I miss corn

I am loving summertime in Mississippi.

I thought it would be awful. Everyone warned me about the humidity.

I am pleased to say that it's nowhere near as horrible as I was building it up in my mind to be. Yes, it's pretty terrible and I sweat A LOT just by doing a 30 second task like putting my daughter into her car seat, but it's more tolerable than I thought it would be - though I wouldn't exactly call it tolerable :)

The sun shines nearly every day. We have very few days that are overcast. In the afternoon, we get a lot of clouds and sometimes thunderstorms but after 2-3 hours, it's back to being sunny.

I'm not really homesick - well, not terribly. I'm not close to my family at all. In fact, in the couple of months before we moved away, there was a huge blowup between me and the family members to whom I was closest. Nothing was resolved, but we (they) sure pretend it was, then they go on to talk about me behind my back. But whatever, it's cool. It just helps with me not being homesick, knowing that only one person back home truly cares about me.

What I AM homesick for is the setting. Oh how I miss the Midwest. I miss those weeks where it's day after day after day of endless sunshine....literally never a cloud in the sky....driving through Small Town USA and putting the pedal to the metal when I hit the first cornfield at the edge of town toward the interstate...a gorgeous, vivid blue sky serving as a backdrop against a huge red barn and grain silo. I never in a million, jillion, billion, gazillion years thought I would miss that, but I do. I miss it SO much. I miss those warm spring and early summer days where you wake up to a beautiful blue sky, but you can feel a storm brewing on the horizon and by the end of the day, big black storm clouds are rolling in as the tornado sirens are going off. I miss empty highways lined with fields of tall, green corn gently swaying in the breeze.

Everything is city here. If you're not in one of the gulf coast cities, you're out in the swampy forest. I don't think I've seen a cornfield since May 6. It sounds crazy, but I never realized how much a cornfield was part of my life until recently. I grew up in a house surrounded by corn to the north and east and a horse pasture to the south. When I lived in northern IL for school, it was in corn country. When I moved to southern IL for school, it was right at the periphery of where the cornfields meet the forests of southern IL. When I moved to MO, I lived close to the edge of the St. Louis suburbs and the cornfields were just a mile to the west. When I moved back to IL on the east side of St. Louis, we lived out in the corn again, though in 3 different towns over the course of our relationship - still, most recently, we lived right next door to the cornfield.

I love it here. I guess I already said that, but it bears repeating after my tirade about the corn. I miss the Midwest setting so very much, but I am loving the south. People really are friendly and hospitable. You ask an employee somewhere a question and they greet you with a warm smile, a "how are you doing?" and an answer to your question in the most gracious, charming southern accent. The food here is amazing. I've already gained weight living here. Just a pound, but still.

When I was a kid, I used to dream about life in the city. Then I moved to the city and I didn't care for it, so I moved back to the cornfields. Moving down here confirms that the countryside of IL will always be considered my home. While I love it here, it doesn't always feel right. There is always noise from the neighborhood, the main street we live off of, beach traffic, jets taking off from the base runway and a generator of sorts in the neighborhood behind my house that goes off at random intervals. Sometimes, when the noise is getting to me, I just close my eyes and go back to a memory of an endless summer day of abundant sunshine where I'm sitting on my back porch soaking it all in, whilst the only sound I can hear is from the wind rustling the corn stalks. I may love it here, but it ain't the Midwest.

It's been a while

It's been a while since I've been on here writing about my life. It's just not interesting! It's your typical mundane, everyday type of day every day.

I do have some news on the medical front. My daughter has always been behind other kids when it comes to acquiring skills and meeting milestones. In February, she was diagnosed with autism, but that's a long story. I'll try to make it as short of a story as possible because it's the back story for the news that we have.

We went to see a developmental pediatrician in February. I was told the appointment would be 2-3 hours long and assess her in 5 areas of development.

Imagine my surprise when we got there and spent approximately 55 minutes with the doctor. We went into a patient room and the doctor interviewed me. This lasted approximately 20 minutes. She then spent approximately 10-15 minutes giving my daughter a physical examination and interacting with her, or attempting to interact with her. She was distracted by the enormous bookshelf in the room - books are her thing. If there's any one thing I will look back on her childhood and say she obsessed over, it will be books.

After the physical exam and then a brief interaction that involved bubble blowing, a counting game and a sharing exercise, the doctor told me my daughter is autistic, but not to worry - my insurance pays 100% for a 40-hour per week ABA therapy program that she needs. ABA therapy is a common therapy for kids with autism to help them acquire skills by repetition (for the most part, but it's so much more than that really).

I did not feel my daughter could benefit from a rigid program like that and after speaking with some other local therapists, I started to become suspicious that this doctor referred us to that program after such a short evaluation because she got a monetary incentive for sending patients to them. It is really questionable that she barely glanced twice at my daughter and spent so little time with her before slapping her with a diagnosis - and prescribing 40 hours per week of ABA therapy! Everyone I've spoken to, professionally and personally, who knows what ABA therapy is and knows my daughter fairly well thinks that is insane and she is not the type of child to need that rigid of therapy! I mean gosh, she gets 1 hour each of speech and occupational therapies per week and she has improved AMAZINGLY with just that much. 40 hours per week is total overkill.

Now, that's not to say that I thought the diagnosis itself was bogus. I've known that from a young age, my daughter has had signs of autism. There is a questionnaire called an MCHAT that sort of quantifies how autistic a child is, if autism is present at all. The goal is to get a score of zero...the higher the score, the more severe the autism, from what I understand.

At 21 months of age (the time of her evaluation), she scored a 4. When I took her for her 2-year checkup at 24 months, she scored a 1. So in 3 months time, she acquired 3 skills that were previous thought of as skills she wouldn't or couldn't acquire due to autism.

To this day, she would still score a 1. She does not look to me for a reaction in new situations enough for me to feel comfortable marking it off on the list as saying she does it. She does it sometimes, but it's not consistent.

At any rate, now that we've moved to MS, we wanted a second opinion. So we got one - from a doctor who actually bothered to spend time with her and interact with her and since he's a military doctor, he can't accept referral incentives, so there would be no reason for him to diagnose her as anything other than what she is, if she is anything to be diagnosed.

He feels that she is in a gray area between high-functioning autism and global developmental delay with sensory integration dysfunction. However, he thinks she could benefit for 1-2 hours per week of in-home ABA therapy and she can't get that (or rather, we can't get funding to pay for it and we sure cannot afford it out of our pockets) unless she is diagnosed as autistic. We had a lengthy conversation about it because a diagnosis of autism is there for life and he wanted me to be 100% comfortable diagnosing her with it so that she can get the benefits of therapy - and he is REALLY optimistic that she will benefit beautifully from it. He said there are about 10-20% of children who are autistic who...I don't know how to say this and say it correctly....they don't "grow out" or "develop out" of it because you don't grow out of being autistic....but they are able to overcome their challenges so much so that they can function as a totally normal person is society and no one would ever think that anything was amiss about them. The doctor thinks that my daughter has a good chance of falling into that 10-20% because of the progress she's already showed and how well she responds to therapy. And just to state for the record, this is a doctor who is very conservative about over-diagnosing. She does meet the criteria for a diagnosis, but she's a difficult diagnosis because she's right in that gray area next to being globally delayed. He would not have diagnosed her at this point in time if he didn't think she would benefit from the therapies available. And let's face it - while she's somewhat there cognitively and socially, she's not really all there. It's almost as if she's constantly on the brink of another world.....like she's always just 1 step away from leaving us to be in her own world. I wish I knew what went on in her head.

So, that's where we're at. I am the parent of a child with autism. But, it's nothing more than a label. I embrace it because I know that it doesn't define who she is or confine her abilities, but it's a label that opens up a world of opportunity for her and for me as a parent with the challenges I face with her developmental delays. My only major concern about the label is that it's going to prohibit her from doing regular things like go to day cares or cause her to be treated differently by her teachers in school without them first getting to know what areas she doesn't need to be treated differently in. She's capable of anything you ask her to do, she just needs a lot of extra guidance and I know they have special assistants to help kids like that.

In other news, we're just enjoying the weather down here. I sweat more than a whore in church, but I know the alternative means being back in IL and having to face long winters, so I happily sweat! The beach is off limits with the remnants of the oil leak and the dispersant chemical cesspool floating around, but we like to get out and explore the area, go out for a snowball, sit in the backyard with the sprinkler on and our feet dipped in the pool, go out for date nights....you get the picture. I am not homesick at all. I am embracing everything down here with an eager smile. There are so many new experiences to be had and things to see and do. We have been busy spending mornings at playdates or the splash pad or the park or the children's museum. Yep...I am loving life down here! I wish I could always live here.

WOW!!!! The magical key to weight loss is......

....eating as much as you want, not giving a crap about what you eat and chugging down sugary sodas all day!!

No in all seriousness, I am STUMPED here. I'm not complaining - since last Wednesday, I've lost 2.4 pounds.

But how I've lost those pounds is beyond me. I went to stay at my in-laws this weekend. They always have a house full of bad, horrible, no-good-for-you treats that taste OH so yummy. Over the weekend just at the house, I ate cookies, Lindt truffles, twizzlers, trail mix, chocolate muffins, a CRAPLOAD of skittles and I did a lot of this eating late at night while we sat around talking or playing games.

In addition to all of that lovely stuff, we ate out. A LOT. We ate ice cream, italian food, we went to a japanese hibachi place, Zaxby's (which I was DETERMINED to eat seeing as how we don't have Zaxby's here nor did we have it in IL). When we weren't eating out, we weren't scrimping at my in-laws house either. Big, thick, fatty, deliciously juicy steak with corn on the cob, baked potato, salad and I think there was probably something else in there one night, burgers and macaroni salad the next night, bacon eggs biscuits and toast for breakfast. I drank Pepsis and Sprites and I didn't get the diet versions either.

I know. All of this talk about what I ate is clogging my arteries even more.

Then we got back home. I kept drinking sugary Sprites. Yesterday I ate fast food TWICE. Granted, I had a hectic day, but I should have made better choices.

Today I went to the gym for the first time in 9 days. Well I shouldn't say I went to the gym because I didn't. I worked out. I did level 2 of Jillian Michaels' 30 day shred dvd and then I went to the track and ran 3 miles and pushed myself as hard and as fast as I could go. Then I went to the gym to weigh myself.

I kicked off my shoes. I stepped on the scale and pinched my eyes shut really tightly. I gave it a second and squinted my eyes open a little to see a number that was 2.4 pounds less than what it was when I last checked.

Dumbfounded, I stepped off the scale, pressed the "zero" button and got back on. Same results.

Totally confused I thought the scale must have been wrong even though it's the same scale I use every time I go to the gym.

So I went and got on the other scale. It reconfirmed what the other scale said, except .5lb more, but it consistently weighs me at .5lb more, so it was right.

So I left the gym a happy camper. I don't think I deserved a weight loss of 2.4 pounds. I didn't do ANYTHING to better my health or my body for about a week. Yet I somehow lost weight after filling my body with junk, grease and sugar. While I won't make a habit of it, I'll take it and will stop questioning it. Now I just need to keep those 2.4lb off.

Just another day at the commissary

Well this was a first this morning.

There I was....I had just entered the commissary for my weekly shopping trip. I walked through the doors and held my breath as I walked through the stinky flowers in the breezeway and then when I stepped into the store, I changed my sunglasses out for my regular glasses. Without my glasses, I'm about as good as a blind person.

The free coffee by the door caught my eye. The sign said "Free coffee while you shop!" I briefly considered trying the hazelnut kind, but quickly walked away before my consideration turned into reality.

I checked my list. Where to first? Ah yes, lemons. I walked to the lemons, felt a couple of them up to see if they were hard or soft and settled on one, which I promptly tossed into one of the produce bags and then after checking my list, I wandered over to the pepper display.

Habanero pepper? Hmm....I see jalapeno....pablano....bell....chili...where is habanero? With no habanero peppers to be found, I settled on getting a jalapeno pepper in it's place, except someone was standing in front of them and wasn't budging.

So I decided to just go back later, after I'd found my parsley and mint leaves. I headed to the fresh herbs display only to find they were out of stock of mint leaves. OK....moving on to parsley. I looked...and looked...and looked....where in the world is the parsley??

I had my cart sort of in the middle of the produce section and I was turned around scanning the sides of the displays looking for a parsley bunch when a male voice interrupted my search.

"Ma'am?"

I ignored the voice. After all, I've only lived here 2 weeks, the voice wasn't my husband's, I haven't dropped anything out of the cart, the kiddo didn't have any shoes that she could have thrown off, so what could this male voice possibly want with me??

A second later..."Ma'am??" a little more loudly.

Startled, I turned to look at the staff sergeant from security forces (they are the military police of the air force) who was standing at the edge of my cart.

With my attention, he casually continued "I'm going to have to ask you to leave the store."

My first thought was "What in the WORLD did my child do???" I glanced down at her, but she was happily sucking her thumb, looking around a little doe-eyed and on the verge of sleep. No, she couldn't have done anything. So, what did *I* do?? Was it because I touched 3 lemons, but only bought 1?? My mind started going a mile a minute. Everyone should be washing their produce anyway, I mean why would you not wash your produce because people in the store touch it and it's not been washed between being picked from the farm to riding in the truck to being put out here on the shelves at the commissary. Should I just go back and buy those lemons? I mean they're only like 30 cents or so, it won't break the bank.

So, in the split second that all of this thundered through my mind but before I could utter a word, he turned on his heel and asked the woman who was getting asparagus spears to leave the store as well. She asked if he was serious and he said he was very serious and that he needed every single person out of the store immediately.

Dumbfounded, I just stood there. The staff sergeant wandered off down the meat aisle and spoke to some of the shoppers, presumably asking them to vacate the premises.

Since I had my lone little lemon in the cart, I didn't want to take the cart out of the store with us and be accused of stealing, so I took a cue from Asparagus Lady and just left my cart parked right there and carried my kid out of the store.

Since this is southern MS and it was already 86 degrees by 9:30am, we went to sit in the car with the AC blasting. We watched as everyone slowly filtered out of the store. In the 4 minutes I'd been inside, 3 or 4 cop cars had pulled up and blocked off access to anyone trying to turn into the parking lot.

I began to panic. What was going on? A gas leak? A bomb threat? An exercise? I am a civilian, I don't have time to play war games with my feisty 2-year old in tow. Speaking of her, she started melting down the moment I put her back in the car. Totally content in the race car cart....totally not content in the boring car. I sighed to myself and decided I would give it about 10 minutes and see if we were able to be let back in. Hopefully it was just SF out playing their war games where they do exercises to see how they would do in real life if a situation were to occur.

Eventually the cops chased everyone to the back of the parking lot and started checking the cars in the lot to see if anyone was sitting in them. Those that were, would end up being asked to either leave or get out of the car and walk to the back of the parking lot in the 86 degree high-humidity heat. Just what my 2-year old needs.

As you can imagine, we just left. Without food. With nothing for lunch because the cupboards were bare in my house. We ended up eating bland leftover spaghetti but since my daughter has food allergies, I had to literally scrounge through all of the cabinets to make something for her that was allergen friendly. It ended up being sort of a repeat of what she had for breakfast. Oh well, she won't die from breakfast for breakfast and breakfast for lunch, right?

I finally went back to the commissary after naptime. It was, of course, packed. There is a reason I do my shopping at 9:30am, people! There is no one in the store and my kid is on her best behavior at that time of day! By the time we went at 4pm, she was cranky, annoyed, bawling and just generally not happy. The place was packed and they didn't have a few things in stock that I needed. Of course it couldn't be the unimportant stuff, it had to be diapers that they were out of.

Just another day at the commissary. Yep.

Week 2

My second week here is drawing to a close. Has it really been 15 days since I moved here? It doesn't seem possible that I've been here that long and at the same time, I feel like I've been here forever with all that we've packed into the last two weeks.

I've gotten settled into a routine. I am a creature of habit and I need a daily routine to feel normal and organized, otherwise I feel chaotic and anxious. We've spent some time exploring the area, shopping, finding new restaurants (mostly mexican! We looooooooooove us some mexican food! The more hole-in-the-wall, the better.) and walking along the beach. We can't wait to have our first guests. We love to have people visit and love to entertain. So, who's going to be the first to stay in our new guest bedroom?? We've never had a guest bedroom before! It's so exciting! Guests will have their own queen-size bed, TV and laptop to use!

We're totally settled into our house. Everything is unpacked and put together. The garage is in a bit of a state of chaos, but it's organized chaos and really, most of it is just cardboard boxes that need to go out with the recycling. My husband has started his class that he has to take before he starts his job. It's like a speech class, so we have fun talking about coming up with topics for him to talk about to the class. We sit out back on the patio a couple of nights a week and drink a Mike's or some wine and just unwind. It's so nice to have a backyard. I've already bought the kiddo a few toys for it. Go figure....we've bought everything from expensive to silly and you know what she likes the most? Her $2 box of sidewalk chalk. She can draw forever out there with it! I love looking at her little creations! They are nothing more than chaotic scribbles, but they're the cutest works of art to me - this is huge for her because she doesn't like to color with crayons. I love that I found something she can color with.

It's about time for me to get her up for the day. We have a potential babysitter coming by today and I hope it works out because I would love to start having date nights!

We are here!

We made it!

I survived my first PCS, despite having been married to the military for the last 4 and a half years - most people move twice in that time frame. We've never moved once.

The drive was long. Dreadfully boring.

In southern Illinois, there is a mix of flat farmland and rolling hills.

In Missouri, there is flat farmland.

In Arkansas, there is more flat farmland.

In Tennessee, there is Memphis, which is sort of interesting, I guess.

In Mississippi, there are trees. Trillions of them. Maybe even googles of them. Seriously, if I never see another pine tree in my life after driving down I-55 for 5 hours, I will be happy.

We have our house.



The movers came on Saturday. We're unpacked and settled in except for a couple of odds and ends.

We've been to the beach several times. I've found the gym and unlike the gym back at Scott, this one actually has an AC that works. If it weren't so hot and humid, I'd stick to running outside on the rubberized track.

We're starting to get into our routine, though we won't really be into it until my husband starts back to work. The little one isn't sure what to think of the new place. All I know is that she didn't have windows at her height to look out of at our old apartment, but here she can see out of them all and they have door handles that she knows how to open, so I have mini panic attacks several times a day as she attempts to open the front and back doors and let herself outside. I don't even trust her in the backyard because the gate doesn't latch very well and it's simple to open. So simple a 2 year old can do it with ease.

Well, until we meet again!

This is it - moving day

Moving day is finally upon us. Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I'm a little attached to this house. I have pretty much raised my baby and turned her into a full-fledged toddler in this house. We moved here when she was 9 months old and she hit so many milestones here. She started getting really good at crawling with all of the floor space in the play area and living room. She learned to walk here. Walking soon turned to running...the kid only has 2 speeds: fast and faster. I've never seen her walk anywhere...unless she's sick or holding someone's hand.

She has grown so much in this house. I wasn't attached to the last house like I was this one despite the fact that my husband and I started out living there as newlyweds, lived a great, fulfilling 2 years of our life together before children and conceived and raised an infant there until she was 9 months old. Maybe I was never attached because it always felt a little too military....I knew the house next to us and the one next to that and the one next to that and all 8 across the street looked identical to mine. Here the layout is different. Each apartment in this building is unique, spacious and has a warm color scheme of muted golden yellows and muted dark greens. It's not as 1970s as it sounds, it's very modern.

I look forward to our new adventure, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sad about leaving here. And by here, I mean this house and my friends, not the base my husband has been stationed at for the last 7 years. Life has calmed down in the last year and even though I'm still anxious and uptight about everything, I've been able to enjoy more.

The movers should be coming in about 30 minutes....and then I've got so much to do that I probably won't update my blog here until I'm on the "other side" of this PCS. Peace out.