Today, my adorable monster of a son decided to take a whiz on the couch. And I can’t clean it up properly, because… wait for it… the water’s out! I’m 10 seconds from meltdown.

For about four months now we have been subjected to frequent, long-lasting water outages. Since they are not planned for (evidently, as we were not given notice except for one time, back in June or July I think), the jackasses running the show are apparently not obligated to provide water to the people living here. They’ve dug up the roads, the yards, the sidewalks, made “mud pies (I guess washing this foul dirt around some with a firehose must be their idea of “cleanup”, thanks assholes) and generally annoyed the crap out of people up and down the street. I walk my kid to and from the bus stop through a construction zone. No choice. The bus stop itself has had a most unpleasant aroma of SHIT for the last 2 weeks, because they are working on a sewer line about 25 feet away.

Nice way to provide for soldiers and their loved ones, yeah? Thanks for nothing, I say. This is disgraceful.

It’s no secret to anyone who has been suffering through my blog for a while that I adore the Halloween season. Lazy and I were married on Halloween, and I have a deep and passionate love for costumes, scary stuff, pumpkins and CANDY! I’ve already mentioned that we pre-ordered our costumes, and I am now eagerly awaiting the first time I get to wear mine- at a party on the 17th. Some of the other things I love about this season are the fresh, cool air, the dormancy of the lawn (or the “weed gallery” as I prefer to call it), the long nights, spiced cider and hot cocoa, warm blankets and buying presents!

Oh yes, presents! Lazybones’ anniversary gift shipped just yesterday, after some struggling- I purchased him a set of red Doc Martens, since I learned that they have returned to manufacturing selected styles in the UK recently. When they moved production to Asia they no longer held the same appeal for me. I have a similar feeling about American cars. However, since there are certain “vintage” Dr. Martens styles now made in England once more, I thought it was high time that Lazy had his very own (all mine are pretty old, pre-dating the 2003 change).

Speaking of Lazybones, On the first of October he was finally promoted. He made me do the ripping and re-velcroing of his rank, and I could not be more proud of him. In honor of this long overdue occasion, he shall henceforth be known in these pages as “Sergeant Bones”. Next on the agenda is the re-enlistment, around the end of the year, followed by us getting the fuck out of Italy. Thank goodness.

Did I remember to mention the kids’ costumes? Ringo will be a skeleton (I found him some cute glow in the dark skelly jammies) and George will be a beautiful little orange and black butterfly. There will be pictures, provided I have a functional camera by Halloween.

That’s about it for now. Just updating so everyone knows I am still here. Ciao.

The Flutterbye Garden

Why am I linking this?

Well, dear friends, because this story was written by my grandmother, for my sister and me, when we were little girls. Back when we used to run around the backyard giggling and I did things like wear ribbons in my hair. Yes, I used to have hair. Bald tattooed chicks usually start off as perfectly normal little girls, you know.

But anyway. I received the paper copy of this the other day and a wonderful letter explaining that the L.A. Times had published it and held a kids’ illustration contest to go with it.

And my little sister, she really did call them “flutterbyes”. We weren’t very good about playing nicely with one another but the story still made a ton of happy memories come back to me, of the beautifully groomed yard with the orange and lemon trees, the koi ponds, and yes- many, many flutterbyes.

So last week, the phone company unceremoniously disconnected our phone. No, it wasn’t past due, and they couldn’t explain why they did it. It wasn’t fixed before I had to leave on my trip, so I didn’t have a chance to post about the whole lot of nothing I had going on. Really. Nothing’s happening. Except this:

Tomorrow is Ringo’s first day of preschool. I think it’s going to be great for him, but a little panicky voice is screaming in my head about how little he is, and will he behave, and how good is this alleged bus driver, and what if he burns down the school, etc… I am sure it will be fine. *tapes little voice’s little mouth shut*

Lazybones is on leave and we’re just being lazy together.

I miss Crash.

George is just so cute I can’t stand it, with her little tiny voice and her little tiny face and her little tiny toes, and I am constantly having to tickle and squeeze her and kiss her.

But really that’s it. Hope everyone else is doing well…

As my ever-loyal readers already are aware, I have oodles of babies.

Okay, three children, but it is far funnier to think of me as living in a shoe somewhere with rug-rats climbing all over me, isn’t it? So anyway, my three kids arrived in this order: Girl, boy, girl.

The boy, my little monkey in the middle, he’s the one I am telling you about today.

This guy-

-also known as Ringo. (Ringo is his middle name. My choice- Lazybones picked his first name. And before you ask- yes he does drum.)

In fact he was drumming so much that it was a little, well… odd (I still insist that he was tapping out rhythms in the womb but I realize this is a far-fetched claim). He also underwent a bizarre change when we moved to Italy.

If ONLY he’d started saying “ciao bella!” all the time!

No, instead he went from his usual perky, engaging little self to a different mode, where he was disinterested in food, toys, and hugs. The only toys he enjoyed at all were circles- the little rings that go on the stacker, plastic cups, things like that. He liked to watch those spin around and settle on the floor. They stopped, he dropped ‘em again. Over and over.

And he drummed- and drummed and drummed. But he also lost weight, didn’t talk, and didn’t even try to walk. Mommy was someone to be wriggled away from, never cuddled. Needless to say, this prompted the doctors to begin looking closely at him, testing, pinching, poking, and generally making him afraid to even step into the clinic anymore. That was fun when mommy needed to go in for the prenatal visits that preceded tiny George’s birth.

So, we got him interested in food (well, sort of, he’s picky as hell) and he came back up on his growth chart, started working with Early Intervention here, and we got him saying a few words, playing with some toys, occasionally looking at us when we spoke to him, all that stuff, but he still is considerably behind the power curve as far as his early childhood milestones go.

Now I sat here watching him wave his hands, rock in his chair, spin his toys and drum on everything from the TV set to his newborn sister’s fuzzy little head, and I wondered why, if he was doing all these decidedly quirky things, none of the doctors or Early Intervention folks we’d worked with had even said the “A” word to us. Huh?

Even he’s thinking… “Dude, WTF?”

Seriously. I never read up on autism- I have known one or two autistic kids/adults in my life- but I was seeing this tiny red flag popping up over his head when he’d do all these wacky little things. I just waited. We reviewed with Early Intervention after a year and the boy, he had improved so much he was like a different kid all over again- but he still was doing these things that were making bells go off for me.

Shit- Lazybones does stuff that makes the same red flags and bells pop up, but he’s a grown adult and has done just fine, so I am not particularly worried.

It took until this last month for them to evaluate his behavior for signs of autism.

Guess what?

They have now decided that he does indeed fall into the broad spectrum of autism-related “disorders” (hey, order is overrated in my opinion anyway- so bring the disorder ON, baby), and now we’ve suddenly got this new label. I wonder if they think I am crazy though, as a parent, for being glad to finally hear it? If I know something is wrong and it’s not just that I am forgetting how to raise him, maybe I will cope with it better. I’ve laid awake more than a few nights on (or over) the edge of tears, wondering why I can’t communicate with my son.

But mommy’s little buddy-

He’s still happy, funny, clever and has long since decided that mommy is perfectly fine for hugging, so I don’t think things are too bad, in his world.