When Jodi Picoult--whom I admittedly (snobbishly) consider a sort of pulp fictiony hack writer—came out on my birthday with her new novel, House Rules, I was all jazzed up to hate it.  The book is a thriller about a teenage boy with high functioning autism (commonly labeled Asperger’s Syndrome) who is compulsively interested in, of all things, the murderous crime scene of his friend.  Of course because the boy is autistic, he is weirdly gifted, too, at solving crimes through the (gratuitously grisly) forensic evidence left behind.  Basically his autism—a hot-button popular topic and emerging character of itself in an awful lot of American fiction—is the unconventional new vehicle for a murder mystery plot.  I really, really wanted to hate it.

Well, then came all the hubbub, the book clubs, the #1 ranking on the NY Times best-seller list (down to #6 now), the positive press and finally, the making of the movie buzz, and I realized that despite my righteous indignation , I would now have to read it.  Damn you, conscience!  Why’d you even give me free will, LORD?  What good is it if I have principles?

When you have an autistic child, the oh-very-first thing you do before reading any book (fictional or not)that involves the autistic is read the author/filmmaker/artist’s backstory.  Why’d she write it?  What does she know about autism?  Who does she know who has it?  You are certain that you are far and away the High Queen Know-It-All about ASDs and that anyone else who isn’t themselves living the authentic life of an ASD parent is full of hot air and bunkola  (and even some of them who do have autistic kids are writing bunkola*—Jenny McCarthy!).  Anyway, I read Jodi’s autism story, and I felt convicted.  A little.  She’s a pretty good researcher and close kin to a severely autistic child, so she knows a lot—not everything, but a lot.  Actually, I now heart her, even though I still think most of her books are moderately stinky (I know saying that will make me wildly unpopular, but does it strike you that I care?  And anyways, didn’t you already discredit me as unreliable when I said Jenny McCarthy is full of bunkola?).

I know a lot of autistic kids of all ages and their parents, and these are the things I still kinda hate about House Rules:

1.       Not one ASD kid I have ever met or read about has the kind of physical tremors and tics Jodi describes in her book and backstory.  Maybe her cousin did, but that is not typical autism.  Children with Angelman's Syndrome or Tourette's have this.

2.       Extremely high-functioning kids with ASDs almost never lack empathy.  They can relate to and express emotions easily.

3.       Even the smidge of a whiff of a hint of a suggestion in an enormously popular book that vaccines may be a cause of autism is irresponsible and dangerous.  If you’re going to write fictionally about autism, at least use as a chance to educate people on the new frontiers of what we now do know about autism causes and treatments, not alarm and sensationalize the most controversial topic in the whole world regarding the disorder (p.s., vaccinate your babies, just spread it out over more than the first 18 months ).  I know she doesn't out and out say vaccines are to blame, but the undercurrent of this thinking is there.

4.       I don’t like all the murder stuff.  Most kids with ASDs are stark-raving scared of anything negative, even a harsh tone of voice or severe expression or unusual sound.  I really doubt a kid with ASDs would gravitate to a crime scene, but that’s just me.

But mostly, I didn’t hate it at all.  So don't hate me!

* BTW: “bunkola” is a highly technical term used in the autistic community to describe a particular variety of autism-ignorant sham, just so’s you know. 

The top five emails in my inbox this morning:

Help Stop Obama from Staining the Consitution with Red Ink  (yah, I’m so sure this is from someone who knows me!)

They Killed Pregnant Women!  (lovely way to start the morning)

50% Off Sale on boys’ Incredible underpants and more!  (did they mean The Incredibles underpants?)

A Living Social coupon inviting me to have 50% off brunch including bottomless Bloody Marys, Grey Hounds and Screwdrivers  (bottomless!—I guess they know I need more than coffee…)

A message from Pat Boone (yes, my good buddy and well-known economics savant, Pat Boone) about “The Biblical Solution for Getting Through The Financial Crisis”

Aren’t you grateful for the internet?

Miracle?  Hard work?  This week at Toe's kindergarten readiness meeting, his team of teachers went over their academic and developmetnal evaluations with us.  We are so excited to report that not only has Toe's language usage delay been overcome, but he has tested far above his age in the length, complexity and vocabulary he uses in speech!  He is now an advanced speaker, where less than a year ago he was considered behind.  He also tested several levels above his age in math, reading and general pre-academic knowledge.  Our litttle Toe is on the road to smartytown.  Thanks to our God and all those who prayed/helped with his development. Bring it on, autism--we'll kick your butt!

Both the lads are constantly teaching us new words and expressions--here are some of their recent usages:

Roo:  epscotch (hopscotch), upcake (cupcake), e-licious (delicious), coolawesome! (exclamation of greatness), Red (ketchup), mammimals of the sabannah (animalsof the savannah--including the 'rhino-oscerous"), tinkyoo (thank you), whereday be? (where is it?), ka-yooooot! (cute), minger (finger), darky (night time), abcdefghijklmnop"kribble"rstuywx"yabber"z (Roo's version of the alphabet)

Toe: Tobias Hugs (his new name for himself), Reuben Doodle (his new name for Roo), high up in the skyborg (his new name for me), well, we'll se about that...(whenever I tell him what is next on his schedule), can you help me, hon? (yes, he calls everybody "hon" now), turkle (turquoise--his latest fave color), Kachow Sign (lightning bolt symbol), yellowandorangeovalfirechips (Lays Stackers cheddar chips, his treat of choice), blue tomato bubbles (blue raspberry soda).

Besides the cozy respite of Hubby’s broad shoulder, my favorite piece of real estate in the world in which to escape my cares and rest my head will always be a book nook. When I was little, the book nook was the most important part of my personal space, and my mom made sure it was welcoming to me—a cushion of pillows and stuffed animals in a well-lit but remote corner of a large walk-in closet, a soft and colorful blanket tacked to the wall, a stack of reading materials and my own tin of Saltines.  That’s where I met some of best buds of childhood: The Cat in the Hat, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Snoopy, Ribsy, Ramona Quimby and Alonzo Purr the Sea Going Cat (and, because I was weird little kid with access to a large library, Ernest Hemingway).  It’s always been so important to me that my boys have the same nooky experience with their books.

Of course, in a small house jumping with creatures, just about every place takes on a sort of nook-like quality.  Cushy corner on the little bitty couch=nook.  Spare strip of floor in the corner with a rug=nook.  Big bed in a Lilliputian bedroom=nook.  Personally, I could care less about a nook for myself these days--I’m so pressed for time to read that I could and do get my book on almost anywhere (stop lights, car washes, doctors offices, grocery lines, leaning against the dryer, standing at the sink, walking, cooking, deep in the dark of the sleeping house with my beloved and brain-saving Ott Lite clipped to the page…).  But Toe and Roo, like most pre-K’ers, are selfish den animals.  They are soothed by private cavelike small spaces to cuddle up with their stories and let their minds sail away. 

And so, in our house, the little red Vano slipper chair, on the teeny tiny round rug right beside their own personal shelves of books, has become their nook.  Sometimes you can find us all crammed in there, but in the BCD house we are used to a huddle.

Now I know the book world has changed--you can store up to 1500 titles on your electronic Barnes and Noble Nook, even more on your E-book or IPhone or 4 G whatever.  You can read whole texts online and listen to anything anywhere on CD or MP3, just a bit of data zipped, downloaded or uploaded instantly into a million different miniaturized handheld things.  I know I am supposed to want to tech forward and move on.  But not everything new is better.  How can you read the inscription To my darling daughter at Christmas 1977 or This book reminded me of you…or the signature of the author you actually got to meet or know on a computer chip? 

And in the end, there’s just no substitute for the experience of seeing a big fat book in the chubby excited hands of your child (all curled up in his nook on a rainy afternoon, cracker in hand, the dog at his feet).

Enjoy the rain!

Why is it that we allow—nay, even admire—certain things in small children we would never tolerate in adults?  Egregious open-mouthed snoring, grape juice moustaches, flatulence.  If, on the first brutally hot day of summer, I ripped off my pants and ran around the house yelling “Let’s go swimming!” would you think that was cute?  Would you call your sister on the phone and say, “Angela did the most adorable thing today…”?  I think, no.

For some reason, in a slightly narrower form, this double standard also applies to husbands.  As in:  Can you believe he has absolutely no idea what baking soda is for? Isn’t that precious?  Or, Yesterday he fed the children spaghetti in the bathtub again.  Men!  As if husbands were the cutest little morons.

I’m not really sure why all this has come to be true in my culture (meaning:  among overly-cerebral middle-brow Minnesota chicks slightly shocked to find themselves 40 and married with kids), but it also applies to dogs as well.  I would never find humor in, say, relieving my own bladder directly on the shoe of a visiting friend.  But when Skeeter does it, even the injured party reacts with bemusement:   Oh, look, he’s marking me!  Would I find it charming if, like Birdie, Hubby slept (legs splayed and belly-up) on an over-stuffed pillow all day long, rousing out of sleep only to flatulate and beg for snacks?  That is a definite negative.  And, again, there is no humor in the flatus of a Mommy.

All this comes by way of saying, no matter what your politics, sometimes things in the home just aren’t very social justicey.   They’re not even gender justicey, no matter how many Women’s Studies classes you took or how proudly you walk in your sensible egalitarian girl shoes.  Sometimes, love just trumps the principle.

You know how terrifying it is when that toothsome little beast bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach in the movie Alien? Well, imagine the ghoul choosing to stay inside his belly and gnaw endlessly on his tender gut. 

Um, yah.  That’s about where my neuropathy’s at right now.

If Alien doesn’t give you a good idea about the current perpetual gut ache caused by my spinal cord degeneration, you can also think of the giant salivating mythical Kraken repeatedly chewing out the liver of poor Prometheus in Clash of the Titans, or the small furry Domo kun monster chomping away at my tender, nerve-receptor-rich duodenum.  As Roo would say:  Dat’s ouchie!

What a pain in the…whatever.  On the bright side, Killer Bellycahe (which waxes and wanes, for daily variety fun)—when’s she’s really raging full force—does save me on my grocery bill.

Breakfast:  ice chips, ice chips, coffee, YAWNING REGRET, dry rice cake, self-pity, mewling

Lunch:  determination, ice chips, ice chips, sparkling water, steamed rice, ½ stewed pear, distended abdomen, RETREAT, RETREAT, ice chips, ice chips, more mewling

Dinner:  festive positive attitude, ice chips, ice chips, jello, false confidence, ¼ grilled chicken breast, 2 roasted asparagus spears, HORROR, HORROR, screaming privately into pillow, ice chips, mewling, bed

Who says blogging doesn’t pay?  Er, maybe it’s more payback than pay per se…

The large consumer research company for whom I have personally stress-tested pillows, evaluated whipped topping and opined on television commercials just dumped me as ineligible due to blogging.  Apparently some whiny paranoid Cool Whip (bite me, KRAFT FOODS) programmer somewhere developed a creepy web crawler to find and weed out focus group members who have “an internet presence” because, like, our opinions are so dangerous.  Either that or one of you told them.  Anyways, my blog is now officially making about -$500 a year.  Do you think I should install a PayPal widget for that? And also, who knew test kitchen recipes were covered by the Patriot Act?

Did I mention we also look like lepers? I’ve always identified with the life of Job, so I suppose boils couldn’t be far behind.

The other night I took Benadryl and two other histamine blockers for hives the size of pool floaties (caused by the sprouting of my little indoor lettuce greenhouse?) but still woke up looking like a poxy Michael Jackson in Thriller.  My latest rash makes facial expressions painful, so I am trying not to emote.  You can imagine the spirit of fun that brings to the household (Hubby tells Toe and Roo: Look, boys, this is the MommyTronic 3000! She’ll be your maternal parenting droid for the day!)?

So, look for me sporting the fashionable belt-loop zipline Epi Pen for EZ administration of anaphylaxis rescue meds.  Or perhaps you will see me rolling down your street in one of those hamster-style protective bubbles.  I’m not sure what one does when one’s own breath becomes toxic, but as a believer in lifetime learning I look forward to finding out.  Not.

When Uncle Poopy tells you he stood mid-hurricane in the spray on the deck of a ship and watched the dance of a dozen waterspouts, you can believe him.  If he mentions he bought one of the first toilets ever made (whose enormous egg-shaped ceiling tank takes 5 gallons for a single flush, I might add), that he completely outfits his garden with plants grown from vegetable seeds passed out of your intestinal system and into a lake of sewage (where they then blossomed), that he once accidentally ate a half a margarhita glass without noticing until the next morning, that he buys his propane from a millionaire with no teeth who lives in a cargo box down the road fron his house, or that he spent most of his time as a naval fireman hosing folks off the landing strip of an aircraft carrier after “incidents,” you can believe that too.  Uncle Poopy’s legendary tales are like the sagas of the Vikings:  terrible and ghoulishly attractive.  Also, true.  A visit with Uncle Poopy is like an audience with a medieval minnesanger.  You can’t help but listen.  You can’t ever forget.

Toe and Roo love their Uncle Poopy.  What pre-K boy doesn’t like someone who tells a dis-poo-portionate number of animated (and authentic) stories about poop?  Uncle Poopy holds a high position at a county sewage facility and is an expert in his field.  He knows secrets about an infamous underground world that, trust me, you would hardly believe.  He also gives exciting and terribly inappropriate gifts, such as realistic toy weapons and dangerous homemade motorized scooters.  UP is a boy’s man—like a pirate and a lost boy and a hobo and bad Santa all rolled into one.

We won’t recount the most fiendish of true Uncle Poopy stories here—they were never meant to be recorded.  These are legends designed only to be heard once, preferably in the clutches of your family—perhaps around a campfire in the dark or at least over a good strong krug of stout.  UP stories change you and haunt you.  But strangely they also leave you asking, Uncle Poopy, will you visit again soon?

I’m all for God’s glory, but please stop raining such a ridiculous bounty of blessings on our PCAs already!  First Kayla, now Jude!

Yes , faithful Jude is worthy, LORD.  Selah.  He wed  his young bride in a grassroots home church he founded (housed in nothing more than a humble pole barn in a vast and otherwise empty field—it was a veritable manger scene…), then traveled the globe to dark and godless 3^rd world places assisting his wife in providing Christian witness and dental care to forgotten blighted children in every vile place you can think of.  Oh the crowns he's earned!

Did you have to reward his obedience and service by calling him back to Medtronic so soon?  Would another year as stellar PCA and Toe’s BFF have killed him, really?  Why not a free trip to Cancun, or a Trader Joes’s gift card?  Why not just some more jucy fruits of the Spirit?

So, we will enjoy but one more full week of Jude and then it’s the search for PCA #3 for us.  After only a short time together, Toe and Jude are such buds already they finish each other’s sentences (and sort of dress the same).  Lucky for us, His Majesty, Jude the Devout wishes to continue as one of Toe’s BFFs, and they will have monthly man-dates to hotspots all over town.

In our house we don’t even use the word g-u-n.  Nor gat, heater, strap, Fo Fo, cap, piece, pistol, 4 pounda, nine, pumpa,  ruger, Mac, Sweeper, rod, Rodney, hog leg, chrome, Techs, burner, roscoe, biscuit, cannon or K. There are no video games which involve shooting or even remotely violent video of any kind (except in Daddy’s own twisted grownup late-night personal Xbox and war documentary time).  Whenever Toe or Roo see a toy gun (say, for example, strewn all over the house and yard of their faux-ammo-packin,’ capgun-lovin’ Posse Jr. boy cousins’) they say, “Lookit that drill!” In their minds, a drill is the object in their realities which most closely resembles the thing they are seeing.  And I am fine with this. After all, we don’t want to receive an impromptu visit from the jakes on suspicion of a juvie 11-6 in the 651.  No.  Word up.

However.  Over time, gifts trickle in below the Mommy radar.  Daddy lets Roo buy a $2 plastic Tommy at the neighborhood store (where they are probably selling real guns in the back) while Mommy is at the doctor, or Tante Chicken sends a hand-me-down junior M-16 buried in a tub of rubber dinosaurs.  Uncle Poopy claims he had a BB gun at 3, and that his present to the lads of the Wii Cabela Marksman set for learning to murder imaginary animals on a screen in the living room is the necessary modern pre-K boy equivalent.  And all God’s people said, let them have drills.

Well, this morning, after watching Toe and Roo gleefully and repeatedly "murder" each other (and dramatically “die” with gusto), then seeing Roo take his M-9 copkiller to the stuffed baby piglet he got from the Easter Bunny, I’d had enough.  Officer Mommy has done a sweep.  Now, if only they took plastic in Chief Harrington’s big city firearms incinerator, I’d be set..

Peace out, homes.

Today is World Autism Awareness Day.  It’s also Toe’s godsend PCA Kayla’s last day!  Yes, you may cry for us. Toe’s new BFF (who has been with us every Tuesday through Thursday since January) is studying to be a Physician Assistant,  and two weeks ago she got news she’s be given a dream job she didn’t quite expect to get at the University.  She will be doing full time medical research in her field of emphasis after Easter, making about a gajillion more dollars per hour than she does now serving as a pediatric PCA.  Yes, she has chosen financial viability and career advancement over us.  Can you believe it?

I know what you’re thinking.  Sure, of course.  Why wouldn’t the University steal Kayla from us?  They’ve taken everything else:  our jobs, our respect for them, our hard-earned money, our love for our alma mater.  Why not Kayla too?  So, off she goes, into the clutches of the great satan of the the Big 10.  We wish her well…sob.

Toe, as you know, loves passionately and easily.  He will miss Y2K (we sort of got Kayla’s hubby Karl as an occasional package deal and Toe HEARTS Karl), but he is already crazy about our replacement PCA,  St. Jude of the Immaculate Energy.  After the meet and greet with Jude (during which Toe hung from Jude’s lean, gangly 6’2” height like a monkey from a tree), Toe has been asking daily: When’s Jude coming when’s Jude coming when’sjudecomingwhen’sjudecomingwhen’sjudecoming????????????   Jude is very experienced working with kids with ASDs, and if you've ever seen the hilarious Friends episode when Ross and Rachel hired a male nanny (or “manny”) played by Freddie Prinze Jr. you know both what Jude looks and acts like.  Yes, he a cheerful, sensitive guy who probably plays pan flute lullabies and says things like, “There are ships made of wood and ships made of steel, but the best ships are friendships!”  he comes with stellar references (and not just written by his young wife), so we’ll see how the whole manny thing goes. 

Personally,  I am not sure I can survive another source of testosterone in this house on a daily basis, so pray for my womanly soul.