today's word is moron

and that is all i have to say about that guy, well i could actually say more, but i try not to use words like that here and because my brother said some of them for me already.

God's peace y'all and perhaps a little understanding for kids with asthma and autism

thank you for the inconvenience

years ago, right after hubby and i got married, we moved to newark, nj for the year to do our internships. the year we moved there newark unseated detroit or washington dc (whichever it was then) as the most violent city in america. we never had any problems and actually loved living there. perhaps only the way newly weds can love a tiny apartment with crazy landlords and car alarms going off throughout the night.

i would travel to montclair, nj for my internship. montclair is the complete opposite of newark. it was affluent and well-to-do. the people who lived in montclair were highly educated and worked in corner offices in new york city.

hubby stayed in newark and split his time between a new mission and a church which had been around forever. the new mission was tri-lingual: english, spanish, and portuguese. the neighborhood we lived in was made up of mostly portuguese and brazilian people (many of whom weren't here legally.) the other church was in the hood and the stories the people there could tell would break your heart.

i loved all three communities.

one day we were out looking for something to eat at one of the local eating establishments in the hood. i can't remember which one we tried first, but when we pulled up to it there was a sign on the door explaining that they were closed for one reason or another. it then said, "Thank You for the Inconvenience."

strangely enough the word inconvenience was spelled correctly.

it has become a catch-phrase with hubby and me. one of those in-jokes that couples have. he knows exactly what i mean when i say it and vice-versa.

i had the opportunity to use it last night to describe my experience picking up prescriptions at our local cvs. i have been having terrible luck with them the last few times that i have had to deal with the pharmacy. we keep talking about switching to rite-aid, but cvs is closer and right next to several other stores we frequent.

i had 3 scripts to pick up and it took them so long to wait on customers in line ahead of me that i also had to buy the gummy worms inconveniently located right in the sight of the silent prince who i intended to get dinner for immediately following picking up our scripts.

by the time we got out of there and bought our dinner and took it home the prince was no longer interested in eating because he had consumed too many gummy worms.

he was a sticky mess and i decided to feed him the several different meds that he has to take (including the stool softener that i had to get for him and the antibiotics that he has to take for his up-teenth ear infection since having the tubes put in.)

so i give him his abilify (which is working great) and the laxative (which still hasn't worked yet) and then i go to get out the antibiotics from the little white bag and the only thing in the bag are two liquid medicine dispensers. i look at the bag again and notice that the word "fridge" is written on the bag, meaning that the antibiotics need to be refrigerated and were most likely still in the fridge at the cvs.

i look at the sticky silent prince who is so ready to take a bath and go to bed and say, "thank you for the inconvenience."

we go back to the cvs which is conveniently located two doors down from the liquor store and decided to make a pit-stop. smirnoff now makes cosmos, mojitos, and pomegranate martinis already conveniently mixed in bottles... thank you very much.

back inside the cvs we again waited in line, but this time i didn't put the prince in a cart so instead we stood there turning in circles while 5 employees slowly waited on one customer at a time.

sure enough the meds were in the fridge.

at least i got a pretty good cosmo out of the deal.

God's peace y'all

abilify

did you know that there are words that are copyrighted? i don't mean strings of words put together into sentences and paragraphs and stories. i mean individual words. i'm guessing the word ability is one of them otherwise the medication we have just started giving the silent prince would have been called: abiliTy rather than abiliFy.

we went to see the kids' doctor (fiscus) the other day. i periodically schedule these appointments because we never just get him when we go for sick visits or other little issues. he is an incredible guy and we knew from the moment we first met him that we wanted him to be our children's doctor. he spent about a 1/2 hour with us starting when he came out into the waiting room to call us back. i've never had a doctor do that before (with the exception of my chiropractor who really needs an receptionist.)

i had a list of things i wanted to go over with him including getting a prescription for pull-ups. (still don't know if the insurance will cover it or not.) one of the things that we wanted to talk about was putting the prince on meds which would help him focus and calm him down. the developmental pediatrician we had seen back in march had sugested doing this and we had finally gotten up the nerve to talk to fiscus about it.

he suggested that using something like riddlin would be counter-productive. meds like riddlin would help the prince concentrate more, but according to fiscus chances are he would start to concentrate on the behaviors we don't want him to do. autistic kids can become a bit ocd on things like riddlin and focus all their attention on things like banging their heads against a wall, or spinning, or flicking things, or any other stimming behavior that they do. (the prince doesn't bang his head... but he does bite and i'd rather he not concentrate all his energy on that behavior.)

so instead fiscus suggested that we try an anti-psychotic called abilify.

so far we are on day 3 and have had 2 side effects. the first side effect is that he has been a bit constipated. which means he has pooped once in 2 1/2 days. this from a kid who i have considered sticking a cork in his butt (only jokingly, don't call any hotlines on me) to keep him from going 5- 10 times a day. i think i have mentioned that poop is a major part of my life and i'd like to undergo a real life-change in this regard.

the other side effect is that every day so far he has taken a nap at about 4pm. he's sleeping right now. as i talked to the grandmom today about it she mentioned that he's really not too young to take naps. the fact of the matter is that he hasn't napped regularly since he was a baby. all this time... maybe he's been so hyper that he hasn't been able to nap when he has really needed to.

i'm really positive about this however. the fact of the matter is that i spent some time yesterday reading stories about people who put their autistic children on abilify and have seen unbelievable results. non-verbal children have even become verbal. and while i don't need my son to talk in order to love him or know that he loves me if this medicine is going to help him learn how to communicate better i will deal with the fact that he is napping in the afternoons and seems a little sluggish as his body adjusts to the meds.

he also has two loose teeth. i'm trying to figure out how i explain to the tooth fairy what to do with his teeth (whih hopefully will come out when i'm around and not when he's asleep.)

God's peace y'all

radio edit

in high school i was in the drama club. my freshman year we did a play with a lot of profanity in it. (though i can't remember the name of the play i remember the entire story) the art teacher who also doubled as our set designer was a born again christian and insisted that we change most of the words to something else. basically we had to step down every word to another curse word. the f word was changed to "screw" the s word was changed to "damn."

it was actually pretty comical how many times we had to relearn lines for the sake of his sensitive ears.

panic at the disco is one of my favorite bands. they have a song called, "i write sins not tragedies" which uses the phrase God-damn.

i love words even words that can be very ugly and feel that there is an appropriate place for all of them, especially in art. i can also curse like a sailor, but there are certain phrases that i would prefer not be played on the radio and this is one of them mostly because my kids are exposed to the same music i listen to.

so the other day i turned on my car radio because i forgot to bring along my ipod and this song came on. i expected an edit. what i didn't expect was which word they would edit. at first i thought i heard it wrong. sometimes when they bleep out a word you can still sort-of hear it, but then it happened again.

apparently "God" is the more offensive piece of that phrase because that's the word that was edited out.

it was like stepping down the phrase... we did the same exact thing in our highschool play with this particular profanity. but if the purpose of a radio edit is to clean up the language of a song then why choose "God" to be the word they clean up?

ah well...

*bleep* peace y'all