Love My Friends

Badger: Cooked and delivered and hung out during dinner tonight.

Jo: Took on Iz for 9 hours on Saturday.

Ep: Braved a Sebastopol road trip with me, Leelo, and Mali (i.e., much Leelo duty) on that same Saturday.

Would not be surviving this without them.

I was supposed to have the invites for Mali's 2/20 welcoming ceremony mailed a week ago; they are printing out as I type.

Have 20+ responses for the babysitting ad; Haven't been able to respond to any of them yet. NIIICE. Bet they really want to come work for us now.

Iz is doing a weird dual response to our new life. On one hand she is being super polite and obedient and thoughtful and kind (to me at least; others might not see it), completing her homework nicely without supervision, giving me tons of hugs and kisses, and trying hard to be nice to Leelo. On the other she is being excessively needy re: my attention, especially at bedtime, and has been having foul bedtime accidents 3 years after being night-time potty trained. She says the latter is because she's too scared of the dark to get out of bed and use the pot. I told her that I'd much rather be woken up than clean stinky sheets and diapers.

Leelo is also a needy bed-time boy. Took an hour to get them both down tonight. And I swear that he's figured out that crying because he's sad makes Mommy pick him up and give him snuggles, so he's working that angle a lot.

Good Leelo language lately. At our friend's house in Sebastopol, he spied and obsessed over a tiny three-key piano. "It's a piano!," he kept saying. I thought it was good generalization because it certainly didn't look like any piano he'd ever seen.

At the same place, we showed him a picture of an owl and tried to get him to tell us what an owl said. He said "hoot hoot" but didn't seem all that enthusiastic about it. Instead, he asked us "What does a rooster say?" I wasn't sure that I'd heard him correctly--he never asks those kind of questions--and so repeated the question back to him. "Cock a doodle doo!" he crowed, happily.

Dr. P, our DAN doctor, called today. He said that 1) he doesn't think that a vitamin deficiency would explain Leelo's excessive oralness. He thinks it's a stim or coping behavior, and that 2) the next phase of our treatment is the B12 shots in the arse 3x/week for 5 weeks. Leelo's going to loooove that.

Seymour sent me this autism article from the NY times. I am going to recheck Mali's 1 to 2 month circumferences first thing in the morning.

Mali is cute as a bug and looks like a real baby now. Does a weird thing where her head is turned all the way to the left a lot. I think that's because she ends up in that position frequently when she's nursing in bed, even though I try to roll her onto her side.

Isn't this all fascinating. I am wiped. Got our friend Marroqui to come help out around the house for 2 hours this morning. She got so much done and I am five-foldedly grateful but it's so very much a drop in the ocean, as I told Badger.

How do Mormons ever do it? All those kids? Catholics? Anyone with more than two? Am I just completely inept?