Thursday, February 27, 2020

A Tiny Key Thief

This morning I found myself running around the house searching for my keys.

I felt like I was losing my mind.

You see, I try really hard to be careful about where I put my keys at night.

And I was certain that I'd come downstairs and put them in the same spot I always put them down in when I walk into my bedroom.

But then someone had needed to borrow them. I retraced my steps. I specifically remembered getting up and moving them back to the place that they belonged.

And I remembered thinking that I wouldn't have lost keys in the morning. I had been so proud of myself for remembering to put them away.



Yet there I was with no keys in pockets and no keys in my hands and no keys on any of the bookshelves or in any of the spots that I commonly set them down.  I looked under my yarn and under paper work from a doctor's office and behind the Google Home Hub, but they somehow seemed to have vanished.

Sadie, Patrick, and James had a snow day, but Maggie and Tessie's schools, which are further away hadn't canceled, so we needed to leave the house in half an hour and I was feeling the time crunch in a very real way.

I had time to do everything that I needed to do.

But I did not have time to lose my keys.

I asked the boys, who had just finished breakfast, if they could check downstairs for my keys, while I made sure Maggie was ready for school,

Approximately thirty seconds after walking downstairs, James and Patrick ran back upstairs and told me that they had checked and the keys definitely "weren't down there."

And then I thought of Tessie and her midnight antics.



I thought of how lately she's been collecting all the hairbrushes in the house and hiding them in the bottom of the laundry hamper, usually next to a handful of her toys in case it wasn't perfectly clear that she was the one who had put them there.

I ran down the stairs two at a time.

At three in the morning Tessie had woken up and taken every toy out of her toy box in her room. And she had also come into our room.

 I began picking up blankets and folding them, scanning the floor.

Nothing.

A hundred small toys with pointy hands and pony tails made it perilous for bare feet as I picked my way through the room, grabbing things up here and there and putting them away so that I could actually see the floor, while still searching all the while.

Then I glanced over and saw them.

They were just below here pillow, sitting all by themselves, in the middle of her bed.

I breathed a sigh of relief, decided to find a new place to keep my keys at night, and managed to hustle everyone out the door on time, which in itself felt like a minor miracle.



And now, since writing this post I have just realized that, as of 9 o'clock on this fine Thursday evening, I cannot for the life of me remember where that new, safe place for my keys actually is.

Tomorrow morning ought to be fun.

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No I'm kidding. I've got to find them before then.

At least I know Tessie isn't the culprit this time. She was asleep before they disappeared.

Or maybe I should check her bed...

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Meanwhile over on Wattpad, my first story reached #7 over in the Mystery section (out of around a quarter of a million stories).

Paul may have spent a while today teasing me about how it qualifies as a mystery and did not think "because you don't know what's going to happen" quite cut it since that means just about any story could have that tag. 

He isn't wrong.

But I was still excited about this:




I have started a new novel and am about 36k words in. 13 chapters are posted as of this moment.

It is totally different than anything I've ever done before and I'm having a lot of fun writing it. 

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Over on the vlog there are almost daily videos (although right now I've been knocked off my feet by a pretty brutal virus so I have taken a couple days off). 

This is one of my favorites.

I've been told that at Tessie's school they had her doing puzzles line by line. 

One days she walked over and completely disassembled the whole puzzle and insisted on doing all 48 pieces by herself. 

She let me help her on this one. So I guess I was lucky!



This is totally unrelated to my vlog.

When I'm driving I tend to listen to True Crime channels.

And I finally decided to try my hand at making my own True Crime channel focusing mostly on missing persons cases.

This is my second video for anyone who is interested in True Crime:



Anyways, I guess now is the time to figure out where my keys are, before it gets any later!

I hope you're staying warm during these last few days of February.

Saturday, February 8, 2020

Screwdrivers, Autism Evaluations, and a Collapsing High Chair

I have big news but first a smaller story about our tiniest kid.

There was a day last week when this girl was walking around the house with a toy screwdriver. 


I saw her crouched next to the giant chest in the dining room where I keep my yarn stash for knitting, but I didn't pay much attention. I mean, this particular toy screw driver was a very clunky plastic flat head. I didn't think that she could actually use it to unscrew an actual screw.

Do you see where this is going?

I was making dinner.

In this house, if something mischevious is going to happen it's going to happen when I'm making dinner. But Tessie wasn't alone. There were four other kids running around as she seriously walked around the dining room with her grey and orange screw driver, investigating.

She was very quiet, but Tessie's often very quiet so it's not quite the red flag it is with just about any other kid her age.


So imagine my surprise when Paul lifted her into her high chair the next night and it collapsed. 

She was fine, thankfully, simply a little startled from the legs of her high chair suddenly giving out.

Upon closer examination we realized that several key screws in her Eddie Bauer wooden high chair had been removed and were missing. 

Since only one person had been walking around testing out any kind of a screw driver, we're pretty confident in the culprit. 


The high chair had probably stayed around so long because it was an extremely convenient place to put Tessie when something needed to be cleaned up. If she'd dumped a glass of water and was trying to swim in it across the dining room floor I could lift her into her high chair until I was done mopping it up.

If she'd broken a Christmas ornament (there was a thankfully short lived glass breaking stim at the end of last year) I could whisk her up before she attempted to stomp on the glass with her bare feet and safely put her in her chair until the broken glass was no more.

But the chair is gone now and she's doing remarkably well in a big kid chair at the table after a couple of rough weeks transitioning. It took a little bit of time to understand that being out of the high chair did not mean that everyone's plates at the table was a Tessie buffet.

In other news we had a busy January.

Patrick and I bother ended up with referrals from our doctors for neuro-psych testing.


And we both ended up getting identical results.

Although we were tested on different days, when I went to get my results they happened to have his results ready as well, and so they gave me both.

We both are autistic. We both have ADHD. And we both have anxiety.

And honestly when I got my own results it was an incredible relief (which I made a video explaining right after I got the results). I might try to explain in writing more at a later date but I know it would completely overtake this post and I'm not quite up for that on this Saturday morning.

Patrick's reaction was pretty awesome too:



Meanwhile I just realized, that I never shared that Sadie was also evaluated.

Now Sadie's evaluation was the result of Sadie learning about autism because of her sisters and saying "hey that's me too."

She then came to me and asked if she could be evaluated. She told me she would save her allowance to pay for it.

I told she didn't need to do that, we could talk to her doctor. And we did.

And she is also autistic.

Her reaction, like Patch's was pretty amazing.

Also can you believe this kid is as tall as me now? Where did the last 11 years go?



And in totally unrelated to everything else news I just love this video. It's Maggie doing something she really loves and also talking with me a lot while she does it. And that makes me so incredibly happy.



Anyways I hope that you are having a great winter (or summer if you're in the southern hemisphere) and that you have a good weekend too.