Sometimes We Need a Fairy God Bitch

Whenever I don’t post, it isn’t because I have nothing to say. It’s because I have so much I don’t know where to begin.  Two things have been bothering me lately in the spectrum world and I thought I should address them, but it is so much easier for me to write about the snow and how much it annoys this little southern belle.  Don’t we all want to avoid the big issues? Big surprise, one involves my daughter and the other my first born son.  I’ll start with her first.

I post a lot about the “bitches” and how much I hate them.  Women should stick together under just about all circumstances, but this is why I call myself a quack.  I say one thing and then I say something else.  (Maybe I should consider politics) Anyway, sometimes I feel it is my job to be the bitch.

I spent three years in denial that anything was wrong with my daughter.  Well sort of.  I listened to the people who told me what I wanted to hear.  I am tri-lingual, but my baby didn’t babble.  No one told me that wasn’t normal.  It could have been that all of us were having our first babies so none of us knew they were supposed to be babbling.  But deep down I knew perfectly well how language develops and I looked the other way. I thought I was lucky.  I would put her on a blanket and there she would sit happily without making a sound.  I wish I could remember that silent period now when she says things like “Mom, you are killing my mood.” 

You hear it over and over again during that “iffy” period. “Don’t worry about it.” “Babies aren’t cookie cutters.” “They are all different.”   “You need to give her time.”  You hear it and you let out a sigh that it is all going to be all right. AND then a friend of yours has a child the same age and that child is babbling on and on about a dog and re-telling a trip to the park.  Then you go eat cookies instead of running……

I wish a “Fairy God Bitch” would have shown up and told me to get her an evaluation. Then I would have huffed and puffed and done it, and then I would have gotten really bad results, had a good cry, and started the speech therapy much sooner than I did.   

So now whenever I’m with a group of friends and one is worried and the others are re-assuring, I “politely” say that I am going to be the "Fairy God Bitch" at the table.  I’m the one to say that I had a child not babbling and did nothing until she was a  little older.  I am the one who says go to this link.  I am the one that says go to Google and type in "Early intervention + your state." OR "Birth to Three + your state."  

Don't misunderstand, my husband and I are very proud of her and all that everyone has done to get her where she is, but I still can't help but remember the time I lost that could have been used.

What is the worst that could happen if you offer unsolicited advice?

Option one: They will never speak to me again? They will hide from me in parking lots or hide in the classroom until they see me leave? Been there, done that.

Option two: They will tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, despite having two children on the spectrum and a husband who researches it? Been there, done that.

Option three: Have it plastered all over the front page of the newspaper?  Make a made for television movie?  I don't think it will get that bad...

So that is my “calling” as my Southern Baptist friends like to put it.  I’m the one who says, “Hey get that checked out.”  Look into Birth to three programs in your state.  Find a private speech pathologist and pay up.  Eat at home, skip the movies, shop at Marshalls instead of the mall-get it taken care of. I swear,the happiest day of my life was when my child called me a “freak.”

If I am wrong, just call me a bitch…

On the 9th Snow Day We Decorated a Shoebox....

My son is supposed to decorate a shoebox for Valentine's day.  This would be great and easy if he hadn't told me he didn't want any pink, red, hearts, or lace on it.  I suggested he just take the New Balance box in as it is since all the other moms know I'm crazy anyway.  He was nice enough to say he wouldn't to that to me, so we are going with a Harry Potter theme. It is going to be covered in basilisk fangs and Tom Riddle diaries. :0)

As we were working on this monstrosity, we had the following dialogue:

"What's the spell to make a snake come out of your wand?"

"Serpensortia"

"Are you sure Mom? That doesn't sound right..."

"Yes, don't ask me again."

"Mom, maybe we better double check...."

(Not looking up from the box) "Year 2, The Dueling Club, Chapter 11, probably page 190 something in my hardback English version.  Go get it."

Kenneth goes to get it, we find the answer exactly where I said it would be (p.194, but I was never good at math).

Kenneth won't be out done by anyone.  I have no idea who he got it from but he is never WRONG.

"Well, what does he say in the movie?" I can't believe he just did that.

"Well, get the DVD and put it on scene seventeen to find out."

We watch it on my laptop and guess what Malfoy said?

We go back to the anti-valentine shoebox.

"I'll get you one day Mom, I really will."

Not when it comes to Harry Potter he won't.....

The Accidental Steelers Fan

We were in Pittsburgh for fifteen months when my husband told me we were leaving. I wrote about this two super bowls ago.  You live in Pittsburgh, you catch a Steeler virus. There is no vaccine. There is no cure. You are a Steelers fan for life. So basically I was there long enough to get pregnant, have a baby, and become a Steelers fan.  Without re-writing my entire post, on a Steeler game day the entire city is wearing some form of Steeler fashion. I don't mean the bar tender and the electrician-I mean your Pilates instructor and your dentist.  All three of my children still recognize the Steelers and we are not sports people-except once every four years for the world cup.

The wonderful Polamalu (those of us with beautiful hair have to stick together) is headed back to the super bowl yet again!  I thought I should buy a jersey to celebrate the second time in my life I will refrain from a Pedro Almodovar marathon to watch football.

The problem is I have never bought a sports jersey before in my life.

EVER

I appealed to a Pittsburgh girlfriend who told me to start at Dick's.  She also reminded me that jerseys are made for really big men and I'm really small so get a boys medium.  She also said do it quickly, as they sell out.

OK, I can do that.  I got it.

I got to the website. I would like to think after teaching online for four years I can get to a website.

The question is, what do I click on now that I'm here, because I usually just go straight to yoga...

Hmmmmmmm it's a team sport.  But I'm a fan, so I scroll over there and up pop a bunch of acronyms: NFL, NHL, MLB -which one is football?  It isn't NASCAR, thank God I grew up in North Carolina and know that much. I'm going to take an educated guess and say that the one with the "F" is football.

Wow-I didn't realize how many football teams there were. The list is alphabetical, which makes sense and now I see the point in my daughter's first grade homework. P for Page, P for Pittsburgh and I have finally arrived.

Excellent- they have visuals for people like me so I assume this will be easy.  But THEN you click on "Steeler Jerseys"-and you get ten freaking more choices. Do I want to buy a woman's jersey? Do I want one that would fit a boy? Do I want to go really crazy and wear a men's size and pretend I'm wrapped up in Troy's jersey after he just won? Do I want authentic or fashion?  These are tougher questions than you think. What is authentic anyway?  Does it have grass stains and sweat on it? ahhhhhh

A customized jersey costs more than I spent on my wedding dress. I'll pass.  What is excellent about being petite is you can buy a child's Polamalu for less than you would otherwise. That works for me.

Click Click done-I will soon be the owner of a football jersey.

The thing about your life is that every little thing you do leaves you a little different than you were before. So no matter how brief my time was in that city, I know that football team.

The big dilemma is will I have to drink beer on super bowl Sunday or can I still have Skinny Girl? I'll post a picture game day. :0)

That's a Margarita

My first memory of a margarita is from kindergarten in Houston, Texas.  Every Friday we went for Mexican at Ninfa's. It wasn't like when I take my kids to a restaurant and we try to eat fast and not make a mess. We stayed a long time-at least two hours.  My parents had drinks out of these huge glasses with salt on them. Every now and then if they got drunk enough they would let me lick some of the salt.  You know, thirty one years later, I should wonder why they took their three kids to a bar/ Mexican restaurant, but it was the 80s. It could have been worse.

 A lot of different movies feature women with the margarita. Practical Magic comes to mind-Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock make it look like so much fun, don't they?  In the (gag, cough) love story Ghost, Whoopi Goldberg tells Demi Moore's character she is wearing the shirt she "spilt the margarita on". So she knows that Sam is really there. If Hollywood ever makes a female version of The Hangover, margaritas will be involved somehow.


The bar tender rules for a margarita are 7:4:3, which means 50% tequila, 29% Triple Sec, and 21% fresh lemon or lime juice.  Now, being Americans,  we make "mixes."  If you make a margarita with a mix, the average margarita has 246 calories. Have two of them?  492  Have three of them?  738  They don't have nutritional value, so that is what it is: 738 calories. True, they have "mommy" value most definitely, but that isn't the point.  So if there is no value, you are just making yourself fat.  How many babies have you had? Do you really need more fat? No sweetie, you don't.  But you do need the drink.  Problem, isn't it?

The question I always ask myself, and I probably wouldn't ask myself if my son didn't go to school in Madison, CT, is this: WWAD?  That means, What would an anorexic do?   I remember from high school that she would drink vodka and diet coke. But due to bad college memories (well not really memories due to blackouts) I can't touch the big "V."  What to do?  What to do? 

Enter the Skinny Girl. Actually, my husband brought it home from New Haven.  He didn't know what he was buying at the time. He just said the bottle looked like something I would like.  I rolled my eyes and then poured a class. It was yummy. It was the margarita of my youth, only 80 calories instead of 246. Drink two? 160 Drink three? 240.  Look at it this way ladies, you can drink the whole bottle and it's still less calories than one commercial mixed drink.  Don't you love "Pagie math?"

I don't go across the bridge and the old man at the neighborhood bottle shop (I love the north every neighborhood has their own liquor store) doesn't have it and refuses to order it for me.  He did suggest I try flavored vodka and he is lucky I didn't gag in his store. Say "Vodka" and it all goes black.  I called around until I found it-at the beloved package store on the town green next to the dry cleaners.  How often do you have to pick up clothes?  There you go ladies-laundry, liquor, laundry, liquor. IF you are really lucky, your husband forgot to take a twenty out of his pants pocket-and you can go next door for another bottle!!!!! The guys and the one girl that work there know what I'm getting when they see me coming-at Christmas they put a ribbon on the one for Kenneth's dance teacher.  Try to teach my son dance? Yes, have a margarita.

I showed it to a girlfriend once who couldn't believe it was a margarita.
"That's a margarita?"
"That's a margarita!"
"No kidding?"
"I kid you not-have a glass!"

I'm going to get the whole lake crew sloshed this summer, I swear.


Babies are cute and we love them and we have all the time in the world to relish the gift of motherhood. Stare at the baby, look at my baby. I did that.  I'm a miracle, life is a miracle.  Ahhhhh.  Yes you did. But one day, you will look at your baby and she will tell you to turn the Suzanne Vega off because who would sing duh duh duh duh?  When that happens, do not worry for one minute where you went wrong. Have a drink.

You people have no idea how much I despise Jimmy Buffet.  Well, that isn't nice.  You people have no idea how much I prefer many other types of music.  So for me to pick a drink that he sings about is saying something.

If you aren't a chip holding AA member, drink it up....

Lessons from the Chocolate Factory

In the beginning, there was Roald Dahl....

I think that every child must have a "Roald Dahl" phase in their life.  I can still remember reading the collection: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and The Giant Peach, The Twits. I wasn't a very motivated learner in elementary school, but there was something about that married couple being so mean to each other that kept me reading late into the night.  There were no VCRs or DVD players then. My best friend Rhonda and I would go to the little library in our small southern Illinois town and watch the 1971 movie (Re-named Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory due to Vietnam) anytime they played it.

For his fifth birthday, I bought a copy of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory for my son.  A girlfriend also suggested we listen to the audio version, as the wonderful Monty Python actor Eric Idle is the reader.  All three of my kids, even the two year old, can't get enough of it.  We read it, we listened to it, and we re-read our favorite chapters over and over again. We watched both versions of the movie on our drives up and down the east coast.

This is probably Dahl's most popular and least "Frightening" book. Sometimes when you describe a plot to someone, it sounds worse than it actually is.  Veruca for example is attacked by a hundred squirrels who then drag her down a garbage shoot. Sounds like an atrocious headline.  Usually in a Dahl novel, the adults are always the bad guys and the kids get them back in the end.  When you first read Charlie, you think the kids are the bad guys and little Charlie is the hero and there are no villainous adults this time.  Then you read again and you realize how nasty all the adults are.  The four little kids were created by their parents.  I am guilty of it myself at times.  It is my job to unplug the televisions, put away the computers, and tell them, "No." when they need to hear "No."  If you are looking for a good parenting handbook, start with this.

In my daily haze of coming and going and trying to work from home, I do look for teachable moments.  If one of them is screaming too loud, I say, "What would happen to a child that is too loud in the chocolate factory?"  "What would happen to a child that hits or scratches instead of using words in the chocolate factory?"  This is two-fold. First they stop doing whatever it is they are doing, and second, a lot of creativity goes into whatever they think would happen in the factory. For the loud child, we decided Mr. Wonka was working on a candy that would change your voice and keep you from being loud. Kenneth added that you probably had to sing soft lullabies over and over again to little babies.

My son is more imaginative, but my daughter, for obvious reasons, is more practical and grounded.  She loves the Violet/blueberry chapter and we read it over and over, but then I can see the anxiety in her face.  "But how Mommy?  Why Mommy?"  I know she is terrified that at any minute she will eat the wrong thing and become a blueberry.  I sat her down and promised her it would never happen to her.  Violet was a silly girl in a silly story.  Sometimes kids have allergic reactions but nothing like that.  Frances, you will never become a blueberry. Isn't it nice when there is something you can tell a child won't happen?  There are very few things you can promise them, but that is one of them!

The missing chapter and one of the cut characters was published recently.  I really wish "Miranda" had made it into the final version.  Her naughty trait was being a  "Teacher's Pet" type. Her parents have told her she is smart. They allow her to say and do whatever she wants, as she is so much smarter than everyone else.  In that one chapter, she is very rude to adults and a nasty know-it-all.  This struck me because I have taught many a child like this over the years.  I also have a son that comes up with quick one-liners that I post on Facebook, but I never post what I do to him after he says it.  Rest assured that my child will never be told, "You are smarter than everyone," because he isn't.  I just post the funny part and many of my other friends do the same!


Because I love my movies, I have to compare the 1971/2005 versions.  Gene Wilder is the better Willy to me. Don't get me wrong, Johnny is very talented and I liked his performance.  I just feel it more from Gene when I read the book and watch the movies.

Veruca Salt is the biggest icon to come out of all of it.  The two actresses played her about the same. The new kids brought new aspects to the characters. Violet's competitive nature was expanded past the gum. Augustus was more greedy than gluttonous. Mike in an era of technology has added gaming to his addiction.  But with Veruca, there isn't much more to make someone go farther over the top.  And more trivia, of the original five child actors, only Veruca is still acting.  Charlie is a vet and Violet is a nurse, as her parents refused to let her play the Reagan role two years later (See?  Children can be told NO!).  I still want to name our puppy Veruca, no matter how bad that will make her act.

We are on to James and The Giant Peach.  Then the BFG, Matilda, and the Witches. I am going to hold off on George's Marvelous Medicine, not because I don't like it, but I need to make sure all three of them clearly understand that we don't mix everything in the house together and feed it to ANYONE.  I'll give it another year.

If I royally screw up in my parental duties, I'm sure a golden ticket to a certain factory will show up in my energy bar.

90s Music According to Kenneth

 Kenneth has been paying more attention to my music choices than I thought.  These are his observations as we listen to the 90s station on the way to school every morning:

1. Sting- "Beautiful voice, weird name."
2. Hootie and the Blowfish- I understand why she loved "The Beast", but why a blowfish?
3. Nirvana- He sounds sad mama, really sad...
4. Dave Matthews- Cool!  I want to play the violin like him!
5. R.E.M.-They wrote a song for me!!!!!!!

Just a little chuckle to get you through the cold winter days!

Show Me Your Black Swan...

I took ballet in kindergarten.  I saw Baryshnikov dance when I studied abroad in Spain.  I love the Nutcracker.  I even rented Flashdance on DVD when I found out we were moving to Pittsburgh.  I get ballet.  

I am not the only one from my generation to go from Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarrantino to Hannah Montana and The Jonas Brothers.  My New Year’s Resolution was to watch more movies actively without passing out or working on something else while I watch it.  My children are old enough now that I should be able to do this. My brain should also be able to process an independent film.  So, I heard “thriller ballet” AND I heard “Natalie Portman” AND I heard “babysitter available”- AND I went to see Black Swan.

First impressions: I wonder how many ballerinas are southern because grapefruit for breakfast isn’t quite biscuits and molasses with your grits. How do they stay so freaking skinny? I just answered my own question, didn't I?  In the movie when they arrive at the ballet studio, all the girls are trashing the principal dancer and how old she is and how she needs to retire.  I kept waiting for some gray haired A-list actress to walk on in a tutu.  Do you know who they were talking about?  Winona Ryder-Winona was the actress playing the ballerina pushing 40 (like myself).  Now not only do I feel fat, but I also have to worry about arthritis.  I must rent Edward Scissorhands, Reality Bites, and Mermaids to make myself feel better.

The quick summary: The director, Thomas, announces they will do a version of Swan Lake.  He collects a little group of favorites to audition for the lead. Among them is Natalie Portman’s Nina, a somewhat repressed and extremely sheltered young woman. During her audition, bad ass new ballerina Lilly interrupts. Nina is always in white, Lilly is always in black (Things that make you go hmmmm).  Nina gains the role as the Swan Princess Odette.  She slowly goes crazy (from white to black) as the film progresses, convinced that Lilly and others are going to try and replace her.

There are scenes in the beginning that make you think, this isn’t going to end well.  No young adult should still be living with her mother in a pink bedroom decorated with butterflies and stuffed bunny rabbits.  No one should open her mom’s room and see painted portrait after portrait of themselves.  Maybe I’m wrong, but everyone should be allowed to have some private time, if you know what I mean.

About Nina’s mother-they were probably five years away from becoming the Bates family.  Barbara Hershey nailed the border-line personality mom down.  I really felt like I knew these women and they were functioning in their dysfunction absolutely perfectly.  Who needs locks on doors? Who needs friends? Who needs to cut their own fingernails? I believe, well, I know, that people living in crazy don’t know it is crazy.  You could see that in these scenes. 

 The acting was convincing. I could feel the paranoia from Nina, the obsession from the mom, the sleazy talented machismo of the director, the “I’m here from California tattooed ballerina coolness” coming off Lilly. It was very creepy and definitely not for everyone.  I have a list of friends I give permission to see certain films, and they can’t go to this one.   It reminded me of Salvador Dali’s paintings and the way his fears would come to life on the canvas.

Natalie might very well win the Oscar.  This is my favorite movie of hers since the Professional.  Black Swan could be considered a Fight Club for women.  I would also pass out permission slips to show this to an “all girl” health class. All the basics are covered for eating disorders, cutting, sexuality, paranoia, drugs and other substances, making good friendships, and being best buds with your mom. That will get you through college.

My daughter is sticking with gymnastics-until she breaks a rib but refuses to stop tumbling that is….