I would have snapped a photo, but some immediate intervening had to be done.

This boy snaps into action. Sometimes the thinking comes later.

Actually, the thinking follows the doing almost without fail.

He just asked me if I’d hold the nail while he hammered.

What an optimistic boy.

I declined.

One more thing about Eli. He does this every day on the way home from school. Sometimes he yells, “This the best day of my life!” Today he decided to spit.

Yep. All boy.

I’m a bit scattered today.  Nothing big.  Just….

• We’re having a photo taken of my whole side of the family tomorrow.  Yeeep.  Getting all of my busters to look in the same direction is a challenge, y’all.  The photo session will be immediately followed with fried catfish and strawberry cake.  So, even including the photo posing challenges of said busters, looks like an excellent Saturday.
• I’ve just made a chocolate Bundt cake.  This one.   The aroma in the house right now is really distracting.
• Tonight we are attending a church youth function.  Pizza and bowling.  My oldest son, James,  invited someone.   I sure hope that she can come.  The sweet soul has eaten lunch with James and his helper every day this semester.  Bless her.
• I got tickets to see Neutral Milk Hotel.  No biggie — just palpitations.
• It looks like I might be taking a trip to Atlanta in the next few weeks.  Why is this important?  IKEA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Finally, I stumbled across this recipe for a cocktail, known as the Paloma.  Wow, y’all.  This drink, more popular in Mexico than the margarita, sounds so awesome.  Grapefruit + lime + a touch of sweetness + tequila + a little carbonation=  awesome.  I will consume one this weekend.  Yes I will.

Have a great weekend, y’all!!

But, I’m not talking about his furniture today.  No, I recently read about the pre-fab house that he built on Block Island, RI, decades ago.

I just love this house.  I wish I could move right in, in fact.  The view, the windows, the design.  I love it all.

Dwell magazine did a film about it recently.  You can watch it here:

Also, you can see read the article and see more images of the house here.

Now, all I need to do is figure out how I can build one of these on a lake here in Starkville.  I’m kidding…that’s not happening.  But a girl can dream, right?

Happy Wednesday, y’all!
 

I made my granola bars today, and y’all, I have an apology to make.  There is a typo in that recipe.  Nothing dire, but the recipe says to use 3 cups of dried fruit.  Nope.  So sorry, that should read “1 1/2 cups dried fruit”, instead.  I’m about to fix the original, but I thought I’d put it here, too, just in case.

Also, I forgot to add the 1/4 cup sugar when I made my granola bars today.  Fortuitous — because it absolutely does not need that extra sugar.  So, I’m going to nix that from the original recipe.

You know what, I’ll just put the corrected one here, too.

Granola Bars

3 T. coconut oil or butter

2/3 cup honey

1 t. cinnamon

a big of pinch salt

2 cups old fashioned rolled oats

1 cup dried coconut (the natural, unsweetened variety)

1 cup chopped nuts of your choosing (pecans, almonds)

1  1/2  cups of dried fruit (Usually I do a golden raisin, dried cranberry combo)

1/4 cup ground flax seed

1/4 cup oat bran or wheat germ

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Combine the oats, coconut, and chopped nuts.  Put them on a very large jellyroll pan and toast until they are fragrant and light golden brown.  Meanwhile, in a 2 cup glass measuring cup, heat the coconut oil or butter, honey, cinnamon and salt in the microwave.  The length of time in the microwave will vary — I usually do about 45 seconds or so.  Watch it while it heats — the honey can bubble over if heated for too long.  Now it is time to prepare your pan for the bars.  I usually use an 8 x 11 glass pyrex dish.  You can also do 9 X 9 if that’s all you have.  Butter the dish and line it with parchment paper.  Leave the edges of the paper poking out above the sides of the pan so that you can use the paper to lift the bars out when they are done.  By now, the oats should be toasty.  So, get them out of the oven and reduce the temperature to 300.  Combine the oats/coconut/nuts with all the other ingredients in a large bowl.  Stir until well mixed and then press into the prepared pan.  Bake at 300 until done to your liking.  This is a range, of course, but I’d say at least 25 minutes.  I bake mine until they are a golden brown.

Now, this is the hard part; you have to wait at least 3 hours to cut them.

That’s it!

Originally posted June 10, 2010.

The Embroidery of Life

He walked up to me while we were at the pool. Actually, I should say that he flopped up to me. You see, the only thing preventing his 6 E (XXwide, completely flat) feet from qualifying as flippers is that there is no webbing between his toes. So, when he walks with wet feet on concrete it sounds really similar to flippers. But, I’m digressing here.

He had his goggles in his hand and a concerned look on his face.

“Hey, James,” I said, looking up from my magazine, “what’s up?” He rarely visits me when we come to the pool. Usually, I see him at the beginning of our visit when I remind him of the pool rules, in the middle of the time when I hunt him down to reapply sunscreen, and at the end when I gather everyone so that we can go home.

I have the feeling something has happened.

He launched into it.

James: I saw a big mean pool bully over there.
Me: Oh, really, well, how do you know that he’s a mean bully?
James: The bully called me “weird ass”. The bully said, “get out of the way, WEIRD ASS!” to me.

So, what did I do? I told James that he was great. l told him to go back to swimming but to stay out of the way of the mean bully. I told him not to worry about it and not to be afraid. But I reiterated to him to stay away from mean people.

And so he went back to swimming. I watched him retreat into the water that he loves so much and the words that he had just related to me washed over me like the water that he slipped under. Basically, my first thought was that the bully was right on. James is a little weird ass. He just is. Often, so often, I wish that he wouldn’t behave so oddly. I wish that he would have half a care about how he looks to others. I coach him to “walk quietly, James” and “hands in your pockets, James”. After this first thought had passed, I immediately commenced to hating the bully’s guts. I thought up all sorts of come backs, things I would have said had I been there. The mildest one of these retorts was something along the lines of, “Oh, well spotted, Einstein!” Then these two halves of my mind, the half that agreed with the bully and the half that wanted to beat him up got to stewing.

I’m here to tell you that there are some remarkable, truly wonderful things about autism. That moment that I just had wasn’t one of them.

Sometimes I think about life and how we live it as being like embroidering a huge design. We hope that it’ll be beautiful, in the end, and we keep stitching on it all the time. We know that we’ll make mistakes. Sometimes we’ll have to take stitches out. Sometimes we’ll have to do stitches over and over until the are right. But, we know that for our design to be done well that we must keep trying, straightening out the floss, redoing stitches, unsnarling the knots.

I’m pretty good at knots. You know, that is one of the first self-referential statements that I can remember making in my life. One day on the kindergarten playground, my best friend, Christy, had somehow gotten the drawstring around the bottom of her jacket tied in a huge, tight knot. She tearfully asked if I thought I could help. “Oh, sure. You just hang on there a minute and I’ll have it loose,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m really good with knots.”

So, in the greater scheme of things, I suppose that it is interesting that, for the last decade of my life, I’ve had a gigantic knot that I’ve been working with. That knot has a name. It’s called autism. It is a knot that will never come undone. No matter how hard I work at it — some knots are just there for the duration.

When the knot is yours, though, at some point you come to the realization that this knot is/was meant to be. And you make the decision to not only work around it but to make it a lovely part of your overall design. Is the decision hard? No, not in the end. But the work is.

Do my efforts always succeed? No, many times they do not. Sometimes they do. I try to keep trying, anyway. Are there days that I lose my courage to keep trying to work with this knot? Yes. There have been many days that I wonder why I got such a difficult design. I don’t feel equal to the challenge. I feel like I’ve been given a complicated tapestry to work on when my skills were more on the elementary cross-stitch level.

The days when a bully is unkind to my guileless son are particularly hard. They cause inner turmoil. These days cause problems for my heart, too, because my heart seems to know that this ache will happen many times. Because, like the poor, the bullies are always with you.  It kind of breaks my heart a little.

I can’t really put any kind of conclusion on these thoughts. I just wanted to put them out there for any mother of a a child who is not typical. These struggles are somehow easier when you know that others are feeling these feelings and are having these struggles.

But I have lots of hope. I have a great, non-typical family and I have an idea to keep me going, even when it is hard. My idea is that, years from now, when I look back on this part of my life’s design, when I see the stitches that I made, how I kept working with it all even when my heart was breaking, well, those might just be the loveliest parts.

I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I get there. Until then, I’ll keep stitching.

Put It On My List

This is yet another item on the “I Can’t Believe That He Just Did That” list.

My list — it’s extensive.

On Saturday, my boys and I went to the pool. There weren’t too many folks there so Nathan and I started a game of catch in the middle of the pool. After awhile, it dawned on me that I hadn’t laid eyes on any of my other sons for several minutes. So, I told Nathan that I was going to do a head count and then we’d resume our game.

I first went to look for Eli, my youngest. I quickly found him at the snack bar (of course) but not mooching food (thank goodness for that). He was sitting at a table with Charlie. Eli had procured his special dip — the dip that consists of equal parts mustard and ketchup — and was sucking it into his mouth using a coffee stirrer. I asked him to sit on our lounge chair so that I would know where he was while he finished his “seekret speshal dip” as he calls it.

So, I was 2 down and 1 to go before I could be relaxed and play some more catch with Nathan. Then I realized that James was probably in the bathroom and I resolved to have 10 more throws with Nathan before I would leave the pool to go get him.

Turns out that I didn’t have to go get him because, along about throw number 8, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a boy James’s size with identical swim trunks coming from the direction of the bathroom. I turned to check that it really was James and saw him, half-running, into the shallow end of the pool. He had his snorkel in one hand and his goggles in the other. I was visually assuring myself that he also had his trunks pulled up enough when something on his face distracted me.

I looked closer and saw that James was sporting the biggest, most majestic, Santa-like soap bubble beard that I had ever seen. Really, he probably had used the majority of one of those liquid soap dispensers to concoct his beard.

That thing defied the laws of physics, I tell you.

Anyway, he continued to run until he was at the center of the pool where he dunked himself and came up with a flourish equal to any circus performer. It was his big ta-da moment.

Nathan and I laughed, of course. We kept on playing catch and James went back to swimming.

Just another day in my never boring life.

I hope y’all are having a good Monday.

Here are two musical acts that I’ve enjoyed recently.

The first is a band called The Wild Feathers.  I originally heard this song, The Ceiling, on the radio.  I Soundhounded to try and learn what it was but Soundhound didn’t know.  So, after some looking, I discovered the band and the song.  This is a new band, sort of, they formed in 2010, and they have a debut album coming out on August 6th.

I really like the way this song sounds and I want to hear more from the album.  For those of y’all who don’t happen to live in Podunk (like me…I love it, but it is Podunk times 2), you might even be able to catch them on tour this summer.  I think that they’re opening for Dylan.  Now, that would be a concert.

You can get this song and one more for free at their website.

Second song is by Caitlin Rose. It’s called Menagerie and is an earworm for me…so y’all have been forewarned. I was listening to it earlier and Jon walked in and said that it reminded him of a Loudon Wainwright song. Sort of in the Grey in L.A. vein. That’s high praise. High praise, indeed.

Happy Saturday!

Birdhouses in a row.

My ever taller Nathan, volunteering last Saturday.

Jon and James look like they are related.

Yes?

Kale salad with ham, sharp white cheddar, buttermilk dressing, and cornbread croutons. Yum!

This is Stupor Man. He named himself.

Happy weekend, he says. I think he means it, y’all!

His Costume
A couple of weekends ago our church had its annual Harvest Party. One of the activities every year is a costume contest.

Well, I am a slacker. And, it was still before Halloween.  So, I didn’t really talk about the costume contest all that much with the boys. Therefore no one asked for help with his costume. My laziness truly knows no bounds.  

When we got to the party costume-less, my oldest son decided that he wanted to be in the costume contest.  I was visiting with fellow partygoers at the time, and had no idea what he was up to.

He walked over to where the judging was taking place.

He told them that he wanted to enter.

It was patiently explained to him that to be judged in the costume contest one actually had to be wearing a costume. The folks running the judging kindly pointed out to him that the jeans, t-shirt and hoodie he was sporting didn’t really count.

Oh, but he insisted that he was wearing a costume.

They asked him what he was dressed as. He replied,

“I’m the employee of the month.”

A few things that I wanted to share with you today (and to remember, myself):

THIS KITCHEN.  Boom.  What an amazing and doable renovation.  The designers took a kitchen and made it over using only paint, a few shelves, cut and glue cork flooring, and a few accessories.  Inspirational and doable are sometimes not one and the same…you know, for those of us who live with normal lives and have normal budgets, but in this case they are.  Simply gorgeous.

THIS PORK.  I have a confession to make.  I’m not the best meat-cooker.  Yes, I can fry chicken and grill things.  Yes, I can make a decent fish almandine, I can do stir frys, and I can make burgers with a grill pan.  I just haven’t had all that many success stories involving myself, pork, and an oven.  All that is over now, though, because of this recipe.  It also uses a pork loin, which is something that I’ve had less success with than, say, pork chops or tenderloins.  It was really good and so easy.  And, to quote Jon on the easy marinade/sauce that you make to go with it, “This sauce is the happy child of gravy and maple syrup.”   Yes.  And the sauce, along with leftover meat, makes a delightful sandwich for the next day’s lunch.

Happy Thursday!!