat tonight.

And tomorrow's Thanksgiving, and we're having raclette and sweet potato pie, which just made me remember the sweet potatoes steaming on the stove. Yikes.

Last Day of First Five

Sigh. I'm melancholic here. A is trying to figure out all the ways the Aquadoodler pens interact with the humidifier.

Today was A's last speech class with his wonderful teacher. I made blueberry muffins for the staff there and C and I baked several batches of fussy butter cookies from Cook's Illustrated which I put into cute tiny gift bags for his caseworker and his speech teacher.

The other kid (who has some issues, shall we say it kindly?) in his class didn't show, so she got A all to herself for their last class, which they both enjoyed.

His teacher was teary-eyed. She talked about how much she loved working with him, what a sweetie he is, how far he's come with his language. He has come far. He can produce three-syllable phrases now, puts two words together, has expanded his vocabulary significantly, by at least fifty percent if not more, and imitates our speech more often. She's been really good for him. Besides, how can you not love anyone who recognizes how amazing your child is and enjoys him as much as you do?

It's hard to have a melancholic farewell with a two-year-old, though. We were saying goodbye and she and I were teary. I was trying to emote the fact that we wouldn't be back again to A when another family with a dog showed up. He completely focused on the dog and didn't give his teacher a backwards glance, let alone a goodbye hug. Happily, she knows the ways of two-year-olds, and I do too, so we left it at that. The upshot of two-year-olds not having a concept of time is that they don't have a concept of grief.

One phase over, another begins. Tomorrow we try out our first preschool, then home for a nap and lunch before the speech therapist comes over. At least I've already vacuumed. (This is an issue of consternation when you have a virtual stranger sitting on your floor for an hour.)

Return of the voice

I can speak again, quietly and mumbly, and that is a good thing.

A has always mimicked us when it comes to cats and his food. A cat would approach him and he would say, "No, no, no!" and vocalize a lot of irritated, urgent scoldings.

Well, this week he discovered that if he fed the cats turkey, they would come to him and sit by him and even lick his fingers. So he's changed modes now.

The cats are growing more tolerant. I just put A down for a nap (he fought sleep dreadfully today) on our bed, which is occupied during the day by Jake and Niles. The cats were curled up together in the center of the bed, so there really wasn't a place to put a mostly-sleeping baby without being next to them. Niles gave it a minute and then left; Jake stayed because Jake is a pudding. Very sleepily, A pet Jake on his legs, and Jake watched him carefully and didn't move. Now they're both asleep, close together. It's so freaking cute.

UCSD Study

A's taking part in a UCSD study on 27-month-olds. They're studying something about autism; A's a control subject. We went this morning and he had basically the same assessment process he's had everywhere else for the past few months, so it was very familiar to him, at least.

He'll get a toy out of the next visit, which will require the infamous skull cap of many sensors. Oy. This is why we needed the haircut.

First haircut

Still no voice. It's pretty sad here. I tried calling my darling husband, and after rasping, "Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?" for what felt like forever, he said, "I can't hear you, so I'm going to hang up. Maybe you should text me." So we texted. No voice sucks.

A's signed up to be part of a study this week where they'll put a cap with gooey gel on his head and track his brain activity. Fun, no? This meant that I needed to get his hair cut.

Which I did. It's a little shorter overall, but still the same boy. Pictures will be uploaded as soon as I get someone small and sweet down for a nap, which he's been fighting all day, and I have no voice to sing him to sleep.

Sigh.

Chewbacca and R2-D2

House-bound and a little nutty. I don't feel like I can take him out since I can't talk to him to give him directions, so we've been at home all day, which is not our normal mode and makes us both cranky. He's provoked me a couple times to loud grunts not unlike Chewbacca, which he finds a little disturbing; conversely, it's difficult to calm someone down who's howling when you can only hoarsely whisper at a tiny, tiny volume.

And I have done pretty much nothing to help him with his speech today, since it seems odd to prompt for speech when I can't speak. But this doesn't make me feel better about his speech development. I whisper and grunt; he babbles in R2-D2-ese.

In short, today has been like Chewie and R2-D2 doing Waiting for Godot. This sounds great as a two-minute YouTube clip, but bad as an all-day thing.

Laryngitis

I've been sick. Yesterday, I lost my voice and am reduced to a tiny, hoarse whisper.

I woke up this morning and--no voice. Still. Do you any idea how difficult it is to parent a toddler without a voice? At least C's here as my knight in shining, talkative armor, but boy, my voice better return before tomorrow or it'll be an exciting day.

Torque

I don't know why we're on a physics theme for subjects but...

A can open the fridge. And the doors to the TV cabinet. And anything else that just requires torque.

It's a brave new dawn around here.

You can't push a string.

A had speech therapy for the first time this week. These are in-house visits, where the speech therapist comes to our house (which requires a certain amount of cleaning, of course) for an hour or so. (Of course, A turned over a glass of water on the couch, which required the couch being disassembled for the course of her visit.)

So she showed up, said, "Hi, I'm Janis," and in she came with a bag of toys, sat on the floor with A, and played with all the toys.

I sat nearby and watched and tried to stay out of the way. She played with him and talked to him in short, one or two word sentences about what they were doing. He was interested in the toys and didn't say much at all, like he normally is with new people.

I had to restrain myself from not translating when he did speak. He was funny. He would decide a toy was boring and sing a little bit of the clean-up song and put the toy away so he could move on to the next toy--what a fabulous little guy.

Janis desperately wanted A to play with a fishing set. This had: various small felt fishes, two fishing poles with strings that had a Velcro piece on the end.

A has a fishing set, a pole tipped in Velcro (no string) and some fish, so I guessed he would be pretty bored with her fishing set, and he was. She was firm in trying to redirect him to play with the fish, finally showing him how she fished. She put the string over a fish, pressed the Velcro piece into the fish, and picked it up by the pole. "Look, fish! Fish up!"

With a look I can only characterize as bemusement, he took the other fishing pole, pressed the Velcro to the fish with his hand, picked up the pole, and dumped it into her bag. Yes, this is how it works and this is the most efficient way to play with it instead of messing around with that string; next toy please.

So at the end of the session, I asked what I should be doing or if this was representative of how their sessions would go. She said she's using short sentences to urge him to imitate her and eventually she'll encourage me to use short sentences for periods of playtime throughout the day (though not obviously the whole day, since we can't live our lives in caveman-like grunts).

She said his receptive language is extremely high and she was surprised by his focus, because the report she read said he could be somewhat distracted.

He's two. Distracted is the name of the game. But A is a pretty focused kid.

So I'm not sure how it went, but I think he had fun and she left a toy here for him to play with, so it's all good.

Drive-by parenting

We were in the library yesterday, picking up my book on reserve (and damn you, SD Public Library System, for receiving eight (8!) of my holds the day after I pick up my one lonely book on reserve). A loves the library but the whole waiting in line to get checked out makes him cranky, because it's right next to the kids' DVDs and he wants to go look through them all again.

Anyway, I'm saying no and he has a tantrum. I'm calming him down as quickly as I can--I can't leave with an armful of books; I have reserve items I need to pick up or I'll get fined--and he settles easy enough. It's never quick enough in the library, though. In the process of having a tantrum, he's kicked a shoe off.

There's an older woman behind me. She says to me, "How old?" and I tell her he's two. She picks up his shoe, but instead of handing it back to me, she says to A, "Look at this nice shoe I found. Maybe someone doesn't want it any more. Maybe I'll take it." She mimes putting it on her own foot, and A holds his hand out for it. "Maybe if you said, 'Please, can I have my shoe back?' Hmm? Nice boys ask for things." A holds his hand out again and makes an agitated grunting noise, which to my mommy-sense, means tantrum #2 is on its way.

"No, not until you ask nicely," this woman says.

"He doesn't talk," I say. "He's got a moderate speech delay." A is pressing his hand against his chest in the sign for 'please.' "He's signing please."

She hands the shoe over to me. "I didn't know," she said. "But he was certainly loud enough before." Yes, lady, thanks; I didn't feel enough like a crappy parent before you decided to turn into the question Nazi and of course all children are silent angelic cherubs until they gain the power of speech.

"Car, please?"

We're back. C's putting A down for a nap while I sort years of cosmetics, bath gels, and expired medications that are taking up valuable space in our too-small bathroom. The purge is on.

I forgot to blog about Halloween. We had Halloween. We have a costume for A but did not dress him up. C got off work early, which allowed him and A to carve a pumpkin together. Then dinner, birthday cake, and bed for A.

Tuesday night, basking in the warm glow of Obamarama, we headed to Disneyland. C was off work Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. We bought annual passes (for an absurdly low price compared to the WDW tickets, good God) and rode rides: the new Finding Nemo submarines (very cool), the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (for the small boy who loved every minute and was ready to go again), Space Mountain (smoother and darker than its WDW counterpart), and all sorts of other stuff. We walked onto every ride. We left at four-ish so I could make my read-and-critique group.

Thursday A had speech and a vision test. C had a meeting at work to check in for. His vision is fine (-0.25 in the left eye, 0 in the right, which for right now, is within normal tolerances). His speech class went great; he was the only one and the teacher adores him.

Friday we were slated to go to the last of our parenting classes, the review and post-test, and C and I decided we would rather spend the day going to Disneyland. So after breakfast, we bundled A into the car, drove up, and were at the front gate not much later than we were Wednesday morning. Plus, A got his normal morning nap in the car. It worked out beautifully.

It was more crowded than Wednesday but still mighty manageable. We had completely skipped Fantasyland on Wednesday, so we took some time letting a small boy point us from ride to ride. After Peter Pan, the carrousel. After the carrousel, Dumbo. And so on. The pommes frites at Cafe Orleans are fabulous, btw. We drove home at seven or so, got home in time for our normal bedtimes.

So Saturday morning, A leads me to the door to the garage and points. "Car?"

"You want to go in the car?" I say. Happy acknowledgement noise from A.

"You want to go in the car and go to Disneyland?"

Happy dancing from A. "Car, please!"

It's bizarre to me that Disneyland is within a reasonable drive. I think of it as being very far away, but it's not any farther than Park Meadows used to be from our house in Colorado.

Obama won

We're going to Disneyland.

Seriously.

Vote, vote, vote

I voted weeks ago, but C voted first thing this morning, fourth in line at our local polling place. But get out there today and vote.

See, I'm not introducing politics, because I think anyone who reads this blog already has made up their stubborn minds as to whom they're going to vote for. But I'll shamelessly plug a No on Prop 8 again, just for any Californians who really haven't come to their senses and want to spread hatred and fascism. No on Prop 8. Hopefully there will be lots of celebrations in the morning.