Survival skills by trial and error

My sense of humor these days has been a tad "spotty." Sometimes its right at hand......and sometimes I can't find it anywhere, no matter how hard I realize, at an intellectual level, that the situation is so ridiculous that it warrants a good laugh. Here.......let me share a few things:

1) We're a gluten-free house, right? No flour, right? WRONG! We have rice flour, sweet rice flour, tapioca flour, potato starch, expandex............we look like a canister factory. There are even MORE choices of GF flours, but so far, I've drawn the line at these. We tried garbanzo bean flour, but it has a nasty flavor. In fact, I carefully read the ingredients list now for anything we buy pre-made. If it has any form of bean flour, it stays at the store.

2) Jennica threw a fit at a basketball game one night this week. A fit like I truly have not seen her throw in a while. She has consistently been having a tough time getting through Grant's basketball games this year, and claims that the sound of the basketballs bouncing on the floor hurt her ears. She is typically considered sensory-seeking rather than sensory-defensive, (something I will try to explain in this blog at some point) and she's been doing a great job talking to us about it. So we've been using various "tools" to help her get through the games. Difficult....but not uncontrollable.

Well, she totally lost it the other night. If she were an elephant, people would have been trampled to death. Thankfully, I got her removed from the game and to a visually-blank and auditorilly-quiet little alcove down the hallway, and then held her until she was able to regain control.

In any case, we survived it and she was able to verbalize that it was the noise that she couldn't handle. This verbal connection is a HUGE step forward. So.......the very next night, of course, we had another game in exactly the same place. This time, we went prepared with headphones. The kind you wear when you run machinery. I was a bit skeptical as to whether she would wear them, but she LOVED them. She marched proudly into the gym wearing her snazzy headgear, and was all smiles through the whole game. An absolute breeze. Go figure.

So.....lesson learned. If she says that something bothers her ears, give her the benefit of the doubt and try the headphones. If anyone thinks she looks funny, they're welcome to deal with her sans headphones.

3) Jen has been very accepting overall of her diet. Amazingly so. One of the few things that has bugged her is having her syrup out of a different bottle in the morning than her brothers and sister. It doesn't make sense to me that she knows she is eating a different type of waffle than they are and is fine with that, but balks at the syrup issue. But, the days that we have syrup, its always an issue. So, I wised up. Her syrup has now been dumped into the bottle that the other kids emptied this week. The older kids have been clued to the little mark on the bottle that will tell them that it is hers, and she will be none the wiser. And, worst-case scenario, one of the big kids gets her syrup. Its not really that big of a deal.........its just that "her syrup" is $10.00 for an itty bitty bottle of organic pure maple syrup. The genuine deal. No corn syrup, no caramel coloring, no artificial flavors. The way these guys use syrup, we'd go through a bottle every few days, if they were to get on a "waffle kick". $40.00 a month for syrup seems a bit steep to me, so the big kids that don't have the severe nutritional issues get cheaper stuff.

In any case, I feel kind of sneaky and deceitful for putting her syrup in a different bottle. I know, I know, I know........I'm really living on the edge, aren't I? :)