Conclusion of the Story or "What Has That Autistic Child Been Up To Now?"

My sister-in-law calls me this morning and says laughingly:  Your husband sucks!

me:  Yeah, but what this time?

Cheryl:  He didn't finish the story!  What was on the porch?

I pause and look at the receiver, roll my eyes and smile.

me:  Well, I'm not going to tell you.

Cheryl:  What?  Well, you suck too.

me:  I know, but I have the state of my marriage to think of.  You're just going to have to wait.  Mick set it up for reader suspense.

Cheryl:  Oh, you're kidding me!  You're not going to tell me?

me:  No way, you'll just have to wait and read.

Now, if I really sucked, I would go on to write about something completely unrelated.  And Cheryl, now I worry that you will feel disappointed, because no, there were no dead kidnappers or possums on the front porch.

I have been amazed at the amount of road kill around here.  Having grown up in Montana, in a wooded, mountainous, lightly populated region, one expects some road kill.  There is a lot of cover for game to hide in.  But the Willamette Valley is a different matter:  farming, vineyards, some sheep and horses, and suburbia.  There are lots of flat, open spaces.  There are trees, but rarely do I feel like I'm "in the woods".  However, the other day while driving at work, I noticed a dead deer alongside the road, and that was unusual.  If I'd been visiting my parents, that would be all too common, but not here.  However, the possums, skunks, and raccoons litter the highways with their little carcasses.  So Mick's fear is not uncalled for.  Also remember, my dogs have discovered that gopher heads, if they are fast enough to decapitate one, are quite the delicacy.

But we deal with more than just critters and varmints around here.  Critters and varmints are like a breath of fresh air (except for the time they skunked Louise and I swear that when it rains her head still gives off eau de skunk).  Because most of the time we are run ragged trying to keep up with "Sam Mischief".  Sam Mischief rules our world.  Like it or not, and frankly, not wins most of the time.

It is amazing what that child will do and now that she is older and KNOWS that she is older, she is all about being independent.  There is some sorrow in this because we know she will never be able to achieve the independence she longs for unless there is some sort of miraculous break-through in autism research.  In fact, her latest bull-headed mischief ( and yes, we do all know where she gets that from, hon), is thinking that she is going to drive our vehicles, by herself and whenever she wants.

Now she knows that Miranda is older and she knows that Miranda doesn't drive yet.  I dread next year when Miranda can take driver's ed and will get her learner's permit because Sam is REALLY going to think that she can drive then.  Three times now, we've had to wrestle the keys out of her hand and once even pull her from the vehicle.

Mick came home the other night and found his car keys on the front step.

But not on the night in question.  On that night he encountered something of a different nature.

Let me share some of what this child has put us through over the years.  Please note, this is a VERY abbreviated list of offenses.

The eggs have to head the list.  Because we had a restaurant at the time and would have five or ten or more dozen eggs at a time.  Sam wouldn't dream of eating an egg, but thought there was nothing better than breaking them onto the floor as fast as she could.  Break one egg on your floor and try to clean it up.  Not easy.  Now break about two dozen of them onto your floor.  This went on FOREVER!  And yes, I do mean FOREVER.  Oh, she eventually slowed down so much that we mistakenly thought she'd outgrown the obsession.  Then one day I found a broken egg on our CARPET!  Oh, foul, foul carpet.  And I found a broken egg the other day on our porch.  Why just one, I don't know.  But I was grateful that it was just one.

She also used to pour out every bathroom product she could find.  Mick likes Pert shampoo for some reason and there was just something about that that was irresistible to Sam and she would dump the entire bottle into her bath water.  Very annoying at any time, but especially when you live out in the bush of Alaska and can't run to the store and just buy more.  I stopped buying it for awhile.  It's not like Mick got to use it anyway.

I'll never forget the time when we were so dead tired that we didn't wake up until it was too late and toddler Sam had dumped a full pitcher of berry juice, and half-gallon of milk and sprinkled a couple of packages of jello on top of it onto the CARPET again, right next to Mick as he slept, at about 3:00 a.m.  I awoke to loud, ANGRY cursing.  But it was already too late.  That escapade resulted in us cutting out half of the living room carpet and living with rough plywood floors because there was no stomaching the sour milk, no matter how pretty the jello splotches were. 

So there were powder sugar parties in the kitchen where Sam opened up a new bag and tossed the contents around the entire kitchen.  That ultimately resulted in the purchase of a new vacuum because you must NEVER NEVER VACUUM SUGAR!  She did this on three separate occasions (only vacuumed it once, though) and she followed up with baking cocoa.

Our water glasses have had any number of objects in them.  We try to sip water or tea throughout the day, but it wasn't unusual to find a Barbie standing in our glasses.

Which beat having her pee in our glasses which was a recent bit of Sam mischief.

And not to gross you out...well, yes, just to gross you out, Sam went through a phase when she'd poop in the bed or on the floor and then cover it with a blanket and we'd have to SEARCH for the source of that stench, wondering where she'd hidden it now.

So, then we come to our poor hot tub.  As disreputable as that thing looks, in fact, it could guest star on My Name is Earl ( if only it hadn't been cancelled--something that I still can't believe), we are quite fond of it.  And there have been any number of unacceptable objects and substances floating in it.

The worst was pee.  When we first got it, Sam used it like a toilet.  And yes, she still floated around in it, though the rest of us only liked to after a water change.

She threw huge clumps of dirt and grass into the hot tub, MORE THAN ONCE, because she enjoyed the muddy mess.

I have sat in that hot tub and fished out popcorn kernels, after she'd dumped an entire bag into it, because I knew it would clog up the filters.  That was time consuming.

And then the markers.  Mick talks about the water being bright blue.  That was a few weeks ago.  The marker obsession continued and continued and that water was murky BLACK.  As in you-can't-see-the-bottom-black.

So the other morning, I had a meeting at work with the county that was three and a half hours long!  Then I went back to the group home and worked through the usual there which can be any amount of grossness and craziness on a given day ( or relatively mellow, just depending), and this was followed by the I.E.P. meeting.  That meeting had lasted an hour and a half.

Mick only got to attend a few minutes of the meeting.  It was either him or me and he'd gone to the last one.  I took off work early to be able to go and we'd asked our respite worker, a very nice and sweet young woman named Anusha ( she looks like Princess Jasmine and Sam loves her) if she could come over and hang out with the girls (namely Sam, but Miranda is social and both she and Anusha are ADDICTED to the Sookie Stackhouse novels).  So I got home at 5:20 and I had a SPLITTING HEADACHE.

The living room was empty.  Anusha's car was in the driveway, though.  I was perplexed and slowly started unloading my bag.  Then Anusha came running from the direction of my bedroom and was trying to contain her laughter and just a hint of nervousness.  "You've got to see this!"  She laughed.  "I swear, I'd been checking on Sam every few minutes!"  That is not a lame excuse.  Sam has managed many a time to start a building on fire or flood the house when someone was checking on her "every few minutes".  She's fast.  She's an opportunist.

I told Anusha that I was going to title this, "When Anusha Babysits":

What I failed to photograph was the ground, looking like a glacier ice flow of thick bubbles that stretched across our deck.

This tale ends in minor tragedy, due to a break-down in communication.  Miranda had told me that she'd turned off the hot tub because she was afraid the bubbles would mess it up.  The hot tub was out of commission for almost 9 months and we really want to take good care of it.  Both Mick and I misunderstood this communication and took it to mean that she'd shut off the power source at the breaker.  But we'd never shown her or talked to her about it.  Miranda had simply turned off the jets.  So when Mick drained the hot tub late that night, the power was still on.  And now we have a hot tub that only heats the water to 53 degrees.  So here we go again. 

 

Comments

[coach purses]

Even when you feel as though there isn’t a lot you can do to change unhappiness or problems, you can always do a little—and a little at a time eventually makes a big difference.

[Jordans 5]

What is language for? Some people seem to think it's for practicing grammar rules and learning lists of words - the longer the words the better. That's wrong. Language is for the exchange of ideas, for communication.