hide-n-(sensory)-seeking

...KIT KAT BABY! "I keep going in circles. I should get better directions!"     "Quick! Mom's right behind me!" "Get the cookies! Get the cookies!"   "Here Koda, you can snuggle with my teddy!"    At least it's not in our bed, right?!

About two weeks ago we borrowed the Broadway musical Cats from the library. We put it on to watch as a family. I will say that, honestly, this is not my favorite musical, but I enjoy watching it every five or ten years or so. The kids were mostly unimpressed. But Grandpa...wow, how can I say this? Well, he HATED it! I mean despised it.  He thought it was the most ridiculous waste of brain activity possible. (I am summarizing what I was able to pick up from his mumblings which were mostly in Spanish, so this isn't a direct translation.) He was shaking his head, rubbing his forehead, and finally, just got up and left the room. Later after it was over, he said again something about not being able to believe that anyone would pay money to make, much less watch, such rubbish. (Again, I'm summarizing.) He had similar things to say about The Muppets (gasp!), and The Cosby Show (Say WHAT!). So you can imagine how my jaw dropped when he sat down on the couch today t...

(I apologize for the low quality pictures. I'm having problems with my phone, and am in the midst of troubleshooting. Hopefully, much better ones will be coming soon.) Our eyes are constantly taking in and processing our world. Everywhere we look we see shapes, colors, shades of light, and shadows create darkness. Sometimes our brain registers this input as soothing. Sometimes it registers it as irritating, overwhelming, or even painful. For certain individuals it just proves to be too much and their brains get confused. Suddenly, it's as if they've forgotten how to perform even basic functions or execute a plan of action. Now this can happen to anyone, some of the time. However, there are some that this can happen to anytime. This makes certain jobs of daily living very difficult. Take for example my children and their school work. A normal page of math may not present a very big challenge to you or to me, but on some days, for my children, it can be paralyzing. ...

Welcome to Wordy Wednesday! Today's subject is: STRESS Now I know I said I was going to focus on words and subjects that are new or unfamiliar. And I know that stress is unfortunately way too familiar to most of us. So that is exactly why I choose it for this week. Because knowledge is power and strength lies in numbers. I'll explain. The simple definition of stress is: physical or mental pressure. Well that doesn't sound very threatening, right? Right. Stress can be a positive force. It's what motivates us to make split second decisions that can mean life or death, success or failure. So it's actually an essential function. But it can also be very, truly, threatening. When I looked up stress on my Dictionary.com Thesaurus, it has fifty synonyms. FIFTY ! Including the relatively mild: alarm, crunch, ferment, hassle, pull, tightness and worry. At the other end, though, were words such as: agony, dread, mistrust, overextension, strain...

We received our weighted blankets a little over a week ago. Kits weighs 4 pounds. Zak's weighs 11. Wow! This thing is heavy. Resting Easier! Kit still won't sleep at night with it covering her, but sometimes she'll nap with it, so progress! What she will let me do at night is roll it up and squish it up next to her. She then has pressure from both sides, one side from the couch cushion, the other from the blanket. Also she has a cushion up top, so she can push against it if she wants. We have seen much improvement at night. She let's me put her down easily into her little cubbyhole after she's asleep. That alone is huge! A few times she has even stopped nursing and gone to curl up there and go to sleep on her own!!! Beyond HUGE!! Not enough exclamation points ever to convey my excitement! Next, all week long she has woken up just once, a few nights twice! AND...She's not crying when she wakes up! YAY! YAY! And double YAY!! I'm not eve...

I've spent the last few days alternating between anger and feeling sorry for myself. A lot of it may be justified, but for the most part it is entirely unhelpful. Almost, I do sometimes clean when I'm angry, so that's a plus. Most of the time though it just means that I'm even more tired than I started out, and have just as much, if not more work to do. Which of course just makes me feel sorry for myself, then angry, etc. Vicious cycle. So every once in a while when I'm feeling that way, I'll steal away during or right after the kids bedtime. I'll indulge in a coffee or hot chocolate, and maybe some cookies. I'll go to my 'Thoughtful Spot.'  Not as nice as Pooh Bear's, but almost always empty, and as decent a view of the stars as one can expect within city limits. I went there tonight and just breathed in the cool night air. I let my eyes follow the fog as it slowly swept the field, set aglow by the moonshine. I resented the streetlight...

    I cut up two kiwis for Kit today. One was room temperature the other had been chilled in the refrigerator. She only ate the warm ones. If she got a cold one off the fork, she'd spit it out right away. Toward the end of her snack, she started piling the cold ones into my hand. She apparently didn't want them fraternizing with her warm ones any more. Maybe they were making them cold.