Good times lately

This past week, Charlotte was the Star Student of the week. It proved to be a great opportunity for my girl to shine.

She we made a poster all about her family and her favorite things (swimming, cookies and Scooby and the gang).

She brought the class stuffed giraffe home for the week and named it (Lisa) and we took pictures of her playing with Lisa and put them in the Star Student Journal. Lisa had a pretty good time at the goodfountains!

Thursday, she took in her favorite book and read it to the class. Her current favorite book is one Sarah got this past Christmas. It is really cute.

Apparently, she was really excited about reading to the class and did a fantastic job. Her special ed teacher wrote in the communication notebook:

She read it with such expression, in all the right parts, and truly had the class captivated. They really enjoyed the story and several told her how well she reads.

It makes me so happy when I read about her doing wonderfully.

***

Another recent happy time was when Charlotte and I went roller skating with the Girl Scouts.

The pulsating beat of the music could be heard as we were walking outside along the building. Uh-oh.

“Charlotte,” I said, “it’s going to be really loud in there, are you going to be okay with the loud music.”

“No,” she responded.

I asked if she still wanted to go inside and roller skate and she did. So in we went. She donned her bike helmet (hey, safety first with my girl), let me put roller skates on her, promptly stood up … and fell right down.

It was the first of many falls. She didn’t give up though. A kind troop leader (who we didn’t know at all) took Charlotte’s other hand as I was supporting her around the rink and, between the two of us, Charlotte figured out how to take small steps and keep her feet underneath herself.

In no time she was skating -really slowly- but she was skating on her own. And falling down. A lot. That night before bed she told me her bum was too sore for her sit on the potty.

The aide who works in her classroom has 12ish year old daughter who is a Girl Scout and they were both at the skating party.

E offered to take Charlotte out skating for a bit with her friends. Charlotte was thrilled as she had just been telling me that she just wants to skate like a big girl.

While they were out there, it was time for the Chicken Dance.

Charlotte did not take her eyes off of E, so determined was she to get it down.

At the end of evening she said what a great time she had and that she can’t wait to go roller skating again.

And now a word from our sponsors

Up until recently, the kids only watched shows on channels where there weren’t any commercials, only station promos between shows.

That’s been, of course, as you can imagine, fine by me. Who needs commercials, right?

That has changed recently thanks to the love affair with Scooby-Doo and the gang. Scooby is only shown on a station which happens to air commercials.

This has opened up a whole new world of echolalia in our house, as well as some other fun things.

For example, Wal-Mart is now called Save Money Live Better. And it must be called Save Money Live Better or you will be corrected. And, trust me, you will start referring to it as Save Money Live Better. It’s just easier.

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese commercials, besides being cheezealicious, are apparently, hilarious. Big-time humor.

Charlotte began asking for a Baby Alive doll. She had to have one. Luckily, she and Sarah each got one last Christmas. Oh, the happiness when I showed her the little label that said Baby Alive.

“It IS Baby Alive! It is!!”

The echolalia can be heard throughout the day in various ways.

Her pretend Scooby and the gang characters will solve a mystery brought to you by Save Money Live Better.

“Next up, Daphne Blake and Fred Jones will battle an evil knight! Stay tuned.”

Occasionally I find myself getting worked up by the echolalia. I will mistakenly use it as a barometer of her development. As though more echolalia equates to Charlotte being under stress, or an illness, or regression of some sort.

That’s not it at all. Echolalia is an indicator of the Gestalt style of acquiring language. There was a time when ALL of Charlotte’s language was echolalic with zero spontaneous language. Now, her language is mostly spontaneous, with more or less echolalia thrown in at varying times.

Why the amount of echolalic speech seems to increase at times is directly related to her acquiring and processing new language. Right now she scripts (echoes from) Scooby Doo and commercials very frequently.

“Like, zoinks!” and “Jeepers!” and “Jinkies” are all brand new words. She takes dialogue straight from a Scooby episode and repeats it verbatim, then tweaks it to fit a new situation, and eventually it’s seamlessly incorporated into her general pool of words.

She did the same thing when she started Kindergarten, echoing what she heard over the loudspeaker each day.

That’s the way Charlotte’s brain is wired and likely is not going to change. And I’m not sure I’d want it to change. Technically, if I understand it correctly, there’s nothing wrong with the Gestalt method of acquiring language -it’s just not the way the majority of people acquire language. But it’s not a bad way, or a wrong way, just not common.

Even though, I admit, I find it annoying at times, I have finally come to a place where I don’t wring my hands with worry when I hear Charlotte using language lifted straight from a book or a movie.

Instead I’m looking at it as a testament to her incredibly strong memory and unique analytical mind.

Echolalia is not a mystery to be solved by Scooby and the gang. They can stick to chasing scary monsters.

Overcoming challenges

I have probably mentioned  a time or two on here that things have been a little bit difficult at home with Charlotte.

Well, with Sarah, too, but her challenging behavior seems to be falling in the category of “I’m three, and I don’t need your help, Mom.” Oh the tantrums. Happily, and I’m feverishly knocking on wood as I write this, she is responding well to my experiment of spending a bit more time exclusively focused on her. When I let that slide, it shows.

Charlotte’s behavior has been different than that. With her I was seeing more aggression (albeit, only when provoked by Sarah, but still she must learn a more acceptable way to react). Also less language, lots of resisting everything. It was seeming like she was just off in her own world.

With Charlotte, however, other things go along with the behaviors. In addition to a slow down in removing waste matter from her body, she developed a very bizarre redness and rash on her face which then spread over her entire body.

At first, I thought she had Fifth’s Disease, but the rash on her body didn’t match. It was the same rash, normally just on her belly, that she has been dealing with on and off for going on three years now.

It’s an itchy, red, bumpy rash. We saw a massive decrease, although not total elimination, when we removed dairy from her diet. This time it did not confine itself to her torso, but moved down her legs and arms. A hydrocortisone treatment would take care of it, but it would just appear elsewhere the next day.

She also began to complain of headaches at night. She wanted to fall asleep with me putting pressure on her head. Combine headache, itchy skin, and the other problem, and she was not a happy girl.

Frankly, I would be miserable too.

I began to feel desperate to help her. Clearly there was something going on, and no amount of social stories, positive reinforcement, or the making of plans was going to solve it.

I began to wonder if she was having a yeast problem. In the biomedical world, yeast is right up there at the top of the list of things that ASD kids deal with. She  had a classic physical symptom of it (that I won’t describe here) as well as the others mentioned.

We began giving her a broad spectrum probiotic and began an intensive prune juice  regimen. (I don’t know why the medical profession always goes straight to meds when good old prune juice does the job just fine.)

We also just began a homeopathic treatment of Oil of Oregano (mixed with body oil and rubbed on her feet at night). My husband is also doing the Oil of Oregano. Any homeopathic we give her, one of us will also partake.

The hope was that if there’s yeast overgrowth, the probiotic will get to work on that. And that the prune juice would have the desired effect of just making her feel better.

It’s been 11 days of probiotics and her skin is beautiful. Smooth, soft and white (as opposed to red). She’s on a better (albeit not great) other schedule too. (Am I being coy enough?)

And my sweet Charlotte is back. The communication is a thousand times better. The eye contact is right where she’d left it. She’s even managing the aggression toward her sister-who-provokes better. I can actually witness her stopping herself from biting. It’s a beautiful thing.

She’s just so much easier to get along with. Yesterday she and I spent 4 hours shopping, hitting a handful of stores. While it wasn’t perfect (what is?) and we had to work through a few challenges (one of which involved her having to ask the manager of a retail store if that store was the first store while I mouthed “just say yes”) we had a great day.

We hadn’t had a great day in a long time it felt like.

This is where the communication challenges of autism really get to me. She has a very difficult time, it would seem, telling me when she’s feeling bad. I hypothesize that she started feeling bad, physically, before the rash and other symptoms. She is not one to initiate conversations like that. And I don’t want to grill her on a daily basis about how she feels (she’ll always say she feels “just fine” anyway).

I pray for the time in her life when she can recognize what is happening internally, physically, and can take steps to stop it before it gets completely overwhelming.

Course correction

Charlotte likes to talk about the future a lot.

“When I’m sixteen, I get to start wearing make-up.”

“When I’m done with 12th grade, I get to graduate from high school.”

She likes to talk about my future too.

“And when you’re one hundred years old, you get to graduate from … being mad!”

Ouch.

Guess it’s time to ratchet down the irritation, and ramp up the laughs.

(And, hey, Charlotte, you ratcheting things down a bit might help, too.  And tell your sister, too.)

Meh.

Still, I don’t want to be remembered as the mean mom, so…

“Take your turn off!” and other absurdities

Sarah is three years old. Have you met a 3 year old before? Because even though she’s my 2nd child, everything with her is a first -she is so different from Charlotte.

The words that come to mind to describe, besides adorable, which she is abundantly, are irrational and absurd.

There’s the trait of wanting to do everything herself, which is fine, I get that. The problem is that she changes her mind halfway through something and then wants me to undo what I did.

We were making breakfast crepes the other night, she and I together, and I let her do every single thing except crack the eggs. She even up front agreed that mommy would crack the eggs and put them in.

The minute I cracked the first egg, she wanted to do it. “NO I was going to do that!! I was going to crack the eggs!!”

And then she starts screaming her latest phrase. A phrase which she uses at all times no matter that it rarely makes sense.

“TAKE YOUR TURN OFF!! TAKE YOUR TURN OFF!!”

That little melding of phrases comes from when she was upset that I colored something she wanted to color (after telling me it was okay for me to color it) and demanded that I take the color off (I did not), and from another time when we were playing a game and she didn’t want me to take any more turns so she told me to take away my turn (again, I did not).

Somehow that has morphed into the all-purpose “Take your turn off!”

Back to the eggs. She’s yelling at me to take my turn off. I said, “Sarah, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Do you want to finish helping me or just stand there and cry?”

She chose to cry.

She stopped when I started taking pictures of her tantrum and showing them to her. And when her “pancake” was done, she was thrilled. All smiles. “Thank you, Mommy, for my pancake. I just love it.”

How quickly she changes. And how quickly I forget.

Especially when she does the adorable. Or, in this case, adorably weird. She was looking mighty cute with Charlotte’s scarf wrapped around her neck as we were getting ready to head out to the bus stop.

“You look so cute, Sarah, let me take your picture.”

“Here, you can take a picture of my butt.”

Why thank you, Sarah. You’re too kind.

She did graciously allow me to photo her from the front too.

See what I mean about the adorable part. Makes you forget the irrational.

Charlotte has her own absurdities going on right now. With her, everything is about 100 days.

“Charlotte, show’s over, you need to turn the TV off.”

Very whiny and melodramatically she’ll respond: “For 100 days?! Do I have to turn it off for 100 days? Forever??”

“Time for bed.”

“Do I have to go to bed for 100 days? For ONE THOUSAND days??!!!!”

Sarah will claim her Strawberry Shortcake (the one with the red shoes, Charlotte’s is the one with the white shoes, but she deeply covets red-shoe Strawberry).

Charlotte: “You can’t take your Strawberry Shortcake forever! You can’t take her for 100 days!! No! No! Not 100 days!”

And only as a little sister can do, Sarah will sweetly respond, “She’s mine, alllll mine.”

Charlotte’s other latest thing is Scooby and the Gang. I am, like, Scoobied out. I don’t think I can watch another episode.

Her favorite character is Velma. She’s been asking for glasses like Velma. Today, in a rare moment of brilliance, I found some old sunglasses and popped out the lenses.

Voila -it’s Velma.

I know they are young once. I know Sarah’s incessant arguing and frequent tantrums will pass. I am comforted when friends tell me they went through the same thing.

This morning I came downstairs to find Charlotte and Sarah holding hands and walking through the house looking for their respective Strawberries.

It’s those tender moments that carry me through and remind me that I too will survive these phases.

At least for 100 days. Maybe longer.

Middle ground

In the last couple of days the media have hit us with a deluge of articles about a study that appears in the latest issue of the Journal Pediatrics.

In a nutshell, the study says that there is no evidence that special diets help children with autism.

That is usually the leading headline.

What the study reports is that there is not any evidence that special diets help or don’t help autistic kids — or that food allergies, food sensitivities, or gut problems cause autism.

According to WebMD, “The bottom line of the panel’s consensus report is that much more research is needed to explore the intriguing links between gut disorders and autism.”

There’s a whole lot more information in between those two statements. About how the experts agreed that gut issues manifest themselves in a variety of different ways, about how children with autism, because of their communication challenges, may have difficulty expressing their discomfort and so will respond with negative behavior.

Go ahead and click on over to the WebMD article -it’s the most detailed one I’ve personally read and doesn’t appear slanted if you know what I mean.

That’s not really my point today though.

My point really is to serve as a cautionary voice to anyone who is wondering if they should try dietary intervention for the autistic child.

My caution is this: don’t listen to the extremists on either side.

On one side, dietary intervention will be immediately linked with anti-vacciners and people who chelate their children. Apparently there is this false idea out there that parents who try simple alternative treatment like removing dairy or gluten from their child’s diet are also withholding all vaccines, subjecting their children to risky “medical” treatments, and suckers in hands of quack doctors.

That’s simply not true. While it is true that those extremes do exist, it is not true that all biomedical parents are the same. I know many a parent who has removed some foods, added some supplements, and treated for yeast. They’ve not chelated. They’ve not done any other risky medical procedures. And they aren’t interested in it.

On the other side, there are parents who believe every little autistic thing their autistic child does is because of yeast, or a dietary infraction, or a whiff of exhaust smoke (exaggerating there). There are those that spend thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, who are maxed out in debt all in search of recovery-from-autism for their vaccine-injured child.

Some of them perhaps are vaccine injured. For some biomedical treatment does wonders. Others were likely born autistic and no diet or supplement is going to change that.

But those are the extremes.

I find that most parents are living somewhere in the middle. Wondering if their child does indeed have gut issues (I never suspected them in Charlotte till this past summer).

Wondering if perhaps the sudden outbursts, the hitting that seems to come and go, the screaming, if perhaps these aren’t linked to something in the diet.

I know I wondered those things. I am wondering those things right now.

My caution to parents who are wondering these things is to not allow yourself to be swayed by either extreme side. Dietary intervention doesn’t mean anti-vaccine and pro-chelation. It doesn’t mean “desperately seeking recovery.”

There is a middle ground that many families are living in. A middle ground of GFCF (and in our case soy free and peanut free too) diet that yields some pretty neat changes in our ASD girl. Better eye contact, began to use nonverbal language, itchy skin diminished, stopped screaming for no reason, better regulation of emotions.

Biomedical therapy in the form of diet changes and supplements is just another tool any parent of an autistic child should have the freedom to choose without hesitation. Without fear of being perceived as a quack. And without pressure to stop vaccinating and start chelating.

We parents don’t all have to choose a side and stand there vigilantly. Middle ground is nice and comfortable.

Ignorant no more

I used to think I was doing such a good thing all these years that I’ve been shopping the perimeter of the grocery store.

You know what I mean, right? Shop the edges where the produce, bread, meats and dairy products are located. Avoid the interior shelves where all the boxed foods (“just add water and heat”) and candy and other high-sugar, bad carb products are.

Sure, I’ve had to shop those aisles as well, though, for cereal and tomato sauce, coffee and boxes of pasta. But for the most part, I have planned meals based on what is found in the perimeter of the store.

What a sucker I feel like.

The idea in my head was that by avoiding the interior of the store, I was avoiding consuming industrialized food.

I have since learned something that many of you may already know – the perimeter of the store is just as industrialized.

Beef, for example. I, quite naively, thought that cattle were given an antibiotic only if they  happened to get an infection.

That is not the case. Antibiotics are a regular part of their feed (so is fat and blood from already butchered cattle, by the way). And I didn’t know about CAFO (confined animal feeding operation). I thought the cattle were out on the farmland, eating their mixture of grass and corn, fattening up before heading into the slaughterhouse.

Nope. They are in pens, standing knee deep in feces, continuously pumped full of a regimen of antibiotics to ward off infections, and eating nothing but corn. Cows don’t eat corn. That’s not natural. They are grass eaters.

How disgusting. From both an animal rights perspective, as well as from a health standpoint for us humans that are consuming this beef.

Why is this done? Well how else are we going to get our $1.99 Big Macs (McDonald’s is the country’s largest purchaser of beef).

But it’s not just fast food. When you are shopping the perimeter of your grocery store and you pick up a pack of ground beef, or when you are ordering those delectable Omaha Steaks, you are buying CAFO-raised, antibiotic-infused, manure-dwelling beef.

Mmm. Sounds delicious. Pass me some high fructose corn syrup steak sauce.

Hardly different with vegetables.

We all know about pesticides and that they are bad, but do we really understand GM (genetically modified) products? I know I didn’t until very recently.

I’ll give one example. Soybean crops have been genetically modified to contain a gene that will kill insects. So the pesticide has been genetically infused into the soybean. So guess who else is eating that? Us.

We are eating pesticides in our soybean oil. And in everything else that is made with soybeans. (Unless it’s organic, which does not allow the use of GMOs.)

I don’t know about you, but I feel duped.

I truly didn’t know, and did not understand, what big business has done to something  which should be very simple: food.

I feel suckered. By whom? By everybody, to tell the truth. The government for allowing corporations like Monsanto to own the patent on GM crops and and sanctifying lawsuits against small farms for patent infringement when the wind blows seeds across the dirt road. Those small farms end up folding, unable to compete with the deep pockets of Monanto, DuPont, Cargill and ADM.

Suckered, too, by the companies themselves for putting their financial bottom line above human and animal well-being.

What’s a gal to do? In an ideal world, my husband I would sell our 4 bedroom suburban home, buy some land, and begin to raise our own food.

In reality, we don’t know a damn thing about farming. So instead we will spend 3x what the average consumer spends on food by joining a CSA and buying only organic foods. We’ll only buy beef that is grass-fed ($6.99/lb for ground beef). We’re going to try our hand at canning. We’re going to start a garden.

And we’re going to try to take control of what we put in our bodies rather than let the powers of agribusiness hide it from us.

…and a Happy New Year

I have been trying to write an end-of-year, start-the-new-year kind of post for over a week. This is around my 10th attempt and I wonder if this, too, I will “move to trash” due to not finding a decent train of thought.

To tell the ugly truth, things are not going great around here. Charlotte is way out of sorts or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t help that she got sick on Christmas Day and and, until today, we were home every day. I’ve been sick, too, along with Sarah and my husband. We canceled our New Years Day get together with friends because we were all so under the weather.

Sarah is not exactly easy to deal with either. At times she can be so fiercely stuck on something, or so demanding that something be done a particular way, my mind starts to wander to the dreaded criteria.

Or maybe she’s just a really, really intense 3 year old.

Or maybe I really do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, worrying about, managing Charlotte, that Sarah feels neglected and she’s trying to firmly establish control, and most especially control of me. She demands that I do everything for her, and wants almost nothing from her daddy.

And while one might think it counter-intuitive that I try to spend more time focusing on her, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I’m going to try an experiment next week where I give up some of the time I spend doing the things I like (reading on the Internet mostly), and focus that time on Sarah. Don’t worry, I’ll also slack off on the dishes and laundry too, I’m no fool. But I do worry that I am not down on the floor enough just giving her my undivided attention.

Sure, she has Charlotte to play with a great deal, but Sarah is making it increasingly evident that she needs Mommy. She isn’t like Charlotte who was truly content to play with her toys with minimal interaction. I had to force Charlotte to let me play with her, with Sarah I find myself saying “not now” and “in a minute” far too often.

Of course, Sarah will choose what we do, and I have a sneaking suspicion it will be something Strawberry Shortcake. We are totally a Strawberry Shortcake house. All Strawberry all the time.

I’m also withdrawing Sarah from her preschool class. The girl doesn’t want to be there and every week I have to leave a crying girl there. I’m tired of it. Preschool for her age is a luxury, not a requirement, and she has 2 full years ahead of her anyway. Why am I putting us through this? It’s just not working and there’s no rule that says it has to. We’ll redirect the tuition from that to a tumbling class which she claims she wants to take. We’ll see.

With Charlotte, honestly, I don’t know what to do. She is not herself. We’re in the process of collecting all the, uh, specimens, needed for the testing that the DAN! doctor ordered. Perhaps it will reveal she has a yeast problem (which I suspect) or something else which could be behind this very uncharacteristic behavior.

It has been such a struggle the last few weeks. It’s not all bad, all the time, but there are moments that make me want to just give up. She’s such a marvel at times with her amazing language and beautifully developing brain. I still find myself sitting back in awe of her. Like today when she told me she was mad at me for something. “I’m really mad at you for that,” she said.

But then there’s the other side, details of which I won’t bore you with, that leave me speechless as well. Why? And what can I do to help? And how can I make it stop?

I don’t have the answers. And right now I feel a bit like I’m back at square one. I’ll write more as I muddle through our various attempts to help Sarah reign in her controlling and bossy side, and help Charlotte find her way back to equilibrium.

And so begins another year.

We are what we eat

I can’t get that refrain out of my head.

We are what we eat.

I’ve been reading some interesting books. I haven’t finished either (it’s kind of slow going around here when it comes to reading books for myself). One, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, traces foods found in the supermarket back to their plant origins. He goes from the cornfields of Iowa to the CAFOs of Kansas and all matter of fast food and science lab in between. So far, it has been enlightening.

The other book I’ve just started is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle where she chronicles her family’s journey of eating only locally grown or raised food for one year. I’m only a couple of chapters into it, but I’m really loving it (helps that she’s such an engaging writer).

Being concerned about what I eat is not anything new to me. Many years ago I started only buying what we in Ohio call Amish chicken (referring to the religion of the farmers, not the chickens) but I’ve since learned is not what it’s called everywhere. Free range would probably be the more common term. I bought it because I like chicken, eat a lot of it, and didn’t want the chickens I eat to have antibiotics in them.

The taste is far superior, too. One time, for reasons I can’t recall now, I bought Tyson chicken breasts and was shocked by the difference. The breasts were huge and had ZERO flavor. Amish chicken just plain tastes better.

So do their eggs. My husband likes to make breakfast on the weekends for us, usually bacon and eggs. I remember one day, many years ago, saying that I guess I don’t like breakfast foods anymore -just no flavor. So we decided to try some brown, free-range eggs. And they tasted like – eggs! Such good flavor. Switched to all natural bacon too and the flavor difference is quite amazing.

Little by little we’ve made other changes to our diet. No high fructose corn syrup products in the house. Only wild-caught (not farmed) seafood. No meat products that have been treated with antibiotics. No more nitrates and nitrites. Nearly all artificial flavors and colors and also preservatives eliminated.

Another step we made, although not one that is necessary for all families, is when we went gluten free. Gluten free really forced me to change the way I cook. Any convenience foods we relied on before simply had to be eliminated. Or had to be replaced with a much more expensive version. I cook so much simpler now. And, in all honesty, it tastes so much better. It’s freeing in a way, but it can also be a little boring.

We’ve also been going organic. Not on every single thing, but on much of it. Especially the things we consume a lot of: like apples, broccoli, canola oil.

A few weeks ago my husband and I watched the documentary Food, Inc. Before watching it I joked that I would probably declare myself a vegetarian by night’s end. Almost, but not quite. However, I will now only purchase and consume meat that has been cared for humanely and been raised without antibiotics. No corn-fed beef (which we rarely eat anyway), no CAFO-raised pigs or cattle. And no more GMOs. That one means we have to go 100% organic (or look for GMO-free labeling) which will take some time, but we are making strides.

The most interesting and challenging change in what we eat is yet to come. Starting in 2010 we are joining a CSA (community supported agriculture). Our joining fee will provide us with 18 weeks of organic produce from May through October. Approximately enough to feed a family of four.

This is going to be a BIG change for me. I mostly buy frozen veggies. I’m not at all skilled or comfortable with fresh veggies beyond the everyday dinner salad. And think of all the new veggies I’ll be trying: fresh beets, turnips, swiss chard, boc choi. Others that I haven’t even heard of (kohlrabi anyone?).

We are also going to dabble in our own gardening. The exciting part about that is that we will be teaching our kids. Or, I should say, they will be learning right along side of us.

Big changes in store for next year – the beauty is that the only risk is that we’ll be healthier and our food will taste better. Those are consequences I can live with.

Christmas break is here

The Christmas break is  upon us.

Day one was a doozy.

Sarah and I coughed our lungs nearly right out. Charlotte is off-kilter in a scripting, hitting, not listening kind of way. Sarah, being sick, wanted lots of lap-time. And she picked many fights with her sister.

Charlotte, being off-kilter, responded in a less-than-ideal way to her sister’s picking. Me, being sick also, was somewhat short-tempered, and tired quickly of the refereeing.

Despite all that, we forged ahead with our plans to make cutout cookies.

rolling out the dough

making a dough ball

I put my Zen mode on and kept myself from getting annoyed at the exceedingly abundant use of sprinkles, the constant fingering of the dough, the tossing of flour. I was the picture of calm (mostly). And we had fun.

Mantra for the day: it’s not about the cookies, it’s the experience. Repeat.

Too bad I didn’t really care for the recipe. Turns out shortbread cookies are kinda blah. Sugar cookies for sure next time.

As I was watching my restless, bickering girls I thought to myself, “We’ve got to get out of the house tomorrow.”

Then Sarah and I simultaneously coughed up a lung and I thought to myself, “We better stay home tomorrow.”

Because I actually thought this might happen, I had bought a couple of Hello Kitty artsy-craftsy kits that I’m going to break out tomorrow. Something new and different to pass the time in the infirmary.

We must be well by Friday.

Merry Christmas!!!

Speaking of cookies, click on over to (Never) Too Many Cooks for my latest post: Gluten-free Snickerdoodles.