bibliomom

Every so often I go through these phases as the mom of a high-functioning spectrum kid: “Oh, look at me whine – she’s not that bad, I’m just undisciplined and messy. Look at X – now she has a real special needs kid. At least I have some real hope that my kids might move out and get jobs some day …”

That sort of thing Usually it’s after Bug’s been fairly well behaved and/or off at school half the day, and I’m just busy being depressed how how messy and disorganized I am.

And usually, she follows up by doing something spectacularly horrific that makes me want to bang my head against a wall till I pass out.

Over the hols, she’s was just more on a low-level reign of terror – hiding under the table and cutting up pads of paper, emptying her drawers onto the floor, arranging the entire stack of paper plates into crop circles on the kitchen floor – nothing spectacular. But now that she’s back in school and I’m finally over the plague, I’ve been more able to follow her around and pretend to be “good-mom”.

“Oh, here honey – let’s cut paper at the table. Oh, here baby – when you color on paper towels with markers, it goes through and stains Mommy’s carpet … like this. Let’s move to the counter and get real paper, okay?”

Which leads to me thinking, “Oh, she’s not that bad, I’m just a whiner.”

Which I am, but that’s not the point ;-P

The point is that DH came downstairs the other night, rolling his eyes and twitching.

“What is up with Bug? She just like a highly concentrated mass of destruction! She sat there, trying to listen to the story and couldn’t leave anything alone – she tore pillows out of cases, ripped tissues out of the box, pulled books off the shelf … man.”

And then I remember, “Oh, that’s right – she’s not an average, neuro-typical kid. She our Bug, and we love her.

As closely as possible.