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…

If I am an average height human female who tends to be slim (but no longer bony)… Why do I have to buy clothes in size EXTRA small? Or worse, in the kids’ section? The tights I bought for my costume are childrens’ “one size fits up to 140 lbs”.

What kind of disproportionate world is this?

I’ve never, outside of my pregnancies, weighed even 130 pounds. And before anyone decides to comment about my “luck”, let me just say that struggling over weight and self-image is not the sole domain of those who are overweight.

I can’t figure out how it is possible for me to be this little. The world has started making clothes for seven foot tall twig women, and their enormous 140-lb kids. What is this, Second Life? (The avatars there are all outrageously large and proportioned like cartoons, think Jessica Rabbit only sluttier.)

I think this is all a plot to make me think I am shrinking.

No, I am not really paranoid. Just AN-NOYED.

If my costume is too big, I will scream.

If anything seems broken, please alert me.

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.

Wyatt Earp said,

on August 1st, 2008 at 544

Well? How did he do???

Oh, he did just fine, of course, but it’ll still be some time before the actual promotion comes down the pipe. He’s adding more points here and there so next time they aren’t maxed out (which they generally are these days in the MP corps) he should be getting… well not pinned, but velcroed (bah- what a joke. It’s just not as fun if you can’t pound four sharp pins into the collarbones of the newly promoted. If I had to get the hell beat outta me by my platoon a week after I got to Iraq, everyone else should, too).

In semi-related news, my exemption from being recalled has been approved. That means I will not be forced to leave my kids with a pack of wolves while I get dragged back to active duty. I am a little sad though, to be completely out of the Army. I expect I will get over it though.

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.

Snatched up at SYLG.

First of all, it looks inappropriate for kids- despite the “cartoony” graphics style. Check all the blood, and dead bodies strewn across most of the screenshots linked from the article. I wouldn’t allow my kids to play it just for the sheer violence content. How does that “create a new generation of fat-hating assholes”? (To paraphrase one of the sources listed.) In my opinion, this game should be hit up by the ESRB with at least a “Teen” rating (I was unable to find a rating for it on the site). By the time kids are teens they’ve had years of schoolyard experiences with fat-haters and bullies who will seize upon any perceived fault or difference to shame, ridicule and berate other kids for. As if that isn’t enough, they’re likely to hear tales of how obesity can negatively affect their health (from the education system, those fat-hating assholes). Fat-hating cities are banning fast food and transfats, requiring calorie counts on menus, and suggesting that it’s in peoples’ best interests not to eat until they balloon up like Mr. Creosote.

(be advised that this is a disgusting, graphic skit with bad language and a lot of vomit- watch at your own risk)

I’d also like to take this moment to call out Wyatt as a fat-hater, since he spent half of this year trying to lose weight (with quite some success)! We all know he didn’t do it for his health and fitness, but because he saw Mr. Creosote videos and played the Fat Princess game, and it made him hate fat.

Of course I find the story about hecklers attempting to hijack a citizenship ceremony to make it a political protest to be despicable. But it was the comment about over 4,000 people losing their lives that tweaked my brain.

Those people didn’t die for George W. Bush. No matter what insanity people spew forth. Despite the fascism claims. We are not talking “Dubya’s Army”, “The Bush Marines” (heh, heh, bush), “The Crawford Ranch Air Force” or “George’s Navy”. (Though I hear that those are actually the names of Lego sets that George W. Keeps in the Lincoln bedroom.)

People do not join the military to show how much they love the guy in charge, see? Many of those killed joined several administrations ago- there are still folks who are on active duty today that joined back when that bonehead Jimmy Carter was in office! Hell, if I’d done according to plan after high school, I would have joined while Clinton was still in, and my desire to serve my country had absolutely zero to do with that jackass. And don’t take issue with the jackass part, kids. He’s a Democrat, that’s their symbol. I didn’t come up with it. I also am not responsible for his behaving like a jackass- braying loudly and trying to mount anything that moves. Hah!

It’s truly about wanting to serve the country, the friends, neighbors, families and strangers that we see each day. Wanting to be there when the shit hits the fan (heaven forbid) and stepping up to do that duty regardless of who you voted for in the last election. People don’t get that. I don’t think there will be a huge influx of new military recruits if Obama gets elected, folks- nor will there be a bunch of troops getting out if he does. The people who are willing to put their lives on the line are not doing it for one man… but all of the men, women, children and old farts of our land. While that vast number may include the politicians of this nation, it is not solely for their benefit. I doubt they could say the same for their so-called “service”. It’s all about money and power for them.

And people wonder why I dislike politics so much.