Butterflies
One of the shops we visited yesterday had free face painting. Zoë didn't want her face painted at first, probably because she remembered that the last time she had it done, it was quite gluggy and heavy and difficult to get off. This face painter, though, had very good quality face paints and showed her that it would come off easily, and she also offered to paint just a few things on her face instead of the whole face. Zoë chose butterflies.
Fever is gone, girl is eating
Zoë went to sleep last night around 7:30pm, and she woke up around 7:30 this morning. She stayed in bed for a while, but then heard the television and insisted that she needed to come out and watch it. She got settled on the bean bag chair with a pillow and blanket and finally around 9:45 wanted something to eat. Her fever appears to be entirely gone, and while she still has that "not well" look around her eyes, she seems to be improving rapidly.
I asked her what she wanted to eat and she said, "I haven't had breakfast," so I offered her an egg. She said that she wanted an egg "in a cup". I scrambled an egg and cooked it in a microwave egg cup. When she saw it she said, "No, not like that. I wanted it in a cup!" I said, "Well, isn't this a cup?" Eventually I worked out that she meant an egg cup. She wanted a soft boiled egg. I apologised and she thought it was pretty funny that I got it wrong and she had a good laugh. She still ate the scrambled egg and had some fresh apple juice (which she asked for specifically).
She's lying down again now. I think it's safe to assume that she'll be well enough to go to the dentist tomorrow, which is a relief.
I don't believe this was entirely due to being overly excited, but I think the excitement may have added to the severity of it. She's never been the kind of kid who gets sick with excitement, and I've certainly never seen excitement cause a fever. I'm guessing it was just a mild virus with incredibly inopportune timing.
No sleepover for Zoë
Poor Zoë. She was so very excited about the sleepover tonight, but she ended up getting sick. They went out to dinner at a buffet restaurant (she apparently ate "about two chips") and she started to show signs of illness. She threw up, and she was lying down on the bus ride back to the school (we met them at the school just as they arrived back in the minivan), and she looked just awful, and had a fever. Poor kid, we had to take her home, over her protests that she wanted to stay for the sleepover. She did seem somewhat relieved to see me, though, in that way that sick kids are to see their mother.
As soon as she got home, she wanted to go to bed. Andrew set her up with a bucket (for sudden vomiting) and she was so exhausted she didn't even put on her pyjamas. She just took off her clothes and crawled into bed and wouldn't be roused.
Just after ten I checked on her and got her pyjamas on her. She looks very slightly better having had a few hours of sleep, but she's still got a raging fever, and the problem with that is if I give her medicine to take the fever down, she thinks she's well and starts running around and getting into things instead of resting no matter how much I try to explain it to her. Therefore, when she's sick I really just have to let it run its course without benefit of pain relief or fever reduction. I hate seeing her in obvious discomfort and pain, poor kid.
And I feel really badly for her that she has to miss out on the fun of a sleepover. I expect they'll have another one next year, but it's not the same. She's missed this one, and it's just terribly unfortunate.
She's got a dentist appointment on Saturday. We're hoping and praying she'll be well enough to go to that, because it takes weeks to get an appointment around this time of the year, and this one is with her favourite dentist, who also happens to be everyone else's favourite dentist and is therefore booked for months in advance sometimes...
Miranda did it!
There are some cold cooked sauages in the fridge at the moment. I'm going to put them into a casserole for dinner tonight. Just now I caught Zoë with one. Well, she heard me coming and I actually caught her with a mouthful of sausage, sausage on her face and hands, and a guilty look on her face as she tried to swallow the sausage in her mouth without choking on it. I looked in the fridge and one of the sausages was missing the end.
I made my displeasure clear and sent her to the bathroom to wash her hands and face. All the way down the hall she was howling (obviously, she'd swallowed the incriminating sausage by that point), "It was Miranda! Miranda did it! It was Miranda!"
She stayed in the bathroom for a while, all the time screaming or howling and insisting that "Miranda did it! It was Miranda!" She acted like if she just screamed it enough times, it would somehow convince me. Eventually, she calmed down and I heard, "I'm sorry Mom.* I won't ever do it again."
I still had to send her back to properly wash her face, as she missed a fair bit of it. Then I had to send her to blow her nose. And then I let her go back and watch television, which is her usual afternoon habit and which had been interrupted by my heartless refusal to believe that her sister had taken a bite out of the sausage and requiring Zoë to wash her hands and face.
I hope that soon she realises how absurd her lies are. Honestly, they're downright embarrassing at times! If you insist on lying to me, at least make it slightly believable...
*Zoë calls me "Mom" rather than "Mum". This may be a shortening of "Mama", or it may be that she's just picked up that American accent from the many, many American movies she owns. She does have a rather noticible American accent in many of the things she says. I don't know if that's from me, from the movies, from the language DVDs we got for her years ago, or just some combination of things.
Catch Up Time
A couple of weeks ago, Zoë got a haircut. I asked her what she wanted and she said, "Short." I asked her how short and after a few unsuccessful attempts to tell me, she said, "Like a boy." I was surprised by this, but we got on the net and I found some pictures and she was very clear in what she wanted. Basically, she wanted a pixie cut, which is, indeed, pretty similar to your standard "little boy" haircut. She loves it. People say it really suits her, and I agree. A few years ago, she cut her own hair and had to have most of the rest cut off, so maybe that's where she got the idea, but when that happened, she really did look like a boy. Now she's got pierced ears, anyway (nobody has mistaken her for a boy since the haircut, as far as I'm aware).
This week there's a sleepover at Zoë's school. It's for the girls in the "Girls' Friendship Group", which is actually group speech therapy, but it's all girls about the same age. There are six little girls and there will be two adults (the speech therapist and the music therapist, both of whom are women), and the group will be going out to eat at a buffet style restaurant, then doing some craft activities, music, having a late snack, showering, and going to sleep in the gym on the mats in sleeping bags, and then getting dressed and having breakfast and going to school again the next day. Zoë is tremendously excited about it, and I don't blame her. It sounds pretty fun!
Zoë's taken to telling lies, and they're not even believable ones. You can actually see her doing something (stomping her feet down the hallway, for example) and say, "Stop stomping," and she'll say, "I'm not stomping! Miranda is!" (everything is Miranda's fault, Miranda's problem, Miranda's responsibility, etc.). The lies that Zoë tells are just absurd sometimes. You can see her with, say, chocolate all over her face and when you say something like, "Hey, you got into the chocolate!" she'll just point blank deny it, in spite of all the extremely obvious evidence. Point out the evidence and she still just denies it. I've told her how ridiculous her lies are, and how I can clearly see exactly what happened, but it doesn't matter, she just sticks to her story.
So if you ever hear that rumour that Autistic kids can't lie, don't believe it. They certainly can lie, and they can do it with every intention of deceiving the listener. Some Autistic kids may even be able to lie convincingly. Mine certainly can't. (I think this is because she has a hard time getting perspective outside of herself, which is necessary to see how others perceive you and your situation. She can't do that, so she figures if she just says it's a certain way, then it is....)
Zoë's speech is getting better all the time. Unfortunately, she tends to speak in a very high pitched voice, almost like a falsetto. It can be extremely tiresome, to say the least. I hate to complain about it, because we worked for years to get her to speak at all and now we're complaining that she won't be quiet or won't lower her voice! We call her Little Miss Chatterbox a lot of the time now, a title she seems to enjoy.
And I'll leave you with a bit of Zoë humour. She and her dad went out to the grocery store and she took Clifford (the Big Red Dog as per the storybooks, only this Clifford isn't particularly big) with her. We have a rule that toys must stay in the car, as things tend to get lost in shops. When they arrived, Zoë wanted to take Clifford in with her (we have this argument most times, by the way; she always thinks the rule will change for some reason). Her dad told her no, and then added, "Dogs aren't allowed in the shops." Zoë, quick as you please, responded, "I could dress him up like a guide dog!" Dad got a good laugh out of that and even called Nanna to share the joke, but, alas, Clifford had to wait in the car, anyway...
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