That poor juice box didn’t stand a chance.

So the other day after school we were driving and I gave Alex a juice box.  This has been our first week of school and I’ve unloaded our calender.  I’ve cancelled everything except one activity so that he can come home and decompress.  School’s hard on any kid, add Autism and lets just say this week’s been a bit stressful.

Today was the day he completely freaked out.  Self combusted, lost his lid, whatever.  He melted down over a frigging juice box.  In the car.

From the back seat I hear all sorts of sputtering and gagging.  Oh Shit.

Apparently I had the wrong kind of juice box.  I deviated from our normal brand of juice and he noticed.  Fuuuuuuck.

“Mom, MOM!!!  I can not drink from this juice box.  I simply can not ingest juice that is 66% juice and 34% inert material.”  He’s in the back seat of the car, holding on to the offending juice box, flapping and gagging.  Juice going everywhere.

“OK, well hon I’m trying to drive here.  Just put the juice box down and I’ll take a look at it when we get out.  Listen.  Listen to me.  ALEX, listen.  I need you to listen with your ears.”

I get an exasperated, “What?” from the back seat and a, “No, mom, NO.  I can not simply put the box down.  We’re in the car.  Where am I supposed to put it?  I don’t want it near me.  I can’t have it near me.  I drank some of it.  Mom, I think I’m gonna to puke.”

Now if you want to get my attention fast, say those three magic words, I’m gonna puke.  Nothing gets a reaction out of me faster.  There are very few things in this world I well and truly despise and puke is one of them.

“OK, get the bucket if you have to but I tell you what.  I’m not cleaning your puke this time.  New rule.  If you make yourself puke, you clean it.”  If I had a dime for the number of times I’ve cleaned puke in our car, house, pool, where ever, I’d be a bloody millionaire by now.  Or if Alex did the math, I’d have at least, $31.20.  Whatever.

We have an old bucket/Tupperware container in the back seat for this very reason. We moved from a bucket to Tupperware because of the lid factor.  If you’ve ever sat in a car with puke, you’ll know how vital a lid can be.  Trust me.  

Exhibit A.

“What?!?  I can’t clean my own puke.  Mom, THAT’S DISGUSTING!”

“Oh yeah?!?  Well how do you think I feel every time you puke?  Do you think I like cleaning your puke?  No, I most certainly do not.  I think it’s disgusting too.”

“Well, if I can’t puke, now what?  I drank it, I may die. Now what?  I’M GONNA DIE.”  He’s writhing in the back seat, I’m watching juice fly everywhere, still trying to drive, and thanking Good God All Mighty that the straps on his car seat are holding.

“No, you are not going to die.  No one has ever died from drinking juice.  If people died from drinking juice, don’t you think the juice industry would be out of business by now?”

That got him, totally got him off of thinking about his juice induced death, he was thinking, thinking.  And he was calming down.  Just that quickly, he’d calmed back down.

“Well,  Mom.  People can die from drinking water, you know.  There is something called ‘water intoxication’ and people die from drinking too much water.”  He’s telling me this, juice forgotten.  Sure, he’s flicking his wrists and still worked up, but he was coming back.

From the rear view mirror, I can see the juice has been launched to the floor of the car.  He was looking out the window, still thinking.  Quiet.

The rest of the ride was in silence.  I turned off the DVD player and we just drove.  I kept looking back at him.  He was deep in thought and I just let him be.

When we got to where we were going, Alex asked, “Mom, when we get to group, can I throw the juice in the garbage can?  And next time?  You need to remember the right kind of juice box.  I’m very disappointed in you right now.”

Juice box, you are dead to me.

I watched as the threw the juice into the garbage.  I gave him a squeeze and whispered,  “I promise to buy the right kind of juice next time.  And I’m proud of you, you didn’t puke.”

He gave me a sigh, a big exasperated sigh, and just that quickly he wiggled away from me.

Don’t worry, there’s no way in hell I’m going to be buying the wrong kind of juice box any time soon.  Anyone want a case of Fruitopia?

The wedding that was…..

So we made it back from the wedding up in North Dakota relatively unscathed.  And by that I mean we’re all alive.  We made it back home and I was never so glad to be back in our house.  Not to say we didn’t have fun, we did.  There is just a unique sort of hell that goes along with being trapped in your own car upwards of eleven hours, two times, that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin.

Things that may, or may not, have happened:

• We had a flat tire smack in the middle of Iowa.  I take that back, I really don’t know where we were.  All I know is, we had to drive back to get to a Toyota dealership to replace our Dunlop no-flat tire.  The irony didn’t get past me on that one.

“MOM!  They have rules at the rest area!”

• We may have trashed the waiting room of a certain Toyota Dealership.  I tried to clean up as best as I could but they had a popcorn machine.  It was a no-win situation. 
• The kids may have felt-up all the taxidermy bears, deer, turkey and ducks at my friends house.  Her husband may have started a new nervous twitch when he saw Lizzy stroking a fur backwards and named a duck Sparkle.
• I may have had a drink too many after we lost the baby at the rehearsal party and it may have happened about the same time Alex was puking off the side of the pool and it may have happened the exact same time Lizzy got her toe stuck in the base of a table. 
• I may, or may not, have said, “Lizzy stay here while I go find your sister.  Wait, you can’t move, your toe’s stuck.  Well, small blessings.”  
• Lizzy may or may not have screamed so loud you could hear her in Canada.
• When we found the baby she was out in front, with the smokers, trying to borrow a lighter.  Alex may, or may not have, proceeded to question them about their choice to smoke and he may, or may not have, pulled up an image of a  “smokers lung” from his i -Touch…
• Lizzy may have sat through part of the wedding sobbing because her, “vagina hurt.”  Turns out it was not her vagina, it was her underpants crimping her style.  

These make me giggle every time we pass one and if you don’t get it, I’m not telling

• Alex may have read off every single exit on the map and we may have stopped at every rest area so he could get a new map and not miss a thing.  I may have stopped listening somewhere outside of Kansas City.   
• We may have had approximately fourteen fast food meals in a little under four days.  The teenagers at Long John Silver’s may have wanted to kill our kids for ringing their bell over 3,000 times.  
• And we may, or may not, have had Juano’s Mexican food over three times while in Fargo because it’s Alex’s favorite.  I may, or may not have, spent more time than I would care to admit on the toilet. 
• We may, or may not, have had a great time seeing old friends and thinking about old times.

Kids saying goodbye.

Don’t get me wrong, we had a blast.  The kids had fun, we were exhausted and I swear I think I aged several years when the baby went missing.  So that was our weekend that was, up in North Dakota.

While it’s good to be home, I miss my old friends.

Steer clear of I-94. We’re going to be on it.

By the time you read this we should have worked our way from south Kansas City to North Dakota.  See, we left on Thursday to go to a wedding.  A wedding that we could not miss.  One that under any other circumstances I’d have written it off and sent back the reply card with the “Unable to attend,” box checked off faster than you can read this paragraph.

But….but.

This is a wedding we didn’t want to miss.  It’s the wedding of a dear friend.  She’s one of several friends that make my heart stray to the Northern Plains.

North Dakota: home of the sugarbeet, soybean and sunflower.

And then we turn right back around and come home on Sunday.

And then school starts.

And because of that, we’re anxious, nervous and stimming.  We’ve had a volley of emails regarding meeting new teachers, of which we have three new ones this year, IEP concerns, agendas and the list goes on.

Somehow our summer is over and we’re right back to another school year.  And I’m loathe to see it happen.

Like a switch, Alex has been turned on, stimming—flicking his wrists, shaking his head back and forth at lightening speed and melting down at the slightest of things.

I’m sad to see our summer melt away, right before our very eyes.

So by the time you read this, we’ll have dealt with car sickness, cussing, swear words and more fights than you can imagine.  And all of that before we’re even out of the Kansas City metro.  Add to it, I have a new found fear of our car tire falling off, and visions of how horribly wrong our vacations can go, and I’m nervous too.

I don’t know how much I’ll be able to access the computer over the next few days, as it’s our go to item when Alex is stressed.  If I don’t surface by Monday I’d start to worry.

Birthdays, brats and just for fun–a little bit of snow.

My sweet little baby girl turned two yesterday.  Having an older brother and sister she’s been in the terrible two’s for a good nine months now.  Always desperate to keep up and not one to be left behind she’s the one we’ve rushed to the Emergency Room, picked up out of the ocean and nursed multiple head wounds.  

All because she’s the one the other two use as a toy when they get bored.  They have, in no particular order:

• Stuffed her in a blanket, rolled her up like a burrito and then flung her down the hallway to see how far she’d go.  In case any of you are wondering, two feet.    
• Pushed her down the slide outside and watched to see how high she’d bounce when she hit bottom.  They were not happy with the initial bounce so they added items of various thickness to see if it would give her “loft” as Alex called it.  Beach towels gave the most height.  According to Alex, a plank of wood was no different than the ground.  Always good to know.
• Tried to feed her regular milk and cheese to “see what would happen.”  Gracie’s lactose intolerant.  She puked.  
• Climbed into her crib and tried to shoot her out of it by bouncing the hell out of it.  Then they tried to see if they could get the crib mattress to fit under the slide outside.  It apparently has some really good bouncing ability.
• Painted her finger and toe nails “hooker red” and then proclaimed to the free world, “We have a hooker in the house!  We have a hooker here!”  Yeah, I’ll own that.  That was all me.   

Generally speaking she’s aged me faster than any of the other kids combined.  

Gracie multitasking.  Yeah, the penguin back there is in time out.

Happy Birthday little one.  Your mama loves you and the other two think you’re way better than having a dog.  As Lizzy summed it up, “I like her cuz we don’t have to walk her and clean up her poop.  You do all of that.” 

Cake. Walmart style.

On a totally unrelated note we had our first snowfall.

Dropping the kids off to school I slid down the street into oncoming traffic only to hear Lizzy exclaim, “Woooaaa!!  Woo Hoo!!!  Mom, that was great!!!  Can we do that again?!?”

And to hear Alex say, “Mom, did you realize you were in direct violation of about three safety rules?”  He never even bothered to look up from his I-touch.

Snow balls. How can you not say that and get a giggle? Go on, say it. See???

I took a picture of our snow after I damn near killed all of us and calmed my ass down.

That would have been around noon.

Note: I have to thank Tulpen for the use of the words, “snow balls.”  She mentioned a prolific use of balls in her Christmas decorations this year and I believe in giving credit where credit’s due.  She’s over at Bad Words and I love her writing.   


And the cake was five dollars cheaper at Walmart than at Target.  I hauled my ass to Walmart and snapped that thing right up.  I even sported for the sugar letters instead of having Granny back in the bakery write on it.  Cuz seriously, who wants to tempt fate like that?