Kiddlings Updates

BTW, upon re-reading many of my entries I sound whiney and depressed and mewly*. I do not feel that way. I feel tired yet wry.

Here is what my kids are doing. I will no longer make excuses for writing about them because if you have voluntarily read this blog for any length of time then you are a glutton for self-indulgent parenting dribble.

Iz: very inspired by her spy/chemistry camp. Spent all day yesterday conducting experiments with various juices, gelatin, etc. While I am not as disappointed by her camp as Badger was with Moomin's, I am annoyed that the kids did not actually get to power anything with the lemon-powered batteries they made yesterday (they completed the circuits with their tongues) and that they had to take the counselor's word for their being batteries. How fucking lame is that. Still, our girl comes home every day asking questions about chemical compounds whose names I couldn't remember if I tried, so that's all good. She seems in a better mood, generally, now that we're back from Hawaii.

Leelo had a fantastic session at the MYND Institute. Yesterday's evaluation of his imitation skills was two straight hours of exactly the kind of shit he spends all day doing with his therapists. He kicked ass! Imitating block structures, stringing beads in sequence, identifying verbs (e.g., "point to the baby that is sleeping"), etc. He didn't get some of the "ceiling" items, such as their spreading a group of objects in front of him and asking what their functions were, or completing phrases like "A stove is hot, a refrigerator is ___," but Supervisor M agrees that those are pre-K goals for next year.

I just wish they hadn't needed to use Goldfish crackers as bribe tokens. Twenty-four hours later and he's still a complete fucking nut. He was up yelling in his room until almost 10:30 P.M. It was worth it to get him to complete the study, though. Next week I will bring in our own bribes.

Mali has suddenly become an intelligent, rather than a merely sentient, being. She now does "patty cake" on command, has one all-purpose word ("mama"), and boogies to music. All in one day. I am pleased, because if she is a neurotypical baby then the next 12 months are going to be fun indeed, but it also marks the end of her lump stage and means more work/interaction for me, lazy git that I am.

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*"What is "mewling"? asked Seymour.

"That is the sound made by something that you stomped on and it isn't dead yet and it's crawling towards you," said I. Others might say it is the sound of hungry, fluffy little kittens, but I say only if you've stomped on them, etc.