Tessie's Sleep Study Results and A Name Change

I mentioned a few blogs back that I was going to change the blogs Facebook name, because I was trying to make everything match.

In the past I had changed the name and it had been a simple process.

But apparently times have changed.

I went to the about section of my Facebook page and put in the request, asking that it be changed to "Someday I'll Sleep."

Within five seconds it came back and said that it was denied. "Someday I'll Sleep" Facebook informed me, appeared to be a dishonest or misleading name.

"I know, I know, no ones ever going to sleep around here. "I muttered to myself, and then I filed an appeal, explaining that it was already the name of my Youtube channel which I had been using for nearly a year and that it just seems to fit what I write about more appropriately.

The appeal came back denied. Twice.

Thus I began to learn about changing Facebook page names in this day and age and the gradual process of changing the name piece by piece so that the change wasn't too radical. The fact that "I" was in it was also a red flag.

As it stands today it's finally "Someday Sleep Autism Blogs" and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to slip that "I'll" in there.

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In the meantime, I headed back to the children's hospital this weekend, for the thing I dread above all other children's hospital visits, a sleep study with Tessie. 

We got the call Friday afternoon, asking if we wanted to give up our December mid-week visit to come the next day, and I immediately said yes, we could find a way to make that work. 

"No, thank you, I don't need instructions. We've done this... I don't know how many times. A lot. Thank you. 7:30. We'll be there!" 

So we made the eighty mile drive, in the ice and cold and trudged across the bridge to the hospital, where Tessie attempted to lay siege to the enormous Christmas tree that they had placed in the middle of the play area, along with all the other toddlers who all seemed to think it was too beautiful not to touch. 

She realized early on that she was now big enough to make the rotating door spin, so she kept swinging by the front of the hospital, trying to make a break for it, while I scooped her up and brought her back to the place where we were waiting for the sleep study techs to come and get us, which was of course, next to the tree with all its temptations. 

Then it was finally time to head back to the sleep clinic and we were tucked into our own little room. I turned on Moana, and pulled out a tiny soft mermaid ornament with a sequined tail that she'd decided she loved at Target, and the process of hooking her up to all the wires began. 

She screamed when they put the oximeter on her toe, like she hasn't worn an oximeter since she was six months old, for the past two years of her life, and it was a bumpy road from there, with moments of calm, and hysteria mixed in. 

The good thing was that she seemed to understand a lot of what I was saying. When I told her how good she was doing she calmed down a little. And the mermaid's sequined tail calmed her down even more. When I explained that she needed to keep the nasal cannula in she actually listened this time, after a few moments of tears, which was entirely unexpected. 

In the middle of the night she woke up, upset about the nasal cannula again, and this time stuffy after crying about it. 

"You can breath through your mouth Tessie." She shook her head no at me. 

"Yes you can. If you take that thumb out you can." She shook her head no, twice more.

I was elated at the response to my words, that she had apparently understood and in a few more moments she drifted back to sleep. That was amazing receptive language for her to understand.

All day Sunday and Monday I waited for a call.

If the study had been really bad I knew it would come fast. Maybe not on Sunday, I thought, but surely on Monday.

When I hadn't heard anything by five on Monday, I figured that I would hear something when a respiratory therapist got around to calling me in a week or so. 

And that was why, the next day, as I was about to pull into the parking garage at our doctor's office with Maggie, I was surprised when I picked up my phone and I heard Tessie's pulmonologist on the other end of the line.

I thanked her for calling personally and we chatted for a moment about the weather. Monday had been very busy in the office with lots of very sick kids, after the holiday and with the weather, she said. Only desperate people would go out, in that weather. She had meant to call but hadn't been able to. 

Uh oh. 

This sleep study had been different from the last one. In good news Tessie does not have congenital central hypoventilation syndrome, the condition that the gene mutation that she had might cause. 

In other news, this sleep study painted a different picture than the last sleep study and did put her over the index back into qualifying for a monitor again (although she has somehow miraculously never lost hers). Her desats, which were below 89 for more than a minute, also now qualify her to be back on oxygen.

The first part didn't surprise me. It was what we'd been hoping and praying for. The second part did. 

I thanked her several times for calling and took Maggie in to her appointment trying to brainstorm creative ways to convince Tessie that wearing a nasal cannula every night from that point forward wasn't some horrible torture. 

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The medical supply company brought an oxygen tank this time instead of a concentrator. 

"She's on such a small amount tanks will work," the man explained. "And we'll just switch them out."

Yesterday after her first night back on oxygen she was extremely vocal at therapy, which is what we saw the last time she was on oxygen. When she woke up in the morning she started singing along with the PJ Masks song and said "day" in a perfect clear little voice. 

It was a brand new word.

And they're going to try to work with her at school on wearing her nasal cannula to see if they can convince her that it's a positive experience.

If anyone can do it, they can.

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And that is the latest in the goings on with baby Tess.

It is always an adventure with her. 

I did make two videos. 

The first is a lot of footage of her having a blast in the children's area of the hospital while I explain what our time there was like:

And the second is a more detailed description of the results: 

Today.

I mostly feel comfortable sharing this hear because I know my blog is tiny, that very few people who are local read it, and that it's extremely unlikely that anyone involved in todays accident will stumble upon it (especially because there are no names or locations given). Writing has always helped me make sense of things, and I really needed to write about today. 

Here goes...

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I have been stalking on of the local news channels Facebook pages all day, waiting for an update on a story. A man was hit by a car this morning, the story said. Will update later when we know more.

I refreshed the page a hundred times. Every five minutes I would check back in to see if some update had been added. 

I was able to see quickly that it hadn't been, by the time stamp at the top of the page, but I would still scroll down to make sure.

And then I would continue the prayer I had been chanting in my head since just before noon, which couldn't seem to get much past "please God, please God, please God."

Refresh. Check on Maggie who's home sick for an eleventh day. Clean something. Rinse. Repeat. 

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Paul was sick this morning, which is why he could stay home with Maggie, which is why I was able to leave the house this morning to go donate plasma after I dropped Tessie at school. 

I finished donating and nearly drove home, but at the last minute I took an exit and headed towards Dunkin Donuts to see if I could coax Maggie into eating one of her favorite foods. The child can go days without eating if nothing looks appealing, and being sick for almost two weeks hasn't helped that particular trait, and I knew donuts are something she nearly always loves.

After getting the donuts I stopped at the edge of the parking lot for a moment. If I  turned east I could use the money on my Starbucks app to get a treat for myself too... no. I needed to get home. I turned the car west towards the highway onramp. 

But I could stop and get an ice tea? No again. I told myself. Home. Now.

I went through two green lights before hitting a red at the corner where I needed to turn and head south. A truck pulled up in the turn lane beside me. A man waited to cross the street on my left, carrying groceries. 

I really didn't consciously notice him until he stepped out in front of my car. The light flashed for him to walk. He hadn't glanced at me either. His eyes were fixed straight ahead as he stepped off the sidewalk and headed towards the other side. 

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Someone is going to get hit here.

I thought the words to myself as he moved past the front of my car. 

I'd walked that same intersection many times pushing a stroller and in my head I'd rated it as one of the most dangerous in our little city. People would see you coming, but they'd continue to turn left, while you had the light telling you to walk. 

And it was always so busy, there was never a break in traffic. 

So the man stepped out, to make the cars stop, which we all should have done anyways. He had the right of way. 

I stopped. The man moved past me. I put my foot on the gas and the car started to move.  

When I saw the truck on my right coming up fast in my rear view mirror I turned my head. 

I saw them connect and I saw the man move through the air unnaturally. I saw groceries flying. And I saw the truck jolt to a stop. 

All I could think, was that I was thankful that I didn't have any children with me today, as I swerved off the side of the road and threw the car into park, dialing 911 and giving the cross streets, and asking them to come quickly, and then saying that I was going to try to help before hanging up the phone. 

I parked in the middle of a car dealership lot, and when I ran around the new shiny cars, to the place where a small crowd of men were standing around the half conscious man on the ground. Everyone had a phone in their hand. 

No one was touching him.

When I moved forward, someone said sharply that I needed to stay back and not move him. But all I could think was that if this was my father, or son, or husband I would not want him to suffer and maybe die here on the street with people standing over him with phones in hand, not offering comfort.

Someone should at least hold his hand, I thought vaguely as I moved between the men and found myself by his head, kneeling. 

Besides, eight years of lifeguarding had to have taught me something. All those first aid classes and drills putting people on backboards in eight feet of water was still somewhere back there, ricocheting around in my mind. 

I reached out, not quite sure what I meant to do, and found myself automatically stabilizing his head and neck as someone else brought a blanket and spread it across his body. I said anything reassuring I could think of even though, with the blood and foam coming from his mouth, the words felt like lies. Isn't that a sign of a punctured lung? I thought, but out loud I said, "You're going to be okay. They're almost here. Stay with me. Stay with me. Can you those sirens. They're going to take you to the hospital any second now. Don't try to get up. Just relax. Lay back. They're almost here."

We were so close to the hospital. A really good hospital. They just had to get him there.

He was regaining consciousness and starting to fight to sit up when the police arrived and said to keep holding his head, while they stopped the traffic that had been moving around us, and tried to keep him still. 

And then the ambulance was there, which was the sweetest sight I saw today, and two men jumped out of it, and one of them took over stabilizing his head and neck, and in moments he was on a backboard, and I was scooping up his groceries, and belongings and putting them inside the ambulance and then waiting in the snow, watching the cars fly by, to give a statement.

I realized as I started to drive that I had felt calm in the moment, but once I  started to drive away, I felt sick to my stomach. By the time I got home I was shaking and pale, replaying the moment of the crash over and over again, in my mind, hoping the man was okay. 

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A little after seven, after nearly seven hours of checking the news site, the update finally came. 

I'd been outside hanging Christmas lights in the freezing cold and snow to pass the time when they finally posted it.

The pedestrian, whose name I still don't know, is expected to survive. 

It is the best news. I can let out the breath that I've been holding.

I can finally put down my phone and stop clicking refresh every few minutes.

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And that is why I sat down to write.  Because writing has always been a sort of therapy for me. Once I write something down I can begin to let go of it. My mind can stop replaying it in circles.

Although I'm sure that update will play a big role in helping with that too.

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So that is... the story of my day. Or a piece of my day. 

Meanwhile, we have more or less been in survival mode here, as various sicknesses have gone through the house, which is the main reason I haven't managed to write much lately.

When Maggie is home sick I get very little done. 

Usually writing comes when everyone is asleep and with these rounds of illness I don't stay up much later than the kids.  Until today, that is. 

I do have a couple videos, completely unrelated to todays topic.

I'll write about little Miss Tess and all that she's doing in the very near future. 

But for now I'll leave you with these two videos:

And now it is finally time to go to sleep.

I think I've finally written myself into exhaustion.

And that is a good thing.

When Will the Decorations Go Up?

Tessie and Maggie are both officially sick, and Patrick has been home from school for the past three school days, mostly because he seemed to be on the verge of being sick, although he managed to recover Friday, just in time for one of his friend's birthday party on Saturday, which was fortunate, since he'd been obsessing over it all week.

And he had a blast.

Anyways...

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I've been thinking about Christmas decorations this week and when I'm going to drag them out of the garage to put them up.

I used to be a stickler for the Christmas Eve tradition. I've blogged about it before.

And it was a point of pride (one among many I guess).

Christmas Eve was when the tree and decorations traditionally went up and not a moment earlier, and that was when I was going to do it.

How could I possibly keep Advent and Christmas separate if my decorations were already out and up?

I'm audibly sighing as I type those words now.

Maybe it's because now, a decade after I first made that rule for myself, I find that preparing for Christmas during Advent has very little to do with the state of the physical decorations in my house.

Although I have found myself reflecting lately, on the pushing back of Christmas decorations earlier and earlier this year, to just after Halloween by a number of people that I know.  While I'm not joining in the decorating extravaganza (I'm making myself wait until the first week of December over here) I have to say that I think I understand it.

Or at least this is one of the motivations that I imagine for the earlier than ever decorations when I see them.

In a thousand different ways 2018 has been a brutal year.

I think that a lot of people crave that Christmas cheer right now and want a reason to celebrate, and to extend that celebration for as long as possible.

They're decorating and getting ready for Christmas.

Christmas 2012

I think that's a pretty wonderful thing to be excited about.

I won't criticize anyone for that. Even if it's November 1st.

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It was easier to hold off on decorations when I knew that they were likely to be smashed to pieces by a certain mermaid. Now that she's holding off on her destruction (that Dollar Tree Mantle Makeover for October lasted until we took it down last week) there's a chance that our Christmas decorations may actually survive through Epiphany, even if I do opt to put them up now. 

And in a way the excited cleaning and decorating is very much a part of the preparations, even if it isn't done at the very last minute. Which makes a little more sense with our lives now since that last minute decorating would be more than a little stressful, and in the end probably would just leave much of it half finished on Christmas Eve, since there would only be so much that two people could do in one night. 

Christmas 2017

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In totally unrelated news I made this video in answer to a question I was asked, elaborating on a phrase that I've used quite a bit when discussing eloping:

Tessie's Favorite Thing

This is quite possibly the best blog/vlog thing that I've ever made.

I just love it so much.

And it's 100% Tessie's doing.

Tessie's favorite thing to do to wind down at the end of the day is to sit down and play with her sequin pillow.

She might adjust the sequins for an hour. Or she might only do it for five minutes.

But more often, it's for long stretches, in which only one little finger is moving back and forth as she pushes sequins from one position to another.

She is so intent on what she's doing when she's moving around her sequins that I just love watching her work.

And I thought you might like to see it too.



She's also been doing a lot of waving and pointing, which is amazing.

And did I mention that when she goes to horse therapy she likes to look like she's a tiny doll on top of a big horse?

Because that's what she looks like:

She is the only kid who I've finished Christmas shopping for and it's because 2 out of her 3 presents are made with that same sequined fabric that she loves so much.

It just makes her so easy to shop for.

Birthdays, Snow, Scripts, and Name Changes

Patrick's birthday came and went and was a success!

He had school, because it wasn't on a weekend, so he got to see his friends.

When asked what cupcakes he wanted to bring he said PJ Masks, of course but then asked that there be Princess Cupcakes for the girls. The store didn't have princess cupcakes so he took a dozen pink Poppy Troll cupcakes with him instead, and they were a big hit.

And then he had a PJ Masks birthday party with our family at Chuck E Cheese after playing at the local science museum waiting for Mae to get done with therapy, that afternoon.

Both were lots of fun.

A certain someone did briefly try to make a break from the birthday party after the cake, I think because she was a little overwhelmed, and I was surprised that she was tiny enough to fit between the bottom of the booth divider and the floor (when she went down there I thought, "at least there's no where she can go"), which meant she nearly made it to the door, which was right on the other side of the wall of booths, and would have if I hadn't managed to catch hold of her boot. 

Oh well, it just added a little bit of extra excitement after the cake, and she went on to have a lot of fun playing games with the other kids after her attempted elopement.  Moving on...

Winter has arrived in Michigan and bundling up five kids to go out and play in the snow gives me a renewed admiration for any of the kids teachers. Especially the little kids teachers. I have no idea how going out to recess must work in a kindergarten or preschool classroom, where all that snow gear must take an hour to get on, based on how much help the 3-6 crowd around here usually needs with this sort of thing.

Even Patrick, who is getting pretty good at handling some of his snow gear, still needs helps with the trickier parts that he can't quite get on his own.

So it takes us about thirty minutes of prep time to get everyone ready to go outside.

And I don't open up the door to release the first kids into the cold, until everyone is ready, so that the first kids aren't complaining that they're cold and ready to come back in, just as the last ones are ready to go out and ready to play.

I've learned my lesson from years past.

However, this lesson doesn't make getting ready particularly fun, since the four year old was the first one dressed and must have asked "when are we finally going to go out" at least seventy five times, before I'd gotten Patch, and then Maggie, and then Tessie, completely bundled, from head to toe.

Thankfully Sadie can get ready entirely on her own.

I'd forgotten that one of Maggie's scripts, which I hadn't heard in an entire year, was "swim in the snow." She hadn't though.

Within ten minutes of coming outside, after reminding me that it had been too long since she'd had a shake at McDonald's and after we'd gone through that script enough times to convince her that I'd understood sufficiently, she announced that she was ready to swim in the snow and then went through her script about the Bubble Guppies swimming in the snow.

It was pretty great.

I love her memory and how she can call up a script that she hasn't used in a year in an instant, in the correct situation.

And I love that I got that script on camera. I've watched it back so many times. It's one of my favorites.



And lastly here is the video with the update on the sleep study and the surgery.

It basically tells the entire story of the sleep study and the ENT appointment and everything that led up to them, which was more or less in that last blog post, with less dramatic pictures because Youtube thumbnails kind of need that:



And I know I said that was the last thing but there's one very, very last thing.

A bit of blog house keeping if you will.

For the past several months I've been thinking really very hard about changing the name of my blog so that all my pages have to same name, so that I'm not operating under a bunch of different names, which can be kind of confusing.

I've always struggled with naming, well really anything that isn't a child.

Naming kids has always been easy for me.

Naming blogs and other blog like ventures? Not so much.

The last time I changed my blog name lots of people let me know they hated it.

And some people let me know they liked it.

Which was okay. You've got have a thick skin in blogging or vlogging or doing anything online and blogging has definitely been slowly helping me work on that for the last decade.

The thing was, I really wanted to like my blog name. And I liked the newer name more than the older one.

But when I finally came up with my vlog name I actually and really loved it.

It just clicked and felt right as a description for the last decade of my life since becoming a parent.

So I am going to be changing the blog name on Facebook to a name that matches the vlog (at least in part... it won't have "vlog" in it). And maybe I'll eventually add it to the banner here, since my blog here has been living without any sort of a name posted anywhere for quite a while.

And that's what I'm up to at the moment.

Six Years Old Today

Today Patrick is six years old. 

Later I'll have time to write more but I have to run to get ready to get him off the bus.

But I just started scrolling back through photos on the blog.

And I put together a post of pictures.

All but the very last one are pictures from the blog over the years. 

I can't believe how fast this has gone by and how much he's grown.

My big six year old! 

She Used Her Words and Asked

The other day we were driving to Nani and Bopa's house for a typical Sunday lunch when suddenly a small voice from the backseat said:

"Go on the swing please?"

I turned around, surprised.

"What?"

"Go on the swing please? Swim in the pool please?"

My parents do not have a pool. So she giggled after the second part and then said "swing please?" again. "Swing please?!?!" in case I hadn't heard the first three times.

I agreed and immediately texted my mom to tell her the news of the request, rejoicing that Maggie had used her words to ask for something that she wanted.

Because she has words. She has quite a few of them. But she doesn't usually use them to tell us things like how she's feeling or what she's thinking, of even what she wants beyond when she's hungry or when she wants to use the restroom or go to sleep.

Or demanding I script about Bubble Guppies.

And swinging on the swings is none of those things.

It was every bit as wonderful as she imagined it would be:

Even as pictures taken from the video they're all a little blurry because she was such a blur of motion the entire time she was outside having so much fun that she could hardly believe her luck.

I particularly love the almost upside down moment.

And then she got cold enough (even after I got another bigger jacket for her) that she told us she was finished and ready to go inside and so we did.

But we are definitely going to have to get in as much swinging as we can before it gets into the negative numbers temperature wise. Because our little mermaid is our least likely to brave the elements to spend more than a few moments outside when it's really cold.

So we'll swing as much as we can for now and have as many fun moments like this before the snow keeps her mostly inside for the winter. Or we'll see if the swing can tempt her to bundle up with the other kids to sneak outside!

arrives!

She Needs Surgery

Usually I try to match up the blog and the vlog, but today, for once, the blog is going to be slightly ahead of the vlog because I haven't even had time to sit down and make a video yet.

Yesterday we drove down the University of Michigan's Children's Hospital so that Sadie could have an appointment with the department of Otolaryngology. When I'd gotten a message on a Saturday from an office identifying themselves as Otolaryngology I had to google to see that these were the ENTs that the pulmonologist from the other Children's Hospital had requested her regular doctor refer her to after the sleep study.

The sleep study had showed that she had zero apneas.

Zero.

After Tessie I had almost felt like that was impossible.

Because with Tessie "good" sleep studies were talked about in terms of stopping breathing five times an hour. It was hard to imagine a world where someone didn't stop breathing at all, all night long.

It was harder still because I knew that I'd watched Sadie stop breathing  when she was a tiny baby and had it dismissed by our family doctor as paranoia and periodic breathing pauses in an infant, which I had accepted until Tessie was diagnosed and that gene was discovered that Paul and I both had, and then those long drawn out pauses had seemed a little more worrisome to both me and her doctor.

But I'll admit when we went to the hospital yesterday I thought we were more of less in the clear.

Except for one thing, that I was slightly hopeful about, because I thought we were in the right place to get her help, and if she got help maybe the kid would finally be able to breath properly.

Mott Children's is pretty spectacular.

I told the nurse and then the doctor that our oldest kid is perpetually stuffy. I said it could be allergies, that the new allergy medicine the pulmonologist prescribed is helping a bit, and that prescription flonase maybe helps some, but that the general stuffiness remained.

Sadie insisted that she could and always has been able to breath through her nose but I shook my head.

I don't think she knows what it means to breath through her nose because she never has. I explained the 18 ear infections in the first two years of her life and said that I thought something was and always had been wrong with her nose, but that I guessed they would tell me that in a minute when they looked.

They looked at her tonsils and said they were perfectly normal and said that they would check her adenoids but that even if they were a bit enlarged that it was unlikely that they would do anything because slightly enlarged adenoids in a ten year old don't cause many problems.

At ten the adenoids usually have started to shrink and so we went to another room with another chair with a huge screen with a camera on a wire and Sadie sat back nervously and clung to my hand.

And then everyone was very quiet after they'd looked at both sides of her nose until finally I asked if it was blocked.

"Yes," the doctor said quickly. "It's between eighty and ninety percent blocked."

This will very likely improve her speech because it's likely that this has been a key factor in the nasal quality of\a lot of her words. And it will improve her sleep. And stop the snoring and wild thrashing that happens all night as she tries to breath while she's asleep, but can't.

The doctor talked about a study they're actually doing at the hospital with people who have one good night during a sleep study, who actually do have obstructive apnea, because that one night is just a picture of one night and people still have bad nights (which is exactly what we've seen at home with Tessie on her monitor).

So, she will be having surgery in the near future to breath more easily.

And in somewhat related news she's grown the half inch that she needed to grow to officially be five feet tall.  She was pretty thrilled about that. She would love to be taller than me by summer.

She's still got a ways to go for that though.

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 And in totally unrelated news I made this video, because it was fun and kind of silly and there's always a chance it's going to go disastrously wrong.

Cutting Off My Hair and Talking About Armchair Internet Psychologists

I can't really blame Maggie for the impulse to find a pair of scissors and chop of her hair every time it gets to her shoulders because last night I did the exact same thing.

I could wait until it gets long enough to tie up in a bun all the time again, because that's the only other way it doesn't drive me completely out of my mind all day long.

After having it irritate me every .2 seconds for the past week I knew that it was time for a change.

Even when I was getting ready to cut my hair it kept being staticky and sticking to my face every few seconds and I couldn't get this whole job done quickly enough.

Here's about two seconds before I started snipping away.

In my Halloween pajamas and penguin Christmas pants, of course.

In fact when I walked upstairs to show Paul he didn't even notice my hair because my pajamas were so distractingly "loud."

Now I was really committed. No turning back:

And I realized this morning when I went to write this that I had absolutely no normal photos to share for the blog.

So.

I have this.

I've already found a few uneven pieces that I've fixed since I finished it. And I feel a thousand times better.

I guess I do understand Maggie's hair cutting impulses a little bit better.

And I probably should ask her if she wants me to cut her hair any time it starts getting near her shoulders...

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In totally unrelated news this is a topic I've been meaning to talk about for a while because, being on social media and blogging for so long, it was something that I'd experienced a bit, and it was interesting to me.

And I know other parents with more verbal kids experience in their day to day lives all the time, not just on the internet:

On Flu Shots, Halloween, and Tessie Only Recognizing Me Sometimes

We survived all the rush and business of October, which I think is one of the busiest months of the year and I noticed something interesting about a certain Miss Tessie in the midst of all of the goings ons.

She only seems to recognize me when she expects to see me.

When I go to pick Tessie up from school, she happily runs to the door and focuses on me in the small group of parents and smiles hugely.

She'll run straight up to me now and lift up her hands to be picked up excitedly.  When I pick her up from OT she'll see me walk up to the door and the exact same thing happens. 

Joy and excitement are evident the second she focuses on my face.

But twice now I've showed up at places she didn't expect me to be and disrupted her regularly scheduled routine.

"Tessie! Hi Tessie!" I said. No response. "Tessie, Mommy's here." Nothing. I get down next to her and touch her arm. She looked at my face. No reaction. Totally blank. 

This has happened multiple times now. And each time, after talking to her, and touching her shoulder, and getting no response, I finally kissed her cheek.

And then she snapped to attention and turned her little head around fast and starred at my face.

And then she broke out into a huge smile and wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me excitedly.

Before that, even after looking straight at my face, she seemed to have no idea that I was there.

So I think we definitely have some facial recognition problems, where she can recognize those of us she knows well, if she's expecting us, but has a little bit more of a challenging time if we aren't in the situations that she expects us to be in.

When I kiss her it seems to help her recognize that it probably isn't her teacher or her therapist and then she finally realizes that it's me.

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On a totally different note, Halloween was fun! 

Maggie loved being a doughnut and even marched in her schools parade this year, which wasn't something that she was quite up for last year, so that was pretty exciting! 

And I made a video about a subject that is near and dear to my heart!

Last week we went to the public health clinic to get our flu shots (because vaccines don't cause autism, not one little bit) and today I made a video talking about why flu shots are so important to me.

Once you've been hospitalized with the flu, it just isn't an experience that you soon forget!



And this video is a bit of me talking and a whole lot of our two nights of Halloween fun!



And this is just one random day with a whole lot of business!



Hope you all are having a great start to your November!

Can you believe it's already November?!?!