Biting My Tongue (aka, Lessons On Not Swearing)
Okay, so you guys know how pressed I am for time this week right? And how I have twelve bazillion assignments that need to be posted, like, TODAY. And how I was doing pretty good because I had hand-written out everything and today was going to busy but not particularly taxing because all I had to do was type out everything? WELL…
Last night I made a start. Got a full assignment typed out. Started a new one.
Folks, if you’re ever in this situation, please pay careful attention to what I’m going to say next:
DO NOT simply cut the existing text out of a document and start typing the new document up in its place (because you’re too lazy to click two extra times to open a new document) while thinking to yourself, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ll just do ‘Save As’ through the file menu when I finish up for the night.”
Because you won’t. At dawn-o’clock when you’re finally finishing up because you start falling asleep at the keyboard and bruising your head, you’re not going to remember it. You’re just gonna click the little disc icon and stumble to bed. And then you’re going to wake up in the morning ready to print the assignment you’ve typed up the night before and discover your mistake.
And then you’re going to have to really, really, really remind yourself that you don’t swear.
That’s an hour plus worth of work down the drain. But it could be worse. Here’s why it’s not.
* I was so tired last night I didn’t throw out the screwed up pieces of paper from my notebook. If I’d thrown them out last night, they’d have been covered with the remnants of this morning’s porridge by now. As it were, they’re still right here where I tossed them last night.
* It was a relatively short assignment! I’ve written 25 page RSI-inducing behemoths before. Last night’s was just 2 and a bit pages. So even in my desperation, the situation is not dire. I cannot even begin to explain how panicked I would be if it were the former.
So this is fixable. Annoying, but fixable!
Cheers,
Lizzie
Frugal Friday ~ November 30
This is my first Frugal Friday but it’s a good ‘un. I had to hit the local shopping centre today to do some errands - jeans shopping (auggh) and a little Christmas shopping too. But that’s not where the frugal part comes in - and we’ll just gloss over that for the time being, okay? Good. LOL.
Around the holidays, when they know they can guarantee lots of visitors, our city’s public transport company sets up a stall somewhere in the shopping centre with information on timetables, route changes and the like. They also have one of these machines nearby:
It’s a promotional game where you slot your ticket into the ticket validation whatsit and the wheel spins on the screen and you’re playing to win another ticket to the value of whichever ticket you’ve just used to play the game. Make sense?
I nearly walked past the stall today. I was literally on my way to buy a multitrip bus ticket (the stall is info-only, they don’t sell the actual tickets there) and I decided to run my current ticket through the machine. I usually carry two types on me - a black ‘interpeak’ ticket, valid for travel between 9 and 3 on weekdays (the majority of my bus travel occurs then because it is within school hours) and a red ‘peak’ ticket, valid for travel anytime. I’d just used my last trip on my black multitrip ticket, which is worth $14.80 for 10 trips, so I only had my red one, and it only had one trip left on that too.
Wouldn’t you know - I won! This isn’t just a couple of bucks either - because I’d validated a full price multitrip ticket, I won a full price multitrip ticket:
Yep, I just saved almost $27.
A single trip ‘peak’ ticket is worth $4.10 so it’s much more economical to buy the multitrip tickets in advance (you save $14.10 over the ten rides). You could therefore say I saved myself $41.00 today instead of $27 but I’m thrilled with anything extra in my pocket at this time of the year :)
I’ll probably still go ahead and buy the interpeak ticket (those tickets are worth $2.50 each so you save a little over $10 buying a multitrip ticket) but I’m glad I’ve got this baby in my purse :) I use the black tickets quite frequently, about once a week, but the red tickets last me around 6 months.
Crystal at Biblical Womanhood hosts Frugal Friday. Check her out!
Cheers,
Lizzie
Thankful Thursday ~ The Lesson
It’s all pretty simple this week. I’m thankful I found this verse, also known as my new ’scripture motto’, LOL.
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” (Hebrews 12:11, NIV)
This is a page straight out of my book this week :P And it’s so true - it is painful!
I’m thankful that in the last week I’ve been given the grace to accomplish (or at least make serious inroads into) something that seemed insurmountable just a few days ago. I’ve been a little study machine this week, firing off assignments left, right and centre. It feels good, but it has taken its toll on my health. I’m thankful that I’ve been given the best reminder possible to get off my takookus when I’m meant to next time!
I’m thankful for a wonderful husband who has put up with a fair chunk of irrationality and stress from his wife these last couple of weeks. I’m so proud of him - he went to work in a suit today. Okay, so that’s not why I’m proud, LOL, but I’d be lying if the sight of the man (who normally wears very casual gear as specified by the type of job that he does) in a classic pinstripe didn’t get the neurons firing! It almost made up for the fact that he wrenched the blankets off to wake me up this morning, LOL. I really, really wanted him to stay home for a bit longer… (oooh, that’s a bit naughty, isn’t it? Forget I said that!)
Can I also be a tad shallow and say I’m thankful that I hit Toys R Us at 9:30 this morning instead of 11:30 like originally planned? It’s the first day of a sale and the big ticket items are usually all gone in two or three hours and as I was leaving the store (with about 85% of what I went in to get - and the rest was available, I just left it there - I’m a very touchy-feely shopper so I gain ideas from the catalogues then go in search of stuff to touch, LOL) I overheard two separate arguments between shoppers and Toys R Us staff. Our Toys R Us store can be a little finicky with having enough sale stock and it was a bit rough that things were not available only an hour after opening, but sheesh. Anyway, I’m thankful I got out of there quickly!
I’m thankful I’m slowly getting through my shopping list for Christmas. It’s a bit tedious but I refuse to pay, for example, $30 for a board game when I know it just went on sale for $10, know what I mean? So when I see something that fits the bill in a catalogue I try as hard as I can to get there on opening day of the sale. With fourteen thousand other people, LOL.
I’m thankful for the smile on Master J’s face this afternoon when I presented him with his much-anticipated Tamagotchi version 4.5. Part of the reason I battled the insanity of the Toys R Us endeavour was to grab one of these on sale. He saved up for it himself so it’s not a Christmas thing. J gets into these things, Electronic Child that he is :)
For more Thankful Thursday participants, pop in to Laurel Wreath Reflections.
Cheers,
Lizzie
Where Are All The Good News Stories?
(© Cute Colors)
(This is one of those rare posts where I’m going to drop all the usual Bloggityville ’shinyness’ and just speak directly from my heart. There may be readers who are offended by what I’ll have to say on this subject but please understand that I’m not being critical of anyone in particular - just The System in general. I hope you will understand that I’m offloading here and I don’t intend to offend. This is just my experience and my opinion :) Also, this post is very long. You’ve been warned!)
My husband likes to visit ‘clip and link’ sites on the net when he winds down after work. This evening he was doing just that and called me over to watch a video of a disabled man singing The Star Spangled Banner at Fenway Park. Quite possibly this might be more of a well-known story in the States than down here, but the basic gist of it was, this lovely lad was singing the national anthem in a very off key voice until the whole crowd kind of got behind him and continued to sing along with him - thousands and thousands of voices helping this guy out. It was great.
This reminded me of the Jason McElwain story, a video I’ve watched dozens of times since the story broke, and led me on a bit of a YouTube Tour of Autism.
To be frank, I’m disturbed by what I saw. Autism-related videos on YouTube (and autism stories in the media in general) seem to fall into three basic categories:
* Autistic savantism (ie, Rainman)
* ‘Shock & Awe’ stories about how Little Johnny is so severely affected by autism Mum and Dad just can’t possibly cope any longer (and most heartbreaking of all, the stories of parents who have injured - sometimes fatally - their autistic children)
* ‘Cure & Blame’ stories - the MMR debate, chelation, Applied Behaviour Analysis therapy (ABA), the autism ‘epidemic’, how my son’s autism was ‘cured’ and similar stories.
I’ve always had a problem with the way mainstream media depicts autism. It’s either tick box A, B or C above, nothing else. What bothers me most is that for those who haven’t had autism touch their lives, or don’t associate with disabled people generally, these three categories are all they ever hear about autism. Insensitive people, on hearing that your child is autistic, will either launch into a story about how their neighbour’s niece’s son plays the cello like a pro at age three, or recount a newspaper story where some poor folks down there in Boondockville tied their autistic child to the bed, or spew forth some diatribe on how they don’t immunise their kids because they’re afraid the vaccine will ‘give’ their kids autism.
Can I just pause for a second and say, this hurts the autism community far more than you know.
Let’s start with savantism. The occurrence of autism currently stands at about 1-2 per 1000 people (as distinct from Autism Spectrum Disorders, or ASDs in general (of which autism is one condition), which is 6 per 1000 - I’ll be focusing mainly on autism as a separate condition distinct from the more general term ‘ASD’). Of that number, only five, possibly ten percent of autistics show savant qualities. And yet what’s the first thought you have when you hear the word ‘autism’? Rainman. A seriously large chunk of ‘autism airplay’ in the general media goes toward perpetuating the myth that if not all, then at least the majority of autistics are savants. Not all savants are autistic (though roughly half are), but the percentage of autistics who are also savants is very, very small.
Secondly, stories of infanticide and horrible, horrible abuse stories of non-coping parents burden my heart greatly, but there’s also a small part of me who hates the media for portraying it at all. The general public already has cause to think of autism in a negative light, but these stories only serve one of two purposes. You either sympathise with the parents involved, or you don’t. Speaking from the middle of the ring here, there’s no excuse, not a single one, not autism, or ADHD, or intellectual disability - nothing whatsoever will induce me to sympathise with the parents involved in these stories. In 2003 in Australia, a mother smothered her 10 year old autistic son and she only received a five year good behaviour bond. This particular link disturbs me even further because it is literally filled with excuses. I’m not saying the circumstances surrounding this poor family weren’t harsh - they were, and if anyone should understand that, it would be me - I, like many, many thousands of other ‘autism parents’ battle frustration, confusion, advocacy issues, bureaucracy, funding bodies, early intervention services, stress, exhaustion and yes, even depression on a frequent basis. But other parents don’t crack like this woman. We might scream and cry and throw a (well-deserved!) hissy-fit when our funding is cut, or we have to literally force the school system to provide the necessary services for our kids, or (as one dear internet friend and fellow ‘Aussie autism mum’ puts it) ‘wipe poo and toothpaste from the walls’, but we don’t take it out on our children. Get angry at the system, not the child. I will back you a thousand percent, I will sign any number of petitions lobbying the government for more funding, heck - I’ll even march in a picket line if you need me too. But don’t expect me to feel sorry for this woman.
‘Cure & Blame’ stories are almost the worst of the lot. For the record, here’s what I believe about autism: Autism is a brain development disorder characterised by impaired social function and communication. Note I said ‘impaired’ and not ‘absent’. Another common misconception about autistic children are that they’re all slowly rocking in a corner, unable to form meaningful relationships with people. This is just plain ignorant. The single most important thing I long to tell each and every misguided, ignorant and scare-mongery individual out there is that autism is a spectrum disorder. There’s a whole arc of symptoms and two people, both with an autism diagnosis, will never be exactly alike in symptoms or behaviours. Autism just doesn’t work like that. Pigeon-holing autistic children is one of my pet peeves, and right about now is where my Advocacy Mama hat comes out of the closet, because whenever I describe autism to anyone not familiar with the details of it - and, by the way, I’m always, always happy to answer questions, as are most ‘autism parents’, so please ask us and stop staring at our children! - I always slot in something about it being a spectrum disorder.
Take Master J for example. His diagnosis was ‘autism’ - not Asperger’s, not PDD-NOS (where an individual might fit some of the symptoms on the autism checklists but not ‘enough’ for an confirmed diagnosis). Over the years, we’ve been blessed to discover that he is high-functioning and in the 25% or so of individuals with autism who do not have an intellectual disability. Think about that for a moment. If you had 100 autistic individuals in a group, three-quarters of them would have some form of mental impairment, from slight to severe, as if the decreased ability to socialise and communicate wasn’t enough! J meets our eyes, speaks wonderfully (with maybe a slight rearrangement of words sometimes, Yoda-style, LOL) and has friends. He’ll always be different, he’ll almost certainly be special-educated for the remainder of his time in school (though his special ed class is within a mainstream school), and it is highly likely he will either remain living at home indefinitely or at best, in a small-group living arrangement (like a retirement village of sorts, but for disabled folk) But God, we’re grateful for him.
I don’t pay any attention to the MMR debate. I don’t believe in chelation (heavy metals? auugh). I don’t believe there was anything I could have done to prevent it. I believe there’s a genetic component. I believe in my son, and I believe that the ‘cure’ stories can often do more harm than good. Autism cannot be cured - it can only be researched, managed, lived-with and enjoyed - I know! Enjoyed! It’s possible, LOL. When I hear of people ‘curing’ their child’s autism with dietary intervention, I want to scream. You can manage the symptoms of autism with dietary intervention (usually a gluten and casein (dairy) free diet) and it can have a remarkable difference on behaviour and communication, but because I believe that the cause of autism lies in the DNA, I find it almost offensive to hear the word ‘cure’ and ‘autism’ in the same sentence. For the record, we have tried the dietary route in the past with J and yes, there was improvement - but how much of that is autism-specific and how much of the ‘no additives, colours and preservatives’ approach is just plain good parenting sense? If we restrict chemical-laden foods for J, then we do it for Boofah and Miss Moo as well, and it has nothing to do with the autism. I should pause to point out that the GFCF diet is much, much more complex than simply ‘no additives’. The theory follows along with the idea that gluten and casein-containing foods affect the body of an autistic much the same way as heroin affects an addict. You’ll often hear stories of autistic kids who crave bread, pasta, yoghurt, milk and cheese (we called them The Magic Five in our house). Once they’ve had their ‘hit’ of gluten, their behaviour settles until the feeling wears off and the merry-go-round begins again. So in this circumstance I absolutely support dietary intervention - if that is what you’ve determined works for your child. But I don’t think it can cure him or her - just make the condition a whole lot easier to deal with.
When we were newly-diagnosed, the one thing I couldn’t find in any of the (many) books on autism on the shelf, or in newspapers or on TV, were positive, normal, average, everyday stories about kids on the spectrum. They seemed to only ever fit into the three categories described above, and that was more than a little depressing. If you’re not a ‘cure’ advocate, and your child isn’t a savant, and if you just plain don’t want to hear stories of woe and sorrow, you’re not really left with much. Which is why stories like that of Jason McElwain have always touched my heart. A good news story that was focused on the individual, and not the autism. It wasn’t a ‘cure story’ and there were no debates on causes. We need more stories like those.
And thus ends my soapbox session for November. Back to posts on menu planning and housekeeping and - oh, I don’t know - cupcakes tomorrow, I promise, LOL.
P.S. I highly recommend the essay “Don’t Mourn For Us” by Jim Sinclair, an autistic adult. The link is in my left sidebar. This essay, read first when we were newly-diagnosed, changed how I viewed autism.
Cheers,
Lizzie
Inside Lizzie’s Home ~ Basic Daily Plans
(© Mary’s Little Lamb Graphics)
Just popping in - I’m not really here, honest! - to let you know I’ve switched things around in the Routines, Schedules and Cleaning section in the right sidebar. I’ve included two PDFs of what I feel would be the absolute ideal way my day would go…if I could program the other members of the family (and myself) the way I just programmed the DVD player. Sigh.
Still, it’s a dream.
A third ‘Sunday’ version will come soon - probably. Maybe even a ‘No Holds Barred’ School Holidays Version (basically, a blank sheet of paper, LOL). And no, this is not how life goes right-this-second but it’s where I want to eventually end up. Most of the time I approximate the Routines and times and rarely actually refer back to the list during the day (seriously - if you need to check the list after each item to make sure you’re ‘on schedule’…well, that’s a little loony!) But the benefits of having it all listed out this way are huge. The biggest one I’ve found is that it shows you that you have to be a careful manager of your time if you’re going to get all the stuff you need and want to do slotted in somewhere. Perhaps give some stuff up - in the last twelve months I’ve given up over three-quarters of the television I used to watch, for example, and this has opened up my evening hours quite a bit.
When I first did my Basic Daily Plan a few months ago I made a list of the things I wanted to get sorted out, scheduling-wise. Top of the list was a regular time to study (*guffaw*), but I also had things like time to craft/do a project, a set time of the day for certain chores and time for exercise. For example, I knew that I had to schedule exercise before I tackled the housework or I’d never do it. And just this week I re-jigged it a little to incorporate blogging. Yeah, I know. I missed the bit in Proverbs 31 about “She shall blogeth much” too - perhaps this is what she’s doing when her lamp isn’t going out at night? LOL. I didn’t want to give blogging up but I knew I had to set some guidelines or I’d be baby-sitting Google Reader all day. So I worked out that I have a small window of time while having my mid-morning cup of tea and snack to read blogs, some time while eating lunch to publish my own blog posts and a semi-large window in the evenings to actually compose posts. Being that I am (obviously) on Australian time (well one of them anyway…), a lot of the blog carnivals pop up around early afternoon for us (early morning for you) and you know how it is with Mr Linky - the closer you are to the top, the more likely people will read your post (hey, I’m guilty of this too - I just can’t go through 100+ Menu Plan Monday posts each week, much as I’d like to). So from here on out I’ll compose the ‘next day’ post the night before, my time (ie, Menu Plan Monday on Sunday night, Works For Me Wednesday on Tuesday night etc) and then it takes about four seconds to publish it when I check back during lunchtime on the relevant day (I can, of course, fiddle with the time post whatsit but this doesn’t help the Mr Linky thing :) I’m still going to try (sigh) to go blog-free over the weekends, although I haven’t been very successful lately.
Also, just to round off my INSANE WEEK, I managed to catch a cold. In early-thirties (celcius) weather - that’s like 91ºF in ‘other-side-of-the-world’ speak. Who catches a cold in summer after managing to get through the entire winter (and much of the last two years straight) with nary a sniffle?
The one who is up to her eyeballs in study deadlines, that’s who. I get it God. I amuse you, LOL.
Cheers
Lizzie
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