Checking in, be back soon!

Surgery went really well.
Recovery's been a bit slower than expected.

Hope to be back soon!

Friends, a uterus, house drama, and strawberries.

Just going to fill in the blanks of what's been going on at Chez Quirk lately-
Already, this has been a year of tremendous ups and downs.

My 2 best friends (only friends?) moved away- one up north, and the other clear across the country. Boo.

Anyone remember my lovely, and by "lovely" I really mean horrifyingly painful ablation experience? Yeah, well I wasn't one of the lucky 80%. So I'm having a hysterectomy (LSH). Next wednesday. Like a few days from now. Unless I'm still sick, because I now have strep. Lovely. Ugh.

Our house is still not even close to being built. Like the builder doesn't even have the permit yet. Ugh. I'm really starting to stress.

But check out my fantastonishing parenting skills-
Jaysen is putting on way too much weight.
He's now "The Jiggly Kid".

No fun.


Most of his crap-eating is at nighttime. I know. Wonderful timing.
So I mad a firm decision to limit him to ONE bedtime snack (90% of the time it's popcorn).
After said snack, he is only allowed something healthy to snack on, and water.


For those new to this blog, it's important to know that Jaysen has some pretty significant food aversions. He is the carbo-kid. Aside from the baby food I forced down his gullet, he has never, and I mean NEVER eaten a vegetable. Raw, cooked, covered in cheese, pureed, pureed and hidden in food, silly shapes, dipped in a variety of sides... I've tried it all. The times I forced- I mean coerced him, he turned red, eyes watered, and gagged. Not the gagging that you get when you brush your teeth, but gagging like holycrap I.Can't.Breathe! type gagging.

On occasion, Jaysen has been able to choke down red grapes and thinly sliced, peeled, apples.

Anyway, back to my evil plan.

The first few nights, he thought this entertaining little game of mine was a challenge of sorts, and actually went along with it. I love that he humors me. After a few nights of this, he was not amused anymore. He would get into bed, and ask for popcorn, cocoa puffs, cheese its, goldfish, or some other previously allowable bedtime snacky-type foods.

Denied.
You get fruit or veggies, and water.

He begrudgingly agreed to apples. Begrudgingly like I was making the poor kid eat sticks and rocks.

I remember back to the time my kid ate Special K red berries cereal. He wouldn't touch the cereal part, but would pick out the freeze dried strawberries. The next day, I was on a freeze dried strawberry hunt. Love you Trader Joe's!

Now, he gets into bed and says, "Can I have strawberries?"
Aaaaaaabsolutely!

Only problem is the damn things are so expensive! I mean seriously, I can only find them at the one store, and they're almost $4 a bag! And he blows through a bag a day.

So yay! He's eating "good foods" at night!

Messing with a good thing.

They're trying to make me crazy.
The school district, that is.
Everything revolves around budgeting.
No money here, no funding there...
What to do...what to do...
Let's mess with the schools!

The voted on proposal that passed, was to close 4 elementary schools (that's 1/3 of our elementary schools), make the remaining elementaries K-4, have 2 middle schools for grades 5-6, and 2 more for 7-8.
Does that make any sense?
Apparently to someone it does.
*sidenote - One of the schools that's closing, is the craptastic school that treated Jaysen horribly, so... Karma, biatches! *

Jaysen has been doing so well this year, comparatively. I mean so well.
He's staying in the Gen.Ed class almost all day, and tolerating it. He has friends. He's even in an after school tutoring program one day a week.
This is the first year he's actually going to school every day without a fight.

The new plan for our schools means:
Jaysen will only have one more year at The Awesome School. And it will be a transition year, so focus will be put on transitioning, not the things he's just started to work on this year, like increasing his workload tolerance and academics. Dammit- he really needs that extra year at this school.

So. One more year at The Awesome School.
Then he'll go to middle school for 5th and 6th grade.
After 6th grade, he'll go to a different middle school for 7th and 8th grade.
Then to high school for 9th-12th.

That's 3 transitions. And I'm talking transitions in only the physical location sense. I'm not even counting the internal transitions of "new school", "new teachers, peers, classwork, routines, etc".
This is going to be hell on a kid who doesn't transition well.
As soon he gets into a routine and settled, he's going to have to completely switch schools again.
Fuk.

I need to get my advocacy cape back on.
I know this sounds bizarre, but I'm not even sure what it is exactly that I'm preparing to advocate for!
Has anyone else run into anything like this?

Pajama Jam

Tonight there's a Pajama Jam at Jaysen's school. He told me this morning that he'd like to go. I am thrilled with this, as it took some goading with the promise of plastic baby cakes to get him to attend last year's Mardi Gras event.

He's excited.
He's super excited to show all of his friends his new Super Paper Mario pajamas.
The pajamas we just got, because he had to have them to replace the ones lost in the fire.
The pajamas that we got a whole size smaller than he really wears, because that's the biggest size they had. In any pajama.
The pajamas that are skin tight and show his belly.
The pajamas I am desperately trying to talk him out of wearing, with no luck at all.
He's excited.

Jaysen lacks the social awareness of knowing the difference of people laughing with him, or at him. He has "friends" who are backhandedly mean to him. Frenemies. I really don't think wearing these ill-fitting jammas are going to turn out well for him. I'm going to try and talk him into wearing a long hoodie or something, but I know he'll claim he's hot, and want to take it off. To show off his jammas that his kid brother could almost fit into. He has other Mario jammas, but these are new. And they're Super Paper Mario. And he lurvs them. He's even made sure they will be clean for tonight.

And it's not just the lack of social awareness. I remember being teased mercilessly as a kid. It can destroy a person. And it almost did. I don't want my son to be that kid. The reality is, he's going to get teased anyway. I don't want to give kids any more fuel than they already have. I do not want kids to whisper "hey- that's the kid who came to the Pajama Jam in third grade, with the jammas that his mom cut the elastic on so he could breathe...". It's like the kid with the holey underwear. Or the stinky kid. Ugh. I'm mortified already.

The silver lining?
The party is over at 8pm. When we get home, he'll already be in jammas.
Sweet.

I always feel like, somebody's waaatching meeee....

Jaysen loves to google.
If you look at his left hand in the above pic, you can actually see him stimming.
He will google anything on his mind... ad nauseam.
Usually it's something to do with Mario, or Baby Einstein.

I was really hoping we were getting out of the Baby Einstein thing, but he seems to have revisited it in full force lately. But that's not the point of this post.

Jaysen recently learned how to create folders on his computer. 'Cuz he's a geek like that. He made one for Baby Einstein, so he was googling pictures of Baby Einstein VHS tapes to archive, when he came across the muthaload.

His eyes bugged out at this picture:




I thought that pic looked reeeeally familiar, so I swooped in for a closer look.
Guess where he found it?
Yep- here at The Quirk Factor.

My son had pulled up my own blog in a Google search.
How's that for some tweakiness? I totally felt like I was staring straight down the rabbit hole.

Once I pointed it out, he recognized my Lenore girl (upper left corner) and wanted to see all the pictures I had on the blog (once he realized there was not a whole lot of exciting information about Baby Einstein). I showed him how to browse by category, and we spent about an hour just looking at the pictures and revisiting memory lane. We reminisced about family vacations, and the unfabulous times when "Mom cried" because of the loss of beloved furballs like Gacy and Tiki. He also busted me on some profane language- does that say crap? Crap?!? Uh, yeah. Sorry.

This wasn't the first time he's ever seen my blog, but it's the first time he's ever found it on his own, and taken any time actually going through it. It was different, because there was a sincere interest. Despite the fact I was "outed" by my own son, we had a really good time. Now I'm thinking of how I can get him to guest post.

A whole other reason to blog.

Happy Birfday to... ME!

It's my birthday!
And for those who are curious, I am twenty-seventeen.

Shut up and have some cake.

Rants of the day...

I've been informed of the demolition going well, as noted by Jaysen's call to me at work.

"Mom! You're missin' it! This is awesome! You're totally missin' it! You have to see dis!"

So there's that.

Then there's this.

Today was a monumental milestone.
I found my first gray hair.
Technically, it's translucent. Void of color.
But still. Two things went through my mind.
Number one - I've managed to make it to twenty-sixteen without a single gray. I guess it was bound to happen sometime.
And number two - WTF is this doing in my eyebrow?
Yes, my eyebrow.

Meh.