Stuff. ...

Sam and I have both been sick all weekend with some sort of stomach virus. With all that time on the couch I had a million thoughts going through my head but now I can't seem to pin any of them down into a complete post. So I'm just going to do a brain-dump instead. Here goes:

1. I don't know how it came up but I told RT the other day that I was planning to homeschool the kids and he looked at me incredulously and said: "But they're not going to have any friends!!" I thought that was kind of funny and kind of sweet. It reminded me that to him Oliver is just his little brother. Yes, he has autism and yes, he can be kind of a pain in the neck if you are a teenager and want your brother to just stay out of your room. But he really doesn't fully understand how likely it is that Oliver's life will look much different from his own.

2. Every morning I wake the kids up and as they wipe the sleep from their eyes I open the blinds and say: "Good Morning Birds! Good Morning Sky! Good Morning Tree! Good Morning Street!", etc. Sometimes Sam joins me and repeats what I'm saying. This morning it was Oliver who stood next to me at the window and echoed my greetings. It gives me such high hopes!

3. I took Sam for his 2 year well-baby appointment last week and was surprised to learn that he is only in the 10th percentile for height and weight! He is such a little guy but has such a huge presence. The paper they gave me that tells what I could generally expect for the coming year said that he would soon start speaking in 5-6 word sentences. I had to laugh at that because just after I read it he was heard to tell the doctor that: "Dinosaurs stomp their feet on the ground and go GRRRR!" So much for generalities.

4. It is insane how many extra-curricular things RT is doing at the moment and how complicated it makes our life at times -- especially given that we now only have one car. Guitar lessons: once a week; karate lessons: 4 nights a week; soccer: practice once a week, games once or twice a week; then there are the field trips and the academic extras that come up every other week or so. We need a special teenager calendar just to keep track of it all! And then, once we get the swing of balancing all of this he will be off to college!

5. I'm wrestling with the whole vaccination issue for Sam. I had told myself that I would selectively vaccinate after he turned two but now I just can't decide what to do. Intellectually, I don't believe that Oliver's autism was caused by his vaccinations. But he did get terribly sick immediately following his last vaccinations, lost most of his speech in the next 3-4 months, and his digestive system never fully recovered. Is all that just a coincidence? I don't have the confidence to say one way or the other and so I sit here on the fence.

6. I took a bunch of pictures of the boys the other day so now if I can just figure out how to download them I'll post some.

7. Watched Little Miss Sunshine the other night -- wow! what a great movie! And if I wasn't on the couch being sick, sick, sick, it would have made me want to eat a bowl of ice cream.