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.

I figure a little personal update is in order. Mostly because I am sitting home, waiting to hear from my beloved lazy sack of bones. He squeezed (yes, he has put on almost 15 lbs of squidge since we wed) into his Class A pickle-suit this morning and sauntered off to the promotion board- only three years late! It’s a long and bitter story, and I think I have touched on it previously. Let’s just say that the Army has plenty of jerks who are more interested in chasing their own personal gain than in helping their soldiers. My lazybones is quiet, but he’s a damn fine troop and the most decent guy I’ve EVER known. He doesn’t tend to fuss even when someone does him wrong, which is a shame. I get more fired up over this stuff than he does, by far! But anyway, I am waiting here for him to text or call and tell me how it went. Since I know he’s prepared and squared away, I am sure things went great.

I’m a little under the weather. The actual weather has been excellent all week. I feel like shit, however. The kids caught colds at daycare when I was in Toronto in the middle of the month, and I have been wiping snot noses for going on two weeks now- I was bound to get it. So three days of head goo came and (mostly) went, and now the crud has settled into my chest. The kids are coughing too, and I can do NOTHING for them but hug them, pat their backs and kiss their snotty faces. Stupid pharmaceutical companies and their lousy child-endangering cough remedies! My mother pumped me full of Vicks Formula 44, Actifed, and anything else she could convince me to ingest as a kid- and I turned out just fine.

Oh, stop laughing, I am really quite healthy when I am not the leading producer of lung butter in the European Union. And any mental problems I’ve got are the result of other weird childhood crap, a string of shitty relationships and a deployment to Iraq.

So anyway, we have been unable to take advantage of the lovely weather due to our nasty phlegm making party, and I fully expect the thunderstorms to come back just as soon as the gunk clears our bronchial tubes and such.

We’ve been struggling through random power and water outages here as well. They apparently decided that letting us know about the outages would be giving us an unfair advantage, allowing us to stock up on bottled water and all. Jackasses.

Also, a whole bunch of troops just got home. Good for them, yeah. But it means that most of them are acting like fucking morons, and the MPs are busy as hell, and that every store and/or office on post is clogged with a bunch of hooah-hooah motherfuckers, who all think that they’re hot shit. Yeah, okay, good job and all that but I was downrange when some of these clowns were just getting their driver’s licenses, or skateboarding to middle school. I feel old.

I gotta go hack up some goo now.

Opponents vow to fight CA gay marriage ruling.

These gays want to marry the person they love. OMG! That’s HORRIBLE!

Quick stop them before they become HAPPY!

This is why people say conservatives are “evil”. What kind of group goes around trying to crush other people’s attempts at happiness!? Wanting to deprive people of happiness is way, WAY worse in my eyes than wanting to have sex with someone who happens to be of the same gender.

I hope all the queers in Cali get hitched before the ruling gets overturned. Good for them. Just because they’re gay doesn’t mean they don’t deserve love and joy.

Found some bits of my old blog clinging to life out there in the vast interwebses of this wide world. A little blurb I tapped out about my darling Lazybones, about the time that he and I got engaged.

That’s why I hear it whispered in my ear when I’m being held close in the night, “I love you so much.” Because he knows that I feel the same way. That I’d do anything on earth for him. That he makes me happy even when I snap and growl and seem incurably grumpy. I know that when I am feeling like life slapped me in the face with a dump truck that he will squeeze me and tell me it’s okay. I know that he faced a major incident in our relationship (just a week or so into it, mind you) with uncommon kindness, dedication, and an extraordinary calm. I was climbing the walls and he reassured me. I fell in love with him then and there. I didn’t tell him right then. I remembered all the times I fell hard for someone and was faced with being shut out, or cheated on, or ignored, or just left there feeling like that dump truck must have been loaded with boulders this time. He showed me love, he handled my insecurities, and called me Bitchface. I loved him more every minute, I gave him ten thousand kisses every day, and I called him Fuckface. We wrote notes to one another on the paper placemats at IHOP, and passed them back and forth till our waitress thought we were nuts. We held hands, spent money, and fell asleep in each other’s arms. He wanted to move in together. Buy a house. Make babies. I told him that I was afraid of the M-word (mortgage) and he seemed afraid of the other M-word (marriage). I said that once one of us had to go somewhere for any length of time, he would miss me and decide that he wanted to marry me. (I wish I had put money on this one, I was so dead-on.)When he nervously started to hint around about it, I found myself crying, overwhelmed with how much I love him and how happy and good our life is.

I love my pain-in-the-ass husband. More now than I did then.

And yes… I know it’s pretty lame to dredge up old blog posts and recycle them, but this is the one part of that blog that is worth saving.