Ahh Summer time.... is ALREADY making me crazy!

It's been 17 days since Molly finished her junior year. 17 loooong days. I'll be honest....I've GOT to spend this next year creating a life for her post high school that doesn't entail her hanging around the house looking at me for interaction and for me to create her fun for the rest of her life. You will have to admit me to the looney bin if that happens. I also will go crazy if I have to witness her OCD pattern of taking out the trash every hour even if it's only 1/4 full, refilling Tucker's food 5 times a day, and if she dumps one of our drinks that we've only had 2 sips from again....one of us is going to LOSE it. And that crazy person might be her very patient brother Jack. I rarely buy soda for the kids, but do so on special occasions, like recently when friends were coming for dinner to celebrate the last day of school. So a can of Mountain Dew is pure gold for my 15 year old son. Imagine taking only one sip, setting it down to go into the other room for a minute, and when you return, your full can of nectar has already been dumped down the sink by our recycler extraordinaire and the can has been efficiently put into the recyle bin. I might have had the same head popping off reaction with my freshly made rum and pineapple juice cocktail that got dumped. The twisting of the knife in the wound was that I had no more juice to mix another drink! I do appreciate her efficiency but it's tipped over to the extreme. Time to nip the behavior. It's always nipping behaviors in this home.

Jack successfully nipped another recent pattern where she'd go into his bathroom first thing in the morning, use his towel to wipe off the counter tops and toilet seat (nice!), and then neatly rehang the towel. Yes, you can picture the next thing that happened....he'd sleepily wake up to get ready for school, stumble into the bathroom to take a shower, and then USE the nasty towel to dry himself oblivious to what had happened prior. I'm not sure who figured out that she was doing this, but Jack quickly created a way to test if she had been in there or not by hanging his towel in a weird way that she would never replicate. In the morning, if it was hanging neatly, he knew that she had been down and tidied up. He then would go and get a clean towel before taking his shower.

Have I mentioned the verbal stim and how it's making me crazy? I know that I have as it got a little FB conversation going and maybe stifled my future sharing abilities a bit. A mean-ish slap down had me rethinking this whole blog thing. But I've recovered and will persevere. Not everyone will like what I have to say and that is OK. So back to the verbal stim. Picture this: Upon entering Molly's bedroom, your ears will be assaulted with sounds from a variety of sources. She has her TV on the Disney Channel, she has her school iPad playing a 3 minute free video clip off of Disney, and then she has her home iPad blaring music. She has the little itouch that died last month sitting there too and she will pretend that that is her phone. I can't stay in there with the loud assault of too many confusing sounds on my ears. It's mass confusion and how can she possibly know what she is listening too? When the 3 minute video ends, she restarts it or finds another freebie. I think that she has to make her verbal aaaAAHHHHHH to cover the confusion? I KNOW that I need to remove at least one of those iPads.....okay, okay...I'll go do that now. She spends too many hours alone in her room and though that makes it easy for me, I also have horrible guilt about it. I'd rather she had something meaningful to do with her time. Like read a book. Or maybe sit in silence and meditate. I think her brain might like that and thank me.

What's hard with a special needs child is that I can't say "Go find a friend", "Go hang at the park", "Go play outside"or even "Go play X Box" (something Jack has NEVER heard me say :)). She isn't like her 17 year old peers driving around going to the movies or to the pool or just chatting at each others homes. EVERYTHING that she does entails ME, or Brooke, or Jack. When you have little kids, you are used to being that person that hauls the kid around and meets their every need. But you also know that your kid will grow up and start having a lot more freedom from you (by 5th grade even!!). We don't have that. I'm scared to think that I never will! I still make every meal for Molly. Every meal. Maybe this is why I'm sick of cooking?

So the key to both Molly's happiness and mine is to keep her actively engaged. She loves hiking, so one of us a day tries to get her out on the trails. She loves to swim, so weather permitting, we try and get to the pool. So there, we have 3  to 4 hours of our day taken care of.....that leaves a lot of down time. Too much down time. 9 hours of summer school per week starts this week and having that schedule will be awesome. Molly LOVES to use her brain, have a routine, and school is the perfect place to push her. Tuesday...please get here fast!

                                                                               

Overlooking "The punch bowl" in Aspen on our way home from the Special Olympics swim meet. Note the Gold medal and ribbon. And the twins. :)