7.19.2003

Major freakout from the boy today. Took him up to SF to get his hair done by Ab, the world's most fabulous stylist/doula (she helped birth both our babies and so doesn't mind trying to tame their hair). He would have nothing to do with it. Took one look at the clippers (used in every single haircut he's ever had) and starting sobbing. Brandished madeleines & chocolate chip cookies held no sway. Finally had to take him back home still sporting his grown out rockabilly boy 'do (it's now a combo rockabilly/bowl cut--very attractive).

Rest of the day consisted of more funky behavior--supreme hyperactive nuttiness, including more uncharacteristic handflapping, and wacky vocalizations non-stop. I took him for a walk down our street, and can say that for the first time he was acting oddly enough that he couldn't 'pass.' Seymour says it's the heat, as Isobel is on her own behavioral bender. I think it might be chocolate/sugar. But I hope it's not.

See, we're in the middle of doing all those test to see if he meets the criteria for biomedical intervention. For the uninitiated: some autistic kids' symptoms have been found to be linked to dietary causes, usually casein (a milk protein) and/or gluten (a wheat protein). Other foods can be problematic, too, for instance--chocolate, bananas, soy, corn--to the point where the child's daily meals require intensive monitoring and production. As mentioned before, we are not super-peppy organized parents. We are on the happy-go-lucky, we're late for school and you haven't eaten breakfast so let's pick up a donut on the way end of the spectrum. So, while we will take on the specialized diets if we really have to, I hope hope hope that all four of Leelo's tests return normal results. The meeting with our local DAN doctor is this Friday.

And oh, those tests! Not a one was pleasant. The hair sample required way too much hair, so to the keen-eyed our boy's head now appears slightly moth-eaten. The blood samples required larger draws than I would think ethical for a 31-pound little guy. The stool test required poring over and excavating samples from stinky diapers for two days straight. And the urine needed to be a 24-hour sample, so our little guy had to walk around with a pee bag stuck to his nethers for that period (afterwards he walked like he'd just gotten off a horse, since the removal of five back-to-back adhesive urine bags left his groin pretty raw). Poor guy!

Ah well. It is after 11. Hopefully I'll have better luck falling asleep tonight--last night Scabby the cat jumped on my head as I was falling asleep and blew out some sort of sleep circuit--I ended up stomping around upstairs until 5 A.M. (watching old Buffy episodes, attending to weighty and therefore unanswered email, tidying up kiddie clutter). Seymour was a dear and let me sleep until mid-morning, but I woke up to raging cramps, stuffy nose, barfy stomach (a week now--what is UP?) and sticky, enervating heat so today was not a happy day of action items and social achievements.

Our other cat, Pat of the idiopathic bladder condition, has taken to peeing on items left on the floor (he won't just pee on the floor, though, which I guess is a bonus). Anyhow, I have pointed this out to my partner several times, but I can see his workbag and it is sitting right in the heavy casualty zone (dispatched so far: 3 pairs of my shoes and $150 in books). Will I do anything about this? Hmm. Problem is that I can't remember even truly important things these days, so even if I intend to move the bag it might not happen. Memory holes example: yesterday my mom told me that my pilot brother JD was in a plane that suffered some sort of mechanical failure or explosion upon takeoff (no one was injured). I immediately forgot about it until this morning when I was searching through my address book and saw his entry. I immediately called and verified that yes indeed he was neither dead nor maimed, but by this point it'd been a good day or two. I am a bad bad sister, a bad bad cat and fish owner, and a tolerably competent mother. I think these are the right priorities but I've heard that some people don't make these choices.

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