In case I haven’t told you lately, my children are amazing.:)  They are my heroes and the coolest people you could ever get to know.  Those of us who are blessed enough to be loved by them are among those most blessed.

I listened to a podcast today that I think almost everyone should hear and consider.  I’ve known for a long time through personal experience that autistic individuals are absolutely awesome, and I love to hear interviews with autistic adults who are living full lives and are able to articulate a little bit about what it’s like to have autism.  In this excellent interview, Stephen Shore describes an exercise he uses when speaking to large groups of neurotypical individuals to help them understand.   In essence, he selects random people from the audience to play a “round robin” storytelling game.  He instructs them to start a story aloud with one line and then has each participant continue the tale with a line of their own.  This is a fast and easy exercise, much like social interaction for neurotypical individuals, who are interpreting social cues and integrating sensory information at lightening speed without any conscious awareness.  He explains to them that for autistic individuals, interpreting social cues and integrating sensory information is a much more formidable cognitive task.  So much so that by the time these functions are engaged, carrying on a conversation feels nearly impossible.  At this point, he asks the participants in the exercise to start a new story aloud.  This time, they are not allowed to use the letter “n.”  Whether at the beginning, middle, or end of the words they choose, the letter “n” must be completely omitted.  Suddenly the game becomes nearly impossible for the participants.  At this point, Dr. Shore notes that people in the audience “are very interested in their shoes.”  And he says, “You know, anxiety is a problem for a lot of autistic individuals.  Perhaps that’s why eye contact is not so easy for them either.”

On more than one occasion, my teachers and I (I have to call them my teachers.  They teach me as much as they teach my kids.:)) have lingered in conversation over the things through which our amazing kids learn to navigate as they grow.    We are in awe of them and their ability to overcome the challenges they face.  Autistic individuals are among the most persistent, determined, and resourceful people on the planet.

A lot of autistic individuals, my son among them, crave deep touch pressure.  The right amount of pressure applied to their bodies soothes and calms them and even helps them to self regulate sensory input.  

Some of the first (and best) information I discovered in the pursuit of all things relevant to understanding my children were Temple Grandin’s own descriptions of her need for deep pressure.  I was absolutely awed when I read that this exceedingly cool autistic woman had actually built a machine (“the squeeze machine“) for herself that was calibrated to help her achieve exactly the amount of pressure that she craved, with knobs within her reach which allow her to adjust the pressure up and down by the tiniest increments.  On her website, she has even posted plans for building your own!  Just wait until my son gets old enough to understand and implement those.:)  Around the same time that I was reading Temple Grandin’s book, I read Dr. Stanley Greenspan’s book The Child with Special Needs, wherein he describes using pillows to make a “pillow sandwich” out of a pressure seeking child (I have also heard this method described using burritos and hamburgers—choose your own edible.:)).  What a wonderful idea, I remember thinking.  The trouble is, sometimes it takes a while to figure out that deep pressure is one of the many things your child needs.  It’s that puzzle piece that gets stuck in the corner of the box.  You just keep trying things, and eventually your realize you were missing an important piece.

Adam has always had what most of us would call “unusual” ways of soothing himself.  For years, he refused to sleep with his head on his pillow, but prefered to throw himself under the covers until all that remained visible were the bottoms of his little padded feet.  He sweated profusely in this configuration, but that never seemed to deter him.  About a month ago, Adam started hoarding every blanket and pillow he could find in the house.  I used to put them away while he was at school, but everyday he’d just come home and gather all of them again.  About the same time the girls stopped protesting about him stealing their blankets (“Hey Adam, Grandma made that blanket for me.”), I stopped trying to put all of them away.  Now I just stack them neatly on his bed. After a long day at school, Adam marches immediately to his bedroom, where he sheds his shoes and socks and puts them away.  Then he lays on his bed and piles every blanket and pillow he has on top of himself from head to toe.  He balances all of them carefully on the bed first, and then climbs underneath, willing none of them to fall on the floor.  I start homework with the girls, and about 20 minutes later, Adam reappears, ready to do his own homework.  Every night, he repeats this ritual when it’s time for him to go to sleep.  This has become so important to Adam that he searches out other objects that have blanket or pillow-like qualities to add to his growing “pressure mountain.”  He reminds me of a bird building a nest.  I once read about a wren out in California who built a nest entirely out of discarded office supplies.  I laugh out loud on a daily basis at the “extra” things I find in Adam’s room.  His homemade squeeze machine almost always includes a pair of incredible hulk gloves that my dad gave Kevin as a fun-with-the-kids gift.  

Sometimes, I find towels and wash cloths that had been waiting for the washing machine mixed in with Adam’s pile of “fluffy stuff.”  I have a few treasured blankets and pillows that are kept in mine and Kevin’s bedroom and office, and the only reason Adam hasn’t pilfered these as well is that we keep the rooms locked and strictly off limits to the kids when we are not with them.  I have seen him salivating over them when we spend time together in those rooms, and I can tell he’s thinking, “If only I could get in here when Mom and Dad aren’t looking…”

What amazes me and even draws tears to my eyes is that since Adam has such difficulty telling us what he needs, he has figured out his own way to get the deep pressure that calms and soothes him.  What a cool kid.

The only thing for which Adam currently has similar passion is his new communication notebook.  Having watched Adam search his mind for the right words to say and struggle with whether it should be “I have” or “I need” or “I want,” I knew I needed to find a tool that Adam could use to guide and train his memory.  Our sentence strips had become too limited; there was always a sentence we didn’t have attached.  One of my teachers asked me to help her duplicate a communication notebook that a private speech therapist had made for one of her students for use in her classroom.  Instantly, I decided I needed to make an extra one for Adam.  It has pages of useful communication helps all tabbed on the side so that we can find what we need quickly.  We’ve started with just a few pages to help Adam learn how to use the notebook as a tool without overwhelming him right at the beginning.

Adam LOVES this notebook (Actually, Riley loves it too and is very jealous, even though she really doesn’t need anything like this anymore.).  He carries it everywhere with him and even acts out the words.  In fact, on the way out of church on Wednesday night, he was looking at his communication notebook and came to the words “take a break.”  He immediately reclined on the asphalt and put his hands behind his head.  I laughed out loud and told him to get up, so he looked down at his book again and declared “hug!”  He wrapped his arms around my waist and we headed to the van.  As far as I’m concerned, he can practice that one often.:)

Inside and out, she’s a work of art.  MODERN art.  Maybe even PERFORMANCE art.

In Douglass Adams’ hilarious book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it takes Deep Thought (the megacomputer) 7 1/2 years to determine that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42.  Having received the answer, everyone decides they don’t really know the exact question.  Figuring that out, says Deep Thought, is a virtual impossibility.

Yesterday, Zoe sat in my lap after we finished a book together, and hugging her I asked, “Do you know how much I love you?”

“Yes.” She said immediately.

“Really?” I said, amazed at the speed and matter-of-fact way in which she had responded.  ”How much?”

“About 46.”

Well, if Deep Thought was right and the answer to life, the universe, and everything really is 42, then as Kevin later pointed out, Zoe’s answer was fairly accurate.  Aside from God, there’s nothing in life, the universe, and all of everything else that I love more than my family.:)

Never mind loving you to the moon and back and all that.  At the Circus, we’ll just settle for 46.

Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit:

we cannot flower and grow without it.

~Jess Lair

When we entered the gym for Riley’s third basketball game, we were almost positive we were headed for disaster.   At first mention of the game that morning, Riley had begun her protest.  ”I think I want to be a cheerleader.  I don’t want to play basketball.”  All through her bath, as I tried to encourage her to go out there and have fun (“We think you’re doing a great job!”), she reiterated that she wanted to trade in her basketball jersey for a cheerleading skirt.  Knowing this was mostly just nerves talking, I held off on a direct response until it became obvious that a discussion would be necessary to motivate Riley to do anything in this basketball game beyond sit on the bench clinging to Kevin.  You see, that was how she’d spent most of Game Two.  Things had started well, and she’d been out there at least trying to figure out where she belonged on the court.  Then, as if someone flipped a switch in her mind, she’d suddenly walked off the court, wrapped her arms around Kevin’s waist, and sobbed.  After that, Riley could not be convinced to try again.

So, there in the bathroom on the morning of Game Three, I dried my hands on a towel, sat back, and smiled at Riley, whose hair was matted with bubbles and piled on top of her head.  ”I’m sorry, Honey, but when you make a commitment to something, you have to see it through.  If you want to be a cheerleader next time, okay.  This time, you’re playing basketball.”

“But…”

“AND, you’re doing great!”  I’d like to say it ended there, and that Riley stopped whining and said, “You know, Mom, you’re absolutely right.  And brilliant.  And I should never argue with you because you know what’s best for me.”   Yeah.  What actually followed was just more complaining and arguing, and more cheering from me, and the unsettling conviction that we were in for a long morning with Riley.

When the game started, Kevin took his usual spot on the bench with Riley to offer moral support.  Riley told her coach she did not want to play, and then, as if to be sure everyone understood, she threw her arms around Kevin and locked her hands together.  Kevin pried her fingers loose and told her that she could sit on the bench, but she wouldn’t be holding on to him while she was doing it.  This was one of  those awful torn moments, when as parents we know that we have to be tough and iron-willed enough to push our little birds a little closer to the edge of the nest but our hearts are twisted all in knots and we can’t show it on our faces.  Deep down, we wish that wrapping our arms about them would sweep away the fear, the challenge, and the possible humilation and magically land them on the other side of the hurdle they face.  We insanely imagined ourselves running alongside Riley, our hands on top of hers, pushing the basketball down to dribble and lobbing it over our heads to help her make baskets.  These were insane notions motivated entirely by love, because cerebrally we both knew  that the only way that this experience would be productive for Riley would be if she carried the ball in her own hands.

As the buzzer sounded for the half, Kevin strode over to me, gesturing for Riley to follow her team and participate in the half time talk and team time.  Adam was up dancing on the basketball court (our self-proclaimed half time show), which is something he anxiously anticipates the entire game.  Sometimes when he thinks I’m not paying attention, he’ll put his book down on the chair and jump to the side of the court, oblivious to the fact that the ball and the girls are running in his direction.  He’s never happy when I call him back to his chair, so half time–the freedom to dance—has become his favorite thing.   As soon as the buzzer sounds, he looks at me and says, “Dance?”

As Zoe climbed into Kevin’s lap, and Adam danced in front of us, Kevin said, “I don’t think I’m going to sit over there on the bench anymore.  I think it’s becoming a crutch for her, and there’s no way she’ll even try to play if she thinks she can sit over there holding on to me.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking that probably she’d just come over to where we were all sitting and cling to him there.  I wasn’t optimistic about convincing her to stay with her team and make an effort.

I don’t know exactly what happened during half time, but allowing Riley the opportunity to break away and go it alone with her team and her coach turned out to be exactly the right thing for her.  When she walked back on the court, she barely glanced in our direction(worlds away from the mad dash for Kevin that I had expected) and lined up with her teammates to play in the second half.  I nudged Kevin.  ”I don’t believe it.  She’s going to play.”

In fact, she played the entire second half.  As she lined up with the other girls, I sat on the side praying.  Lord, please just let her feel good about this.  Please just let her feel that she can do this.  From the moment the buzzer sounded to start the half until the buzzer sounded to end the game, not once did Riley leave the court or even pause to blink back tears.  As you watch our videos, you’ll have to forgive the sounds of our voices spurring her on.  The four of us sat there doing what we do best at the Three Ring Circus:  cheering over things most people find ordinary and expected.  We just cheered because Riley was playing.  We cheered not for success but for effort.  We cheered because she was in the game and, for the time being, staying in there.  Even Adam lifted his arms and called, “Hooray!”

Don’t get me wrong, I’d been clapping for her all along, but suddenly it seemed that what she needed was more than a little clapping.  We clapped and cheered and raised our arms up in the air in triumph.  We smiled wide and did silly little victory dances every time she turned her eyes in our direction.  At the end of the first period, as Riley’s team walked off the court, she turned and paused.  She stood there, soaking up our enthusiasm, a smile forming that she lifted her hand to touch and perhaps to discourage.  It was a worthless effort.  Finally, the smile broke completely, and she let out a delighted laugh, and then she turned and ran to her team.

Have you noticed that encouragement is contagious?  The referee smiled widely in our direction as he tossed the ball from one hand to the other, waiting for the teams to return to the court.  Our supportive band of parents rallied, and for the rest of the game, we all went from clapping to cheering and calling out to the girls by name.  Riley went from skipping down the floor in bewilderment and sobbing into Kevin’s shirt on the sidelines to raising her hands in an attempt at defense and even trying her best to dribble the ball down the court.  If you watch the video, you’ll notice that she looked over to us multiple times to be sure we were still excited for her.

At the end of the game, Riley’s coach’s voice waivered as he passed out stars to his players.  ”This is the best game I’ve ever seen you girls play,” he said to them.  Our once mildly enthusiastic band of parents erupted into generous applause and cheers for all the girls.  Riley was given the gold star for sportsmanship and the red star for defense.  ”Riley, this is the best game you’ve played,” her coach told her with an audible catch in his voice.  ”I think I even saw you smiling out there today.”

In Game Four, Riley’s efforts were better still.  The funny thing is that all of this mutual cheering for our girls has bonded all of the parents in a very unusual way.  We don’ t have long conversations with each other after the games.  It seems that once the stars are handed out, we’re all herding our kids down the hall and out the door to find our way to the rest of the weekend.  While we’re sitting together on the sidelines though, we share equal enthusiasm for their triumphs and unity in the desire to see each girl do her best.  We join our voices together now to spur them on.

When we arrived for the fourth game, I noticed that even Riley’s relationship with her team had changed.  In the first few games, she’d been like a satellite player, orbiting somewhere close to the group, attached but not really a part of them.  This time, she joined her team and they welcomed her, giggling with her and touching her on the arm.  This game, they started helping her remember who to guard with gentle calls and points.  Once, one of the girls touched Riley on the elbow and gently guided her to the player she was meant to follow (Who, as you’ll soon see, was a slight, sweet little girl who hopped around the court making her own best effort.)  In the space of four games, the girls were becoming a real team.

In the midst of it all, Riley is becoming a player, 4 practices and 4 games into her season.  In this game, she started running up and down the court instead of skipping.  She figured out that there was a specific girl she was meant to guard.  She went from watching and wandering to reaching for the ball, grabbing it swiftly away, catching rebounds, and even attempting a few shots. 

Granted, we’ve still got miles to go before we sleep.:)  Riley often gets confused and starts guarding her girl when she’s on offense, and she still hasn’t quite figured out how to make sense of all the switching from one basket to another.  Still, these are not issues that are entirely unique to Riley.  The best moment of the fourth game came when Riley made her first assist.  She caught the ball and, realizing she was too far away from the basket to make the shot, passed it in to a closer player who scored.  At the end of game four, she received her very first grey star for offense.

Kevin said that at practice the following Monday, the girls enthusiastically called, “There they are,” as he and Riley walked into the gym.  Having noted that the girls are ready for more, the coach worked them hard and pushed all of them to improve.  The remarkable thing is that Riley never got overwhelmed as the coach urged her to pass, move, and make decisions more quickly.  It appears that our little engine finally believes that she can.

A few days later, Riley asked me with a smile (out of the blue, or so it seemed), “Mom, why do you cheer for me when I play basketball?”

“That’s easy,” I said with a smile of my own.  ”Because I love you.”

 

Remember, man does not live on

bread alone:  sometimes he needs

a little buttering up.

~John C. Maxwell

 Eleanor Roosevelt once said,

“A woman is like a tea bag.

 You never know how strong she is

until she gets into hot water.”  

When I was in high school, my Grams wanted to move a refrigerator out of her country kitchen and on to the back porch to make room for a new one.  ”Just hold on and let me send Tommy over,” Mom told her on the telephone.  ”He can move it for you.  You’re going to hurt yourself if you try to do it.”  It was about an hour’s drive down tree-lined roads overhung with Spanish moss, but Mom sent Tommy on his way immediately.  She knew my grandmother.

By the time Tommy pulled down the long driveway, parked the car in the “u” in front of the house, and opened the screened door to go inside, my grandmother had already moved the refrigerator.  By herself.  She stood wiping sweat from her forehead and asked him if he’d like to sit down for a glass of iced tea and maybe a bit of leftover potato salad.

I used to think it was Smith women in particular who possessed this well-we’ll-just-see-if-I-can’t strength that smolders in the eyes like embers just waiting to be stoked.  While not every single one of us was blessed with the same soulful brown eyes God gave my grandmother, my mother, her sisters, and almost all my Smith cousins, there’s not a woman on the Smith side of my family who can be stopped by a freight train if she wants to do something badly enough.  Among the Smith women there are countless stories, many of them not mine to tell, of a sharp and innovative strength that stands up and shakes its fists in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances.  I love that about the Smith women, and I love the legacy it has bestowed upon my own girls.

These days, I’m close to so many women—all amazing and beautiful for their differences—that I’ve come to draw a different conclusion.  I think passionate, never-say-die strength is just God’s gift to all women, which is funny to me in light of all of the vast misinterpretations I’ve heard and read of 1 Peter 3:7 (wherein Peter refers to the wife as the ‘weaker’ partner).  To quote Washington Irving, “There is in every true woman’s heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.”  Heavenly fire, indeed.  It’s the fire that propels us on when we’re sick and our kids are sick at the same time, or when we feel so tired that we don’t want to move or be touched, let alone dry a child’s tears, hold a baby in our arms, or reach out to our husbands in intimacy.  It’s the strength that allows us to do more things in one day (and often at once) than we can count and then sit down and really listen to a friend, chase our kids around the living room until they drop to the floor in giggles, or pay the bills, answer emails, and watch a television program all at the same time after our kids are asleep.

It’s the strength I’ve noticed in my mom for as long as I can remember.  I’ve never seen my mother let anything stop her from doing something she needs or wants to do.  Her sheer determination is the reason she now has metal pins in her ankle.  She walked right off the back of a very highly stacked pile of logs at the construction sight for the Edisto Island Church of Christ because something needed to be done up there, and she was naturally the woman to do it.  When they hurried over to where she’d fallen, she calmly said to my dad, “Could you please get me something to use for a crutch?  I think I’ve broken my leg.”  I can just see the look on my dad’s face as he scooped her up off the ground and carried her to the car.  I just love that even in that moment she hadn’t given up on doing it by herself.

Mom’s leg has never quite been the same.  It swells, and sometimes the pins hurt, and many times her legs ache with restlessness.  I know she has chronic back pain as well, even though she never talks about it, and I think getting a full night’s rest has long been a thing of the past for her.  You’d never know that any of this were true.

When Mom visits us, she jumps on the trampoline with the kids.  Once, while she and Daddy were both (yeah—Dad’s body may be over 65, but his heart is still and always will be quite young) out there jumping, Dad’s foot came down right on top of Mom’s, and she hurt her toe and reluctantly had to stop for the day.  Zoe still talks about that.  ”Remember that time Papa jumped on top of Grandma and hurt her foot?”  I always laugh out loud when someone hears Zoe say that for the first time.  Watching their facial expressions, I can just imagine what sort of mental image that statement has provoked.  Even when there are no accidents, this jumping with the kids zaps Mom’s energy and makes her legs swell, but as I said, Mom never lets anything stop her from doing something she wants to do, and she wants to jump, run, and crawl around on the floor after the kids (Yep.  They love EVERY moment of it.  Riley and Zoe call it “bugging” them.  ”Bug me, Grandma, bug me!”).  No wonder they love her so deeply and can’t wait to wrap their little arms around her neck.

The afternoon Zoe got her cast, she sighed dramatically and said, “It’s too bad I broke my arm ‘ecause now I can’t do anything.  I can’t write, I can’t put on my clothes, I can’t—”

I held up a hand and shook my head.  ”No.”

“Huh?” Zoe said, puzzled.

“No.  You might be wearing that cast for 5 weeks.  You can not allow it to keep you from living.  Those things will be harder for you, true, but don’t say ‘I can’t.’”

In honor of my mom and all the women I love, I offered my daughter her first lesson in bearing up.  The funny thing about this strength we possess is that we often don’t realize it’s there until God forces us to tap into it.  Motherhood has a way of teaching us all, as we die to ourselves a little bit and press on with sometimes tear-stained faces, that we’re a lot tougher than we think.  It’s in those moments when we are certain that we can’t but know we must that we discover we have more inside us than we ever dreamed.  Recently I heard celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels say, “I believe everyone functions within a comfort zone that is far below what they are capable of.”  Women, especially, are often surprised by their own stores of strength.

Zoe nodded as I spoke.  ”Otay, Mom.  I’ll show everyone that I can still do it!” 

“That’s my girl.”

A few days later, Kevin had all of the kids out playing at the elementary school.  Kevin and Riley practiced basketball while Adam putted around the court (on Zoe’s Barbie scooter…I just love my son:)) and Zoe played on the playground.  Kevin turned his head to check on everyone and spotted Zoe dangling from the monkey bars by her good arm.

Okay, so maybe she embraced her legacy a little too well (think refrigerators and log piles).  Sarah Pezdek-Smith said, “The strength of a woman can carry the weight of the world.”  Perhaps Zoe just thought she’d start with her own weight.  One-handed.

When I was a kid, my girlfriends and I had hilarious slumber parties.  We had “Miss Slumber Party” contests.  For weeks, we prepared and refined our “personas” with the hope that we would be robed with a sleeping bag, crowned with a pillow, and sent strolling through the living room as the victor.  I’m not kidding.  We really went all out.

As a matter of fact, I still remember losing to Miss Sweets.  I know it was the evening gown competition.  Miss Sweets had designed her own Hershey kiss costume, complete with a little Hershey kiss pillbox hat made out of tin foil.  I was “Miss Nightmare.”  I wore a black night gown I found in my mom’s drawer and painted a red “x” across my face.  I don’t remember my talent performance, but I probably wrote an eerie poem or read Edgar Allen Poe.  I always felt compelled to add a little “literary flavor” to the festivities.  In any case, I was also poor competition for “Miss Music,” who had made herself an entire outfit out of 45 record covers.  Our appointed judges (always the hosting adults) had quite a job to do, and in the end, Miss Sweets wore the sleeping bag.  More than once, I think.

After our elaborate pageants, we’d lay in the living room floor watching ridiculous horror movies until every shadow in the windows made us huddle together.  I remember a skinny, wind-tossed, beckoning-finger-like branch that once created quite a narrative for us for about an hour and a half.  We laughed, whispered, poured out our hearts about things large and small.  Friendships were forged during those sleepovers.  One way or another, we all still keep up with each other.  Even if conversations are rare for us now, there are bonds that we built that remain.  

On Saturday, we hosted our first sleepover party for the girls.  A friend of mine agreed that we should do this for our daughters often,  to encourage them to build the kind of friendship that can only be built on whispers and laughter, head to head on the living room floor. It was she who first called our little slumber party circuit “The Blonde Ambition Tour 2009,” in honor or her daughter and Zoe– two beautiful, fun, intelligent blondes whose birthdays are only separated by a month.  Whether it’s just those two or those two and a few more friends, we want them to have many opportunities to share memories and history.  When a little girl becomes a young woman, it’s her friends who often help her stay the course and remember what’s important.

 My girls, for their part,  had been asking me for weeks about having some friends spend the night.  Suddenly, I realized that the “slumber party circuit” was about to become an act at the Circus, and I had visions of my mom in the house I grew up in, standing in the living room doorway.  I don’t care how long you stay up as long as you don’t wake me up.   This would be my new role, and I warmed up to it quickly.  Like an idiot, I thought, A slumber party.  How fun!  I’ll get pizza, let them pick out some movies, spread all the sleeping bags in the living room floor.  No big deal.  I forgot, momentarily, that there is no such thing as “uneventful” at the Three Ring Circus.  I also forgot that despite my love for simplicity, I don’t know how to do anything on a small scale.  My mom had one little girl, I have two, and my mom is far more practical than I.  I, with my tendancy to want to surround myself with everyone I love (This makes one of my sister-friends laugh all the time.  She says I love everyone so much that I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t all love each other.:)), had trouble limiting my girls to three friends each for this event.  I kept thinking of other little girls we love.  I kept saying to myself, But what about _____________?  What’s one more?  Had it not been for the echos of Kevin’s voice competing with my own in my head (Are you CRAZY?!?), we’d have had more little girls to sleep over that night than our living room could hold.  As it was, we had eight little girls (including our two) camped out on the living room floor in their sleeping bags.

I actually thought that the little girls would be more high maintenance than the big girls.  I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that my big girl has trouble navigating through social situations and handling loads of sensory information.  Remembering what slumber parties were like for us as “neurotypical” girls, I hadn’t really thought about what a sleepover might be like for a little girl with autism.

About a year ago, Riley started telling me that she’d “lost some friends her age.”  That statement, for all it’s lexical awkwardness, weighed heavily on my heart.  How incredibly perceptive, I thought.  In truth, she has “lost” some friends her age.  The friendships Riley longs to have are lost in her own maze of confusion about language and social rules.  She must at times feel as though she is at one end, and the social connections she longs for are at the other.  Even so,  it’s not impossible for her to “find” amazing and wonderful friendships.  But the truth is that it’ll be a difficult, winding path, and there will be wrong turns, opportunities to double back and rethink, and as in all things that we have faced together, only God will ultimately be able to help her find her way to the other side.  For all of this inevitable effort, when Riley finds true friendships, they’ll be the best friendships the world has ever seen.

For Riley, this first slumber party had a shaky start.  Though she felt thrilled to have her friends with us, the complex social situation immediately overwhelmed her.  Since the blue skies and sunshine beckoned, I suggested that the girls go outside and enjoy the day’s deceptive warmth.  Riley stayed outside with her friends for five minutes and then came inside complaining that the insects were scaring her.  I can scarcely imagine how bugs sound to someone with hypersensitive hearing, but having heard Riley’s terrified screams many times, I can tell you that they are very loud and sound humongous.  I suggested that Riley sit on the porch (I’m thinking, At least she’ll be near her friends…), since her friends appeared to be having a great time together outside.  Realizing that they were missing the friend who had invited them, the girls soon appeared on the porch and sat next to Riley in the double rocking chair.  They tried really hard to engage her in conversation, but this too proved to be difficult for Riley.  She soon retreated from the challenge and came inside, where she insisted that she should help me in the kitchen.  I  suggested that the girls play a game together and enlisted Kevin’s help in getting them started.  He found a card game in the closet that he thought would be perfect, but while he was reading the directions, Riley pulled out some magnetic letters and started pairing them with letter cards.  An easy, mindless task like this one was a refuge for her, and I knew that.  The other girls, to their credit, tried hard to join in this play-project (which was way too young for all of them), but Riley openly resisted their participation.  I sighed.  How could I get the girls involved in something which would bridge all the gaps between them?  While Kevin read directions (he kept getting distracted by various things), the other girls gave up trying to connect with Riley and started playing with one of the dollhouses.

I had invited one friend of Riley’s who also has autism, but she had not arrived.  Riley meandered into the kitchen, once again insisting that she help me make cookies.  I urged her to play with her friends.  ”But Mommy, Akira forgot to come,” Riley said, and I realized that she hoped connecting would be less difficult with someone more like herself.  ”No, she didn’t forget.  She’ll be here.”

“When will she be here?”

“I don’t know, but she will be,” I answered, knowing that Riley longed for me to quote the exact hour, and hoping that what I told her was indeed the truth.  I willed Kevin to figure out the card game and engage all the girls in playing.

Meanwhile, Zoe and her friends took to each other and the slumber party with the ease that I remembered from my own childhood.  They had no difficulty falling into imaginary play and conversation with each other, giggling and tossing about new and fantastic scenarios with natural creativity.  I watched them outside playing and jumping together on the trampoline and felt jealous for Riley.  I wished things were as easy for her when it came to friendships.

Then Kevin looked up from the card game instructions and said, “Oh boy.  Here we go.  Zoe’s crying.  She’s on her way inside.”

Great, I thought.  Zoe said that one of the girls had accidentally fallen on top of her arm and hurt it.  The arm wasn’t bleeding, scratched, or red, so I thought drama was the most serious thing with which I was dealing.  I hugged her and reassured her until the tears ceased, and then I suggested that she go back outside and play with her friends.

“My arm still hurts, Mom.”

“It’ll be okay.  Maybe just a little sore.”

Zoe absorbed this, but instead of going back outside where her friends were still having a good time, she went upstairs.  She reappeared wearing her Hello Kitty pajamas and stretched out on the couch.

The fact that she’d chosen the couch over her friends was a very bad sign.  Had it been Riley, I’d have been less concerned, but Zoe is never one to turn down an opportunity to be with her best buddies.

I went back over to reexamine her arm and noticed immediately that it looked slightly swollen a few inches above her wrist.  The moment I tried to flip her arm over, she winced and crumpled into tears all over again.  Oh no, I thought.  This is very, very bad.

I called a pediatrician friend of ours and asked for his advice.  A few questions later, I had a phone number and directions in hand for Kevin and Zoe to meet our friend at the hospital for an x-ray.  ”But I don’t want my arm to be hurt,” Zoe cried.  ”It’ll feel better in just a little bit.  It will.  I don’t want them to take a picture of my arm.”  She shook her head as she spoke.

“Honey, you need to go with Daddy and do this so we can be sure your arm will be okay.”

Zoe’s friend Nora sat beside her, holding the hand that wasn’t hurt.  She had not left Zoe’s side for a moment since she’d discovered that Zoe had more than just a minor injury.  We could all take a lesson from that show of support, I thought.  ”Do you want a friend to go with you?”

Zoe nodded slowly, bending her head in Nora’s direction.  ”I want Nora to go with me.”

“Nora?  Will you go with Zoe?” I asked.

Nora didn’t hesitate but immediately started looking for her shoes.  ”Yes, I’ll go.”

Together they left on their own adventure.  The first thing Zoe said after her broken arm had been confirmed and splinted by our good friend and they walked back in the door?

“Mom!  Nora and I got to ride down the hall together at that place in one of those chairs with the wheels!”  A true friend always knows just how to turn a terrible situation into something bareable (and even fun) just by sharing in the experience.

So, while Kevin, Nora, and Zoe were off at the hospital, I was at home trying to finish my cookies.  Riley helped me.  Her friends played with each other.  Zoe’s other friends played with each other.  Finally, Riley’s friend Akira arrived.  

Riley loves Akira.  She was so excited to see Akira that she laughed, and grinned, and moved all over the room.  Then, suddenly and without explanation, she left (where was she going?).

Akira’s mom and I chatted; I pulled cookies out of the oven; Akira toured the room picking everything up and putting it back down, asking a million questions.  Adam rolled balls and toys down the stairs.  I put in a movie for the kids.  ”Will you stop talking?” the other older girls kept asking Akira.  ”We can’t hear.”  How ironic, I thought.  The gal with the communication disability is talking too much.  The little girls watched two minutes of the movie, asked me when Zoe would return, and left the room to play their own game.  Somewhere in the midst of all of this, Zoe returned and Akira’s mom left.  Riley reappeared with multiple braids and dozens of tiny beads in her hair.  She’d just spent about half an hour trying to get her long blonde locks to look exactly like Akira’s.  

Riley and Akira are so much alike, but since they are both autistic, they both have trouble making connections even with each other.  It is fine for them to occupy the same space,  but they both remain restless and unsure exactly how to engage each other or anyone else.  The entire evening, the four bigger girls were like separate ships sailing on a pond.  On occasion, two of the girls sailed together, but then their boats would smack against each other and they’d move apart again.

When Zoe returned, the four little girls took up right where they left off.  Not one argument threatened their solidarity.  After supper, they curled together in their sleeping bags, four heads together so that they could whisper.  

Riley and her friends struggled to find all the elements they needed for cozy sleeping.  Some were missing sleeping bags or pillows, some were unwanted in the spots they had chosen.  Finally, we thought we had them all settled, and Kevin and I went upstairs.  Ten minutes later, one of the older girls came and knocked on our door, complaining that the other girls were being too loud.

Exhausted, I sat there trying to remember if there was ever a time when my friends and I had tattled on each other for being too loud at a slumber party.  I had not wanted to police the girls and their friends.  I had wanted to reserve the “quiet down” command for extreme noise.  I had hoped to just let them have their fun.

Reluctantly, I went back downstairs and asked the girls to whisper.  I think the problem for the older girls had two sources.  One of the girls, the one most used to friendship and sleepovers, had injured her closest social equal with a lack of sensitivity.  Another of the girls, who desperately wanted to engage the others, had chosen obnoxious tactics to get their attention.  Reluctantly, I remembered the times when one or two of my friends and I spent our slumber parties in tears.

No sooner had I settled back into my retreat with Kevin, then there came another knock at the door.

“The girls are still being loud.  I can’t sleep.”

Ah, it’s going to be a long night.

Before the night was out, one of the older girls had gone home.  I couldn’t believe it was one of the older girls and not one of the younger ones.  I wish I could give you a window into the next morning, when we got seven little girls + Adam ready for church and loaded up the vehicles.  Someone in the foyer at the church building saw our group file in and asked if we were starting a preschool.:)

As I was telling some of our friends about the slumber party and my surprise that the older girls were actually more difficult, one of them quipped, “That makes sense.  They’re becoming women.” 

I held up my Bible and gestured in his direction.  ”You know, this Bible is very thick and hard…”

Looking back on it, I think our friend is right.  What sort of journey is it that women must endure before we find our way to friendship?  As little girls, we start off so solid.  Loving each other comes so easily.  We can laugh together, dream dreams, accept each other as we are, appreciate all the special things that are so readily visible in each other.  Then, we get a little older and start clumping into exclusive groups.  We forget how to get along, we misplace our priorities, we forget the value of our friendships.  Almost every woman I know has been through a time (some I know are still there as adults) when she wondered if she would ever have true friends or be valued by her peers for every detail that makes her unique.  What is it about figuring out who we are that causes us to damage each other in the process?  Most of us (but unfortunately not all of us) at some point figure out the value of our sisterhood.  We finally understand that we don’t need to be—don’t want to be—exactly alike,  and that our friendships with other women can sustain us through broken bones and broken hearts.  We finally reach the point when we love the friend who always talks too loud because she talks too loud, and the one who is awkward and slightly obnoxious we come to love because she is always a little off beat.  When we finally figure out how much we need each other, we make it back to solidarity.  In adulthood, after all that inevitable difficulty, our friendships become the best the world has ever seen.

A few weeks ago, I took the kids to see the eye doctor.   Other than the trip I made to the pediatric ophthalmologist with Riley when she was three, this was our first circus-wide “grand adventure” with the eye doctor.

First, you should know that the pediatric ophthalmologist we saw when Riley was three was absolutely amazing.  I remember thinking, “This frustrated three-year old can hardly speak or follow directions.  I’m not even sure how much she understands when I talk to her.  She’s afraid of noises and reacts to all new people by putting them behind an iron wall on the other side of which exists only herself and the toys she is silently lining up in rows.  How in the world is this guy going to figure out how well she can see?!”  Skeptical doesn’t even touch how I felt about the appointment, but the school system would not proceed with the evaluation until we saw this guy.  So, we went.

I walked into Dr. Board’s office and could not believe my eyes.  The kids’ side of this office looked like every child’s dream.  There were trees growing out of the walls, play houses with fully-equipped child-size kitchens, beautiful fish tanks, racks of books, a kid-sized grocery store in the corner (it’s awning was built into the ceiling), and baskets and baskets of toys.  I felt like I was visiting the Marbles Museum in miniature.  Instantly, I felt a little more at ease.  I knew just by looking around the waiting room that this doctor knew a thing or two about how to relate to children.  Still a little concerned that autism would derail this man’s expertise,  I waited anxiously while Riley went nuts exploring Adventure Land.

In the office, Dr. Board seemed completely unruffled by his failed attempts at eliciting appropriate responses from Riley.  I discovered that pediatric ophthalmologists (or at least this one) have a plethora of amazing tricks with which to expertly glean information from nonverbal children.  A bird I had not seen when we walked in the room cuckooed and flew out from the wall.  Lights danced on the ceiling, invisible bells tinkled, hidden toys popped out of interesting places, and Riley was very happy and very, very cooperative.  In half an hour, Dr. Board had thoroughly examined her eyes, filled out the forms for the school system, and sent us packing.

So, when Kevin and I agreed with the pediatrician’s suggestion that it was time to begin annual eye exams for the kids (Kevin did get his first pair of glasses when he was in the third grade.), I wasn’t overly concerned.  In fact, I was all ready to make three appointments with Dr. Board and call it done.  Then Kevin went to see his eye doctor.

Now, Kevin’s eye doctor is not a bad guy or even a bad doctor, but pediatrics are decidedly not his area of expertise.  That is not what he told Kevin.

During Kevin’s eye exam, he asked a simple question.  “How old should kids be when they have their first eye exam?”

This launched quite a discussion about our kids, their ages, their eyes, and their idiosyncracies.   “Oh bring them in,” Kevin’s doctor said blithely.  “Kids are no problem.”

“Well, our oldest two are autistic, so I think my wife is just going to take them to the pediatric opthalmologist she used a while back.”

“Listen, I started out working with special needs kids.  I worked in a school for the blind and disabled for years.  It’s where I met my wife, actually, and she teaches autistic children.  Well, she teaches a trainably mentally disabled class, but a lot of those kids have autism on top of everything else.  Really, bring them in.  I’ve worked with special needs kids for years.  It’s my specialty.  Not a problem.”

It was a problem.

Kevin naturally thought that since he’d been seeing this doctor regularly since we moved to Raleigh, and since his doctor seemed to know so much about special needs kids (“His wife even teaches some kids who have autism.”), we should give him a shot first.  I was reluctant, but agreeable.  Maybe this guy had a special room for kids or something that was as amazing as Dr. Board’s Wonderful World of Toys and Special Effects.

He didn’t and it wasn’t.

I had even talked this whole thing up with Zoe, who is always immediately skeptical about doctors.  She had thoroughly interrogated me, repeatedly squeezing in “And he’s not going to give me a shot?” everywhere possible in the conversation.  “No, no,” I’d said.  “It’s going to be fun.  He’ll get you to look at all kinds of neat things that pop out from the wall and bounce up under your feet, lights on the ceiling…Zoe, it’ll actually be a lot of fun.”

“And he’s not going to give me a shot?”

So, the waiting room in Kevin’s eye doctor’s office consists of six chairs crammed too close together in a tiny alcove.  The space is all dedicated to shiny, breakable displays featuring all the latest in brand name eye glasses.  I sat elbow to elbow between two very sweet elderly men, who didn’t complain once despite all the times the kids stepped directly on their toes or pressed hands on their thighs for balance as they engaged in animated competition to be the person allowed to plop his or her rear square on top of the stack of three clipboards I  held in my lap.  I alternated between trying to write our life’s history in triplicate on the clipboards and refereeing the contest.  Intermittantly, I’d convice them to squeeze into an unoccupied corner or sit on my feet while I scrawled dates and checked boxes.  I’m not sure if Adam actually had to go to the bathroom or just finally got tired of the sensory nightmare in the alcove, but when he asked, I pounced on the opportunity and locked all four of us in the bathroom for a few minutes (Where, I might add, there was just one toilet.)

When we walked out, my papers were filled out, and the assistant waited to take us back to the exam area.  The assistant was very kind, and had no problem at all getting Riley and Zoe to look into the diagnostic machines and the neat camera that took  digital images of their retinas.  Other than having to repeat, “Look straight ahead, Sweetie” and “Look at the window, look at the window” over and over, she really didn’t have to work too hard to get what she needed from the girls.  Adam was an entirely different story.

When she said, “Look straight ahead,” Adam looked straight ahead, just not into the machine. When she said, “Look at the window, honey, look at the window,” Adam started looking around.  I could see the way he was wrinkling up the space between his eyes, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.  Okay, so where’s the window? She had no idea that making such a request of a literal, autistic boy in a windowless room would create an extremely frustrating situation for him.  He’s a smart kid.  It was clear to him, having watched his sisters, that he was supposed to look into the machine, but the window?  And the machine made this obnoxious clicking noise which made Adam move backward to investigate it more closely.  Then he noticed the monitor she was looking in and wanted to see what she could see.  Adam had no difficulty looking into the machine.  The problem was that she wanted him to look a certain way, and all of her directions were just extremely confusing to him.  No amount of gentle direction on my part seemed to help her to guide Adam in a way that made sense to him.

Then we went to the exam rooms.

In this doctor’s office, there is no such thing as a kids’ exam room.  The room we walked into was decked out in all the muted gray and tan it could stand, and the only toy to be seen was a bland brown dragonfly attached to the ceiling above the exam chair (So that they could say, “Just look at the dragonfly” while they put dilating drops in the eyes.).  Adam sat on my lap, while Riley had her eye exam.  She did an excellent job.  I marveled at the young girl she’s become.  She was completely at ease and followed the doctor’s instructions without hesitation.  Before we entered the room, I’d been told out of her hearing that the diagnostic tests  showed Riley to be mildly far-sighted, but that the doctor would see how she fared in the actual exam.  I had deliberately not told the doctor that Riley is also autistic, because many times now she can handle herself well enough without having any extraordinary measures taken on her behalf.  I’ve also had plenty of experiences with doctors who hear the word autistic and immediately stop trying to talk to my children.  These particularly uninformed professionals then just start rudely doing things to the kids without explaining what they are doing, and the kids (right on cue and also for obvious reasons) become extremely agitated.  So, I waited to see how Riley could do on her own.

“Do you think you need glasses today?” The doctor asked her, while examining her eyes.

This is going to be interesting, I thought.  “Yes,” Riley said simply.

“Why?  Do you have trouble seeing up close or do you have trouble seeing far away?”

“I have trouble seeing up close,” Riley said immediately.

The doctor spun his instruments around in front of Riley’s face and started trying different options.  “Is this better or is this better?”

“The second one is better,” Riley said.

“Is this better or is this worse?”

“Worse.”

And so it went between the two of them.    Another assistant came and got Zoe and took her to another exam room.  I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to know that one of my children will be able to handle an exam like that and not have to worry.  I sat there thinking, Wow.  This feels remarkably normal. And then, Adam was bored.  While the doctor explained that Riley had answered his questions exactly as he would’ve predicted based on his initial diagnostic tests, Adam decided to get the party going.  He started beating out a distinct rhythm on the office wall.

“No, don’t hit the wall.  It makes the eye charts vibrate,” the doctor told him.

So, Adam looked at the mirror on the wall, reaching toward it as he danced.

“Don’t touch that mirror,” the doctor said.  Then, looking at me, he said, “Each one of those mirrors is worth over $200.  They’re very expensive.”

What a far cry from the Wonderful World of Toys and Special Effects, I thought.

I smiled at Adam and beckoned him to come back over and sit in my lap.  The doctor talked and talked and talked, explaining that since Riley had said she had trouble seeing up close he thought she could use some reading glasses for doing school work and working on the computer.

Then, he asked Adam to sit in the chair.  “So, what’s unusual about Mr. Adam?” He asked me.

That’s a diplomatic way to ask, I thought.

I explained the situation, and he reiterated that he’d worked with special needs kids before.  No problem.

There is a difference between being comfortable with special needs children and being equipped to conduct an exam on them, and that difference quickly became apparent.  This doctor had absolutely zero magical ways to get my son to look where he should look or to make him feel at ease or to convince him that looking at the bland dragonfly and allowing drops to be placed in ones eyeballs is actually a good idea.

The exam was over almost as quickly as it began.  “Well, we didn’t find out much today,” the doctor said.

How illuminating, I thought.

“My philosophy is that at least if we don’t create an uncomfortable memory for our special children (OUR special children?!), maybe they will be more willing to allow us to do more next year.  Or, if you like, we can try again next week (Definitely not.).”

Realizing that our insurance pays for one exam per year and that diabetes makes this a particularly important exam for Adam, I immediately vowed that next year’s appointment (at least for Adam) would be made with Dr. Board.

As we left the exam room to pick out Riley’s glasses, Zoe came trotting out of the one next door.  Apparently she is only very slightly far sighted and needs no glasses, as yet.  Adam?  Hmm…well…he’s definitely not blind.

On the way home, Zoe blurted (in a very accusatory tone), “Mom?  Why did you tell me that would be fun?!”

“Umm…well…I thought it would be.”

“I didn’t think that was fun at all.  Those drops in my eyes were hot.”

“Yea.  Well, I’m sorry.  I took Riley to a different eye doctor a long time ago and it was fun.  I thought this might be fun too.”

There was a long, pregnant pause from the interrogator in the back seat.

“Mom, did you think that was fun?!”

Ah, well.  I think next year maybe I’ll take all three of the kids to see Dr. Board.

(If Kevin had taken this picture, there would be no red eyes.  Obviously, this is my amateur work.:))  Isn’t she beautiful?:)

When Riley walked out of school today, she looked like this:

She walked all the way to the van like this, laughing so hard she could hardly stand up straight.  She got in, buckled up, and said (still laughing), “Mom, I look like a blueberry muffin.”

“Laughter is the spark of the soul.”  I have no idea who said that first, but I just love that quote.  Here at the circus:), we love to laugh.  That’s not to say that we don’t also have our fair share of frustration and tears too (it goes with the territory, after all), but we love those moments when we are laughing so hard that we’re holding our sides, tears are running down our faces, and every so often, when laughter puts us on the floor and three laughing children are climbing on top of us.

When Mom and Dad are here, Riley will plop down on Mom’s lap and say, “Grandma, let’s laugh.”  Those two start goofing off, and before we know it, they can’t look at each other without bursting into loud hee-haws. Together, they’re the picture of Mary Waldrip’s  definition: “A laugh is a smile that bursts.”  Riley and Mom laugh so hard for so long that they are both out of breath.  Then, Riley will look askance at Mom, her mouth curling uncontrollably and trembling at the corners until she cannot stand it anymore.  Finally she’ll look Mom straight in the eyes and give up, a loud “Pffff” escaping from her lips just before the laughter starts all over again.

When Mom’s not here, Riley will ask to sit in my lap and laugh.  I’ll hug her and we’ll be silly, and she’ll giggle, but nothing like that I-can’t-stop-laughing kind of laughing she does with Mom.  Finally, she’ll sigh and say something like, “Mom, I just want to see Grandma.”

Recently, I found a t-shirt that I plan to order for Adam.  On the front, it reads Go ahead and laugh… , and then on the back it says I think you’re weird too. In fact, maybe I need one of those t-shirts too.  It reminds me of another quote I love, “You laugh at me because I am different, but I laugh at you because you are all the same.”  I can’t tell you the number of funny looks special needs families get from those who haven’t walked a mile in our shoes.  In fact, among ASD families, all one must mention is The Look and we all nod appreciatively.  Once upon a time, I hated The Look.  Within that one Look was all the disdain, misunderstanding, and appalled thoughts I needed to witness for a lifetime.  Whenever I saw The Look on the face of a stranger, I was forced to remember that motherhood had not exactly lived up to my earliest expectations.  That was before I learned to laugh about our life.  Now, when I see The Look, I just smile and keep on going, wishing I was wearing that t-shirt so that I could give them a nod and a wink and just turn around and walk away while they read I think you’re weird too plainly written across my back.  You know, as my daddy spent our childhood years telling us, “There are worse things to be than weird.  In fact, if you look at what the majority is up to, you might decide that it’s actually even better to be on the weird side of things.”

My children have taught me to have a sense of humor about myself.  They taught me this lesson the way that crazy people used to teach children to swim:  Into the water you go, kid.  Now, sink or swim. I have children who do not intuitively understand social rules, so it comes down to this:  Their behavior is often going to be either deliciously eccentric and hilarious or miserably embarrassing.  Okay, sometimes it’s both, but most of the time these days,  I just laugh out loud and “go with it.”

In fact, I consider it a great blessing that my children help me find so much in life to laugh about.  Here are just a few examples:

Sometime this past year, we were walking through Target and Riley saw a heavy-set woman looking closely at something on a shelf as we passed.  ”MOM,” she said very loudly, “WHY IS THAT WOMAN SO BIG?”  I have never pushed a cart so quickly away from an aisle.  I was jogging on tip toes, bouncing my way through the store.  I motored us somewhere distant and empty—the auto accessory aisle (every flavor, shape, and size of air freshener you can imagine to hang from your rear view mirror) and explained carefully that there are some things that, while they may be factual, are things that people do not appreciate hearing.  Riley looked at me blankly.  To her, it was incomprehensible that a fact like someone’s size could be any more unpleasant to acknowledge than their eye or hair color.  If only we all saw each other (and ourselves) the way that Riley sees everyone.  She loves every person she meets exactly as they are.  The details are just facts, neither bad nor good, and she feels absolutely no need to recast another person in her own image.  No wonder a person like that doesn’t understand why some of the rest of us are so sensitive.

I’ve mentioned a time or two before that Adam will walk up to a complete stranger and greet him or her by tugging quickly on one of their ears.  Once, we were in a travel plaza stopping for a bathroom/snack break with the kids during a long trip.  The lady at the cash register happened to be kneeling, searching for something in a cabinet below the cash register, close to the floor.  When Adam walked over to her and yanked on her ear, she nearly had a heart attack on the spot.  I think she thought he was about to threaten to rip her ear off if she didn’t hand over all the money.:)  We apologized for scaring her, and to her credit, she was very gracious about it.

Adam also believes it is his personal and specific duty in life to open every single microwave or oven on the planet the moment any sort of beeping happens in conjunction with said device.  He appears out of nowhere, as though he is equipped with an amazing radar that hones in specifically on the beeping mechanisms in food preparation devices.  He is also extremely afraid of the grinder on our coffee pot.  If I am just near the coffee pot and I touch it (to wash it or wipe it off), he gets extremely irritable, grumbles, “TURN it ON! (In a tone which absolutely without a doubt communicates, “Here you go again, turning that thing on!  What am I going to do with you people?!”),” then runs upstairs and slams his bedroom door.  He will not come out until much later, when he is sure that the grinder is off.  So, when Adam is really, really getting on my nerves, I just walk over to the coffee pot and wipe it off.:)  Call it what you want, but I call it creative parenting.

Just the other day, Zoe saw a man smoking a very long cigarette.  It was dangling so far out of his lips that I thought at any second he was going to lose hold of it and burn something.  He was sitting in his car as we walked by, and Zoe turned to me and said, “Mom, why is that man blowing on a candle?”

Since Riley is still trying to figure out how to be funny on purpose, she often tries out her jokes on Kevin to see if he will appreciate them.  A few days ago, she walked in the kitchen while Kevin and I were cleaning up after breakfast and blurted, “Daddy is a little banana peel that fell in someone’s eye,” then she broke into a giggling fit.  Kevin and I both lost it immediately (Kevin joked that I found it entirely too funny:)) because Riley’s jokes have never before contained so much detail.  She’d obviously be working on that one a while.

Believe it or not, for all the humor I find wrapped up in the blessing of living “with the circus,” I find even more in my own ridiculous flub dubs.  That’s definitely something God has given me as I’ve gotten older and have settled into my “extraordinary” circumstances.  I used to take myself way too seriously.   These days, I know that I am the most fallible person alive and that I do and say more than my fair share of off-beat, scatterbrained, and down right funny things.

In fact, the other day one of my sister-friends (who follows the blog) told me that I should write about some of the funny things I do and say, since I’m always sharing funny stories about my kids.  In honor of her, I’ll have to tell you what I said one night while Kevin and I were watching American Idol.

I am not sure if I was just brain dead (Motherhood does that to a person…every night when the sun goes down.  We all literally turn into Zombies.) or being scatterbrained (Yep.  Motherhood.), or just trying to do several other things while watching the show (Right.  Motherhood.  See, we can blame everything on our kids now, because they’re going to blame everything on us later.:)), but I wasn’t watching when Jesus Valenzuela was initially introduced.  If you click the link, you can watch the audition video.  I looked up at the moment when they showed his family crowded outside the door waiting on him.

Completely missing the accent mark above the “u” in his name, I quickly took in all of their signage.  We love Jesus!  Jesus is going to Hollywood!

“Wow,” I said aloud (later I would regret that), “This family really has a lot of faith.  (pause…still not completely processing….Jesus is going to Hollywood???)  I like it.”

A smooth grin slid across Kevin’s face.  “Honey, his name is Jesus.”

About one thing (and maybe just one thing), Shirley Maclaine was right.  “The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.”

This morning, Riley participated in her first Upward basketball game.  There were tears.

When we arrived at the gym, the coach had taken the team into a room for some last minute cramming.  The first thing that occurred to me as we walked in the door was, “Wow.  Everything is so quiet.”  The girls were listening intently to the coach, who quietly pointed at his clipboard and gave them instructions.  ”Now, when I say…”

Well, the room was quiet.  I missed the last part of what the coach was telling the girls.  As Riley sat down, I gestured toward a row of chairs in the back and nudged Adam and Zoe in that general direction.  Adam had brought along what I like to call his “mobile office” for the game.  He had one of his favorite Bibles, his Magnadoodle, and a book.  For some reason, Adam did not like the idea of sitting down in that room with its padded chairs, classroom carpet, and white board.  When Adam is feeling argumentative, he’s like a cross between an irritable old man and a Gremlin.  ”SIT down!”  He grumbled.  ”Sit in the chair!  Read your book!  SIT down!”  Kevin looked over at me, thinking what I was already thinking.  I grabbed my purse and our coats, and turned my irritable little old man around, nudging him out the door.

The funny thing is, when I asked him to sit down against the wall in the hallway, he did so without complaint.  He got right to work, locating favorite stories in his Bible and writing chapter and verse on his magnadoodle.  My job: to identify aloud the numbers he wrote for me.  Zoe sat with us, wondering continually if Riley and her team were almost finished.  I chuckled when Adam closed his Bible and neatly printed an “L” on the magnadoodle.  ”L,” I said when he showed it to me.  He locked eyes with me, giving me a look very close to the one that I give him when he’s not saying something I know he knows how to say.  Finally, he sighed.  ”Ulllll,” he said, as though I was just supposed to know that he had suddenly switched the game and I was supposed to give him letter sounds instead of letter names.  He erased the “L” and neatly printed a “Y.”  Just as I opened my mouth to say “yuh,” the Rattlers filed out, fresh from their pre-game cram session.  I noticed immediately that Riley was the tallest girl on her team.

We all made our way into the gym, which was very different than what I’d imagined.  It’s basically a multi-purpose room which I am sure looks more like an auditorium for worship on Sunday morning.  So in place of squeaking shoes and shiny gloss on the floor (Kevin pointed out that this type of floor would be much too expensive for a church.  Yea.  Hadn’t thought of that.), think deep thumping and bright lights, multiple video screens, and big stage.  On the stage, a squad of cute cheerleaders in bright green uniforms sat cross-legged with their hands on their hips.  ”Here we go, Upward, here we go!”  They chanted.  I noticed a big wooden cross on the wall behind them.  A single row of chairs placed in the middle separated the room into two courts.  Instead of posters on the wall, think flags.  Dozens of flags lined up side by side labeled with the names of the countries they represent (Maybe countries where they have missions teams?).  A few of the labels were crooked and the numbers of the flags uneven, something I am sure my little “Mr. Monks” noticed right away.  Anyway, there was indeed quite a lot of sensory information to process, just a bit different than what I imagined when Kevin told me about Riley’s first practice.  

The girls lined up facing the opposing team, so cute in their shiny green uniforms.  I couldn’t hear what the coaches said by way of introducing them to each other, but just after that Riley’s coach started the Rattlers off with a simple pre-game drill.  They formed two lines, one shuffling defensively and the other dribbling toward the basket.  The girl who dribbled was meant to pass to the one in defensive stance, who would then dribble a few times and take a shot.  The girl who originally had the ball was meant to become the rebounder under the basket.  Imagine trying to do this drill if you’ve never played basketball, it’s your first game with a group of people you barely know, you’re a little nervous, and you have mild dyspraxia.  Come to think of it, I think I might have mild dyspraxia.:)  When Riley’s turn came, she stood there with the ball for a few minutes and then bounce-passed it too hard to her teammate, who was so surprised that she failed to catch it.  No problem.  Riley picked it up and once again bounce-passed it too hard at (yes, it really was at as opposed to to) her partner in the drill.  After that, she seemed unsure how to finish.

Kevin’s such a good dad.  He walked over there and stood beside her for the rest of the warm up (I love that Upward is so relaxed that he can do this!), coaching her one-on-one through the drill.  I noticed that Riley instantly felt more at ease.

The first time Riley entered the game (and the neat thing about Upward is that everyone gets to play, no matter how skilled they may be), she just ran back and forth, following the rest up the girls up and down the court.  Well, I say ran, but in Riley’s case it was really more of a shuffle-skip-shuffle skip movement that looked much more like dancing in a straight line than actually running.  I could tell that she was overwhelmed trying to figure out exactly where she was supposed to be.  The coaches were urgently calling for the girls to move across the midline on the court, get down the court for defense, and get under the basket for rebounds.  At one point, one of Riley’s equally confused teammates, a beautiful, petite little girl of Indian descent, decided just to stand at one end of the court under the basket.  She folded her hands together, as though she had decided she was tired of trying to figure out where to go.  Riley saw her, ran over to where she was, and copied her stance.  I think Kevin and both of the coaches stood up at one time and called their names, pointing toward the other end of the court.  Riley ran back out to the middle, looking at her dad the whole time.  Then she stopped, put her both hands on her face, and started sobbing.  I was immediately thankful that Kevin had chosen to sit with the team instead of across the room where I sat with Adam (whose favorite part of this whole thing was clapping for everyone as he “worked”) and Zoe (who mostly just wanted to know when she could have a snack).  Riley ran over to Kevin and climbed up on his lap.

“I just want to go sit with Mommy,” she wailed.  ”My legs are tired.  My eyes are tired.  I just want to sit with Mommy!”

Kevin is so good with the kids in situations like this.  Even though his heart was breaking for her, he knew it was better for her to persevere.  ”Let’s just wave at Mommy,” he told her.  I returned the wave enthusiastically, wanting desperately to scoop my tall blond baby up in my arms and dry her tears.

“You can do this,” Kevin told her.  ”It’ll be okay.  Just have fun.  Don’t worry.  You can do this.”‘

The second time Riley joined the girls on the court, I noticed that rather than just running back and forth, she actually tried to catch the ball.  Progress.  Unfortunately, her catch was clumsy and the ball flew into her face and smacked her in the nose.  More tears.  She ran to Kevin.

“Daddy,” she cried.  ”I wanted to catch it.  I tried, but I didn’t catch it.  The ball hit me in the nose.”

This time, Kevin said it seemed that she was actually more embarrassed than overwhelmed.  Our gorgeous free-spirited girl, made shy by the newness of the experience, had tried a courageous leap and felt that she had failed.

Kevin hugged her.  ”Riley, you’re doing such a great job!  Don’t worry about it.  Just go out there and have fun.  You’re doing great.”

The third time Riley went out on the court, she stayed the entire period.  She reached enthusiastically for the ball and seemed less confused about where to run.  This time, she finished the game without making a rebound or a shot.  I don’t know if it’ll happen in her second game, her third game, or her fourth, but I am certain that by the end of the season, Riley will have had that ball in her hands many times.

After the game, the girls sat in the hallway with their coach, who presented each girl with a star representing something positive about her performance in the game.  This time, the coach gave Riley a white star.

“This is the star for Christlikeness,” he said to her.  ”Despite some adversity, you persevered and stayed in it for your team.”  Riley seemed encouraged.

As the team meeting broke up, I called to Riley, reaching out for her.  ”Come here, you.  I am so proud of you,” I said.   “You did a GREAT job.”  I don’t know when Riley figured out what “I’m proud of you” means, but she definitely understands those words well now.  She beamed at me.  Sometimes I think I forget how precious those five words are to her, though I try hard always to speak the love I have for her with as many different words as I can find.

As we were leaving, it occurred to me that Riley’s life is a clear testimony to God’s words through Paul in Romans 5:

“…we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; character, hope.  And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us (Romans 5: 3,4).”

When we pulled into the driveway, a conversation ensued about what would happen during the remainder of our day.  Riley said, “Daddy, can we play basketball after rest time?”