Weekend Update

Today Lily took the last quarter tablet of Tenex.  This week she'll go without completely, and possibly the week after that, just to see how she does.  She's still a little stuffy, but no longer warm.  She's been harder to get to sleep in the evenings in general, although I don't know whether to attribute that to the Tenex or being sick.  I suspect the Tenex.  

This was a really nice weekend.  

One accident all weekend, and I think it was possibly "preventable".  We gave her a nap because we felt like she was still fighting off whatever it was she had, and we didn't hear her wake up on the monitor.  Lily won't call out when she wakes up, so you almost have to "sense" it.  You hear the rustle of sheets or the change in breathing, a cough, or her cooing and you go to check and she's awake...this time we didn't hear her and she had an accident.  Apart from that?  Two days and nothing.  Awesome.  

horsey...she just hopped right on...

She was more "engaged" this weekend too.  More appropriately conversational, and more playful.  She rode me like I was a horse for godsake, and asked us to wipe the cheeto dust off her hands.  I had her carry her clothes hamper into her room, and when I gave her a bath, she ran her dirty clothes into her room and put them in the hamper for me.  

And now I look back up at the first paragraph and think...is this ALSO the lack of Tenex?  Because if I'm quick to point out the negatives of taking her off it, I want to also be open to the potential positives.  Is she more in tune with people OFF the medication?  I didn't notice as much of the heavy breathing or jaw clicking at bed time tonight.

She did do something again tonight that she did a couple nights ago:  she fell almost completely asleep, then started awake, and seemed very anxious.  She got agitated and started to whimper.  I tried a couple different things to put her back at ease, including asking her if she wanted me to leave (she said no this time).  Eventually she fell back asleep, but it was a more difficult process.  30-40 minutes to get her to sleep where once it was 5 tops.  On Tenex, she was her own happy little self until she hit the sheets, then within five minutes her eyes were shut and she was asleep.

As great as that is...the goal of the Tenex is not "sleeping pill"...so if she's "on" during the day interaction-wise, and it takes a little longer to get her to sleep...well, then that's a trade-off I think we'll take.

Tomorrow no Tenex at breakfast...or for the rest of the week for that matter.  Winter storm warning in effect...4-8"?  

The Weaning Continues...

Yesterday was a "bad" accident day for Lily.  Certainly in terms of her recent near-potty-trainedness, you have to go back several months or possibly even a year to encounter a five-accident day.  But yesterday was one of them.  

Leslie, overwhelmed by people tracking in and out of the house, and the fifth accident as Lily's therapist was arriving and a friend showed up to take Emma to dance started second-guessing the decision to pull back on Tenex.  She's under some stress here because I think she feels that because my recollection of the pre-tenex behavior is different than hers, and because I was more or less happy with the medication, any decrease is "her" decision.

But it's not.  It's ours.  Even though I was happy with where she was at, I see no harm in weaning her off it and taking better notes this time around to see what we're really gaining, as opposed to just assuming we gained something.

Back to yesterday...it has been her habit to text me with the day's results from school:  good day/bad day...potty accidents/no potty accidents...ate well/ate poorly...etc.  

So yesterday was a bad day in terms of accidents, but a GREAT day in terms of her eating and her behavior.  Accidents have always really been a stress point for us for a variety of reasons, but ultimately we DO want her focused.

Leslie expressed her concerns/second-guesses regarding the Tenex and I told her we need to stay the course, that possibly Lily's body IS feeling different with this lower dose, and that she's not really sure how to process it, that once she stabilizes, we might see no difference in behavior/accidents/eating/sleeping...or big differences, but that this was JUST.  ONE.  DAY.  

By the time I got home, Leslie was back in the game again.  

Lily was stuffy.  It was my night to put her to bed, and although there was some minor tooth clashing...she went to sleep without too much trouble.  BUT...she woke several times, whimpering and crying, sneezing and unable to get comfortable.  Anticipating trouble, I went to bed early, fearing for my sleep.

Sure enough, Lily was up at 11, and 12, and 1, and 2...and at 3 o'clock we gave her motrin (she was mildly warm) and she fell asleep for the rest of the night (6 a.m.).  I found myself very impatient with her last night.  Usually I'm pretty mild and positive and supportive even in the wee hours of the morning, but last night I was just in a bad place.  I wasn't as patient with the sneezing in the face as I can be.  So rather than get upset with Lily about not being able to get calmed down or "be healthy" (both of which are outside her control), I woke up Leslie and "tagged out".  

I don't always recognize when I'm losing patience or when I'm not in the right frame of mind to deal with issues...but last night I did.  And luckily, Leslie was able to leap (slowly, in a lazy-lidded zombie shamble) into action, giving Lily the warm body, soothing words, and patient responses she needed to settle down and get back to sleep.  As a result neither of us slept particularly well, but Leslie probably took the lion's share of the work.  And she also typically needs more sleep than I do, so I know she's going to be tired.

Is this the Tenex?  Not sure.  I suspect it's just Lily getting sick that led to the accidents.  Not sure about the tooth clashing thing...that's something she did before we put her on Tenex, but it ALSO might be because she's feeling sick. Time will tell.

Anyway, Leslie just got home and shot me off a text to tell me about Lily's day that I purposely misunderstood because I'm "funny"...

And Leslie was so tired, she didn't even comment.  Or it wasn't funny.  But that doesn't sound right.  Anyway, you'll all be happy to know that Leslie didn't have any accidents today and neither did I.

(But also that Lily rebounded from a five accident day to zero).

Eat ALL the chips!

I promised myself that THIS time around I'd try to capture my notes about Lily and Tenex in a way that would allow me to better access them later.  BLOG POST!

For some reason Blogger has been very flakey about searches.  Stuff that I know I have labeled isn't coming up when I search for the label.  For example, I tagged a post that I did for our 12th anniversary and tagged it with divorce (okay...okay...stop...it was because I had tried to pull divorce statistics for special needs couples and I wanted to be able to easily find them later...because Leslie and I are NOT divorcing, and I was trying to contrast that with the data I had (or compare it)).  

Someone on Facebook made some statement about divorce among parents with special needs kids, so when I went back to find my sources for the information I had already researched; I typed "divorce" and Blogger returned nothing.  Anyway, I went post to post until I found it...and there it was, complete with "divorce" tagged.  So what's up with that, Blogger?  Huh?? 

Anyway...apart from Blogger glitches, I want to be able to find posts about how Lily reacts to her current 'weaning' from Tenex.  

Leslie and I have different recollections of where Lily was when we started her on Tenex last year.  Leslie recalls essentially that she was then where she is now...only THEN she wasn't taking meds and now she is, so she's rightly asking, "why are we medicating Lily for no reason."  My recollection is that she was grinding her teeth, biting, wringing her hands, heavy breathing, etc, much more than she is now and so I'm saying..."That's why."

In an effort to figure out whether the Tenex is doing any good, we're weaning her off of it over the next month or so and then reassessing where she is.

That said, she's very very stimmy of late.  Leslie and I talked about it a day or two ago.  She's been very stimmy leading up to weaning her off the Tenex...not just since we started the process (which was Monday of this week).  She's been more defiant.  She's been more prone to throwing herself to the floor.  More prone to meltdowns and biting.

Yesterday while I was trying to get her to put her glasses back on she threw herself to the floor and lay there on her back.  When I tried to put them on her, she reared up and then slammed her head against the floor.  End of glasses attempt.  

I'm not trying to trigger meltdowns.  I'm not trying to force her to do something she hates.  But there's such a weird moving target associated with figuring out whether her behavior is simple defiance or if she's overloaded and truly needs the break.  We need her to comply with our request (for the most part) and so when she's more defiant, the first reaction is to "make her", but when it becomes obvious how adamant her refusal is...well then is it behavior, is it meltdown, is it just stubbornness?

This morning she did not want to get off the potty.  She fought and fought and fought.  Finally once she got off (on her own), she refused to pull up her pants.  Would not do it.  Threw herself to the floor several times until she DID half-ass an attempt and I gave her credit.  She was so frustrated that she tried to bit the bathroom counter which WOULD have been amusing, had she not misjudged the distance and bonked her lip off of it, bloodying it.  She refused to go down the steps, so I ended up picking her up and taking her downstairs, while attempting to avoid gnashing teeth...

I don't know if this is Tenex-weaning.  I don't know that it's not.  Yes, she's been more defiant lately.  But she was sort of leading up to that prior to pulling back on the dose.  Leslie opined that maybe she's just feeling "off" because she's gotten used to how her body feels when she's on Tenex...but she's so teeny tiny she was only ever on a half tablet at night (now a quarter) and it should be out of her system by morning.

Anyway, I'll probably tag a few posts with my observations if for no other reason than to capture the memories that flee from my ever-less-reliable brain.

---------------------

To more pleasant things.  Lily has been eating better in the mornings.  For years all we could feed her was yogurt.  Every morning...a cup of Dora Yogurt.  She's branched out recently, and lately she's been eating strudel or poptarts or cereal and some other stuff every morning.  Much better calorie counts.  She's still tiny, but she's getting more food in her.  

This morning I made a strudel for her, and after she'd calmed down from her morning meltdown, lying on the carpet of the family room face down, and kicking her left foot periodically, she sat down willingly and watched "Blue Nono" (Highschool Musical II) while she ate.  Then she wanted chips.

And it's breakfast...and chips are bad for you...but this kid is TINY...and so usually I try to at least get something good for her in her system with a chip reward.  So Lily asked for chips and I said, "First we eat yogurt..." 

"And then chips," Lily finished for me.

"Right, baby, and then chips."  

So I had her sit down at the table and fed her the yogurt and she ate THAT great, and then she asked for chips, so I broke four pringles into bite size pieces and let her eat them while I busied myself with cleaning from breakfast and getting stuff ready.  When she'd finished she got up and wandered around the family room watching TV before approaching me at the kitchen table (where I was writing a note to her aide/teacher in our communication log) and said, "I want blue fruit."  I had just finished writing:  "Breakfast:  Strudel, yogurt, chips (don't judge)"

"You mean blue berries?"

"Yeah!"

"Okay, baby.  I'll get you some blueberries..."

"And then chips," she finished for me.

"Okay, baby.  If you eat your blueberries I'll get you more chips."  And again she finished her blueberries without issue, and again I got her four Pringles, broke them into pieces, and finished writing in her log.  I added to the previous entry, "Breakfast:  Strudel, Yogurt, chips (don't judge), blueberries, and more chips (fine, you can judge)."

When she finished this, I told her she had five minutes before we would try on the potty and set the iPhone timer "duck" to quack.  When it went off, I paused the television and Lily walked to me at the table.  I said, "Okay, Lily, time to go to the potty..."

"And then I eat all the chips!"

Which made me laugh because I immediately thought of the Allie Brosh cartoon "Clean ALL the things!" that's so oft modified and shared on the interwebz, and I replied with a chuckle, "Yes, baby, then you can Eat ALL the chips!!"

And it looked something like this in my head...

From Hyperbole and a Half

Only the broom was chips, and the person was Lily.

So off we went to the bathroom, and when she was done (more like clockwork this time) she sat at the table and I got her four more chips and she ate those.  And then I remembered a picture we had taken of her at her cousin's birthday party one year at a Japanese steak house when Lily was three.  She was even less likely to sit still back then, but she was ape over Barney, and I remember when she started fidgeting and getting anxious and upset, I had given her her Barney and she had been.  SO!  EXCITED!

Seriously...SO EXCITED!!!  And I took a picture of her holding Barney over her head like he was fucking Excalibur and she'd just pulled it from the stone...or the Lady of the Lake...or whatever the legend of Arthur is, and every time I see the picture it just makes me so happy.  Her eyes were pretty crossy back then.  The glasses are to correct that.  But when I look at this picture, I don't think of the strabismus amblyopia...so much as a little girl so excited about Barney that her eyes just cross out of the sheer impossibility of how awesome it is to hold him in her arms.

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

And so this morning as I thought of the Allie Brosh cartoon, it reminded me of the picture, and I resolved to make this:

It was a cute morning, despite a rough start...

Welcome to My Nightmare

We started giving Lily Tenex about four weeks ago to help her with some of her impulsivity. . . tooth grinding/spitting (which is much reduced now anyway)/heavy breathing, hand wringing, etc. Because she's tiny, the doctor started her out not with half a tablet of the lowest dose, but with a quarter. We ramped up as follows: 1/4 tab every night for a week at bedtime (to get her system used to it), 1/4 tab at breakfast and before bed for a week, 1/4 tab at breakfast and a half tab at bedtime for a week, and now we're at 1/2 in the morning and 1/2 at night.

I don't know what I've seen so far for sure, but one positive, that is invisibly disguised is that . . . well nothing seems to have changed. In terms of Lily's personality, joys and hatreds, she's the same little girl. And maybe she's even been a little more low key. This is a big departure from the stimulants experiment more than a year ago. Her potty accidents continue to be very low, sometimes none during a day, sometimes one or two. Her appetite is unaffected. Her sleeping seems mostly unchanged. Mostly.

Sometime after we ramped up to 1/2 a tablet at bedtime Lily started waking up in the middle of the night and calling us. Every night. This hasn't been a big deal for us because we put her on the potty, and then take her back to bed and she essentially falls back to sleep within a few minutes. Is it a pain in the ass waking up every night at 12:30 or 1:00 because Lily's awake? Kinda. Does it beat the shit out of the Chinese fire drill we used to do when she'd wake up, pee the bed and we'd eventually hear her moving around in bed and have to change bedding, get her on the potty, change her clothes, put her back to bed and get her settled down? Absolutely. She wakes, calls one of us (it's usually mommy), we arrive to a dry little girl who we take to the potty and then put back to sleep. I'd live with that arrangement indefinitely. Developmentally, it's a big step foreward. Lily is calling us and telling us 1) that she's awake and allowing us to help her 2) get on the potty. It's a win.

Last night I put Lily to bed around 9:00. It had been a long day for her, the details of which I'll have to cover in a different post. Bedtime for Lily is usually much earlier, with one of us (we take turns with the kids) getting her upstairs, teeth brushed, story read, on and off the potty and under covers by 7:45 or 8:00. Although she fell asleep in the car ride home from my parents' house, by the time we had her ready for bed she was wide eyed again, though clearly sleepy.

I lay next to her and stroked her hair, whispering her prayers to her complete with pregnant pauses allowing her to fill in the blanks.

"Dear. . . " I began.

"God," she completed.

"Bless. . . "

"Mommy and Daddy and Emma and Lily"

"Ayyyyyy. . . "

"MEN!"

"Very nice, Lily."

I recited my nightly litany to her. "Lily," I began, getting her attention, "I love you. I believe in you. I am proud of you." She accepted this silently, tired eyes gazing alternatively between me and the ceiling when her lids weren't drooping slowly over them.

She wrung her hands, picking at her index finger and I inserted my finger into her palm and she clutched instead at that, stopping without protest, her body calming. We lay like that for fifteen or twenty minutes. Leslie came in to wake me from what she imagined must be my slumber and Lily looked up at her. Leslie backed quietly from the room. It doesn't typically take that long for Lily to find sleep and she was very quiet.

When she finally did shut her eyes for the night, I rolled as smoothly as I could from her bed and put up the railing. She moves quite a bit in the bed and when the rail's not there, and even sometimes when it is, she finds herself on the floor or almost on the floor.

I went downstairs to pack lunches (although I took a lengthy pre-work break to watch Season 2 episode 6 of Game of Thrones) while Leslie dried Emma's hair from her bath. When Emma was ready for bed I went back upstairs and gave her a kiss goodnight while Leslie read Half Blood Prince to her before bed. I returned downstairs and started making lunches.

Around 10:15 Lily started to whimper. She'll whimper as she tries to get comfortable sometimes. When she's sick that whimpering can turn to coughing and that coughing turns to vomiting, but I really didn't expect that last night because she's been pretty healthy. I listened as I worked. Her whimpers got louder.

I finished up the lunch I was working on and resolved to head upstairs to check things out. During the time it took me to formulate that plan her whimpers ratcheted up to yelps then screams. I had no idea what was going on, but started sprinting for the steps. I took them two at a time and pushed open the door to her room, not knowing WHAT I would find.

The first thing that struck me was that the nightlight had burnt out. Had she awoken and gotten scared because it was so dark? I didn't know, but in order to see I had to turn on the overhead light in her room, flip the rail down and sit next to her whispering words of comfort, hoping to get her settled down and back to sleep. Her eyes squeezed shut against the too-bright light.

But she didn't settle down. She kept alternating between pained whimpers and shrieks of terror. I picked her up wondering if she was laying on her arm wrong or something, but she wasn't, and I patted her back telling her it was a dream (had she had a nightmare? I had no idea) and that it was okay and that I was there and it would be alright. She didn't calm down.

After a couple minutes I put her back on the bed and tried to get her to drink water. NO! I asked her if she wanted mommy but if she said yes, I couldn't tell. Was there a perceptible calming? It wasn't apparent to me, but as she lay on her back and I talked she did calm a little. I told her I was going to get mommy, then crossed the hall to where Leslie had fallen asleep with Emma and woke her, telling her I needed her.

TYPICALLY that means Lily is throwing up because she's had a coughing jag, but Leslie blearily crossed the hall and I explained. She lay down next to Lily and tried to calm her. I sat next to them both. I can't remember whether Leslie asked for it, or I just noticed it, but Poopers, Lily's stuffed puppy, was in her swing, and I retrieved it and handed it to her. She was still sobbing and whimpering. Leslie asked if I had a blanket for her and I said no, but grabbed one from her drawer.

We tried asking about scary dreams but got nowhere. Eventually I asked Lily what a puppy says and Lily responded through sobs, "Woof woof." I smiled encouragement and continued.

"That's right, Lily!" I was being uber-upbeat. I hadn't really wanted to be high energy, thinking that it would wake her up and get her too alert to get back to sleep, but nothing else had worked, and calm happy awake Lily beats the shit out of sad horror-stricken sleepy Lily any day.

"And what's a monkey say?"

"Oooh ooh, ee ee," she replied.

She had calmed dramatically. I had no idea why. Was it giving her something to focus on? If it was a bad dream was it just distracting her from the memory by giving her mind something else in replace? No idea.

"Do you want your monkey?"

"Yes," she replied meekly.

I got her monkey and handed it to her.

"There's pink monkey, Lily. What color is his coat?" (I swear that question isn't as stupid as it sounds. He's a pink monkey, but he has a coat that's green)

"Green," she said. She was almost herself again.

"Good job! What color is Poopers' hat?"

"White."

"And?"

"Red."

"Yeah, Poopers has a white and red striped hat!" I started thinking about how to get her back in the mood to sleep, "Poopers wears his striped hat to bed, Lily. He sleeps in it."

Leslie told me later that at the mention of sleep Lily started getting agitated again, but we moved on from it into safer waters, making. . . conversation, for lack of a better word until Lily was calm.

The whole thing freaked me out more than a little bit.

Leslie stayed with her as I kissed her on her head and told her I loved her. I replaced the 7.5w nightlight bulb with the lowest watt bulb left in the house (25W) before I left. It was way too bright, but I figured it beat the alternative. She fell asleep a short time later and Leslie put up the rail and left her room.

"What the hell was that?"

"No idea."

We talked about the idea of nightmares, and how her response to the distraction seemed to have worked, and to remember that little trick in the future. We wondered whether the bulb burning out had made it worse. Really though we have no idea. I've heard of kids on ADHD meds (but this was stimulants, I thought) or Melatonin having nasty nightmares. Lily never has.

"When it's time to meet with Dr. Cheerleader, we're not going to the next higher dose," Leslie said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, before we got to the 1/2 tablet at night, we were seeing some good effects but no bad ones. She's more tired at bed time, and she goes through a sleepy spell in the morning, but nothing bad. Now that we're on 1/2 tablet, she's waking up every night, and napping in the afternoon, and maybe her body will get used to it, but right now I don't think we should go to a higher dose."

We don't know whether the nightmare was medicine-induced or not, but it's the first one she's ever had (if indeed that's what last night was), and we're looking for what's changed. Her big sister made her share of tearful treks down the hall, fleeing nightmares to comforting parents; maybe Lily is just at that stage in her life where she's starting to develop fears that are capable of manifesting themselves in dream form. Or maybe it's the medicine.

I don't know, but if it's a side-effect, the sheer terror she went through last night is not worth any amount of impulsivity abatement. We have an appointment on Wednesday with Dr. Cheerleader (assuming I can find her office), so I'm keeping an open mind until then.

Happier moments in her bed

Dr. Cheerleader and Tale of the Parking Lot Labyrinth

I haven't been particularly bloggy of late. Between work, and Sprocket, I'm getting a little over-blogged and things at home have been more than a little hectic and when I feel like I have time to write, I don't, because I'm either asleep, or in bed nearly asleep, or out of bed and awake, but exhausted and muse-less.

And it's not that there's nothing to write about. Sometimes it's worse when there's TOO much to write about. The potty training blog is sitting there "in draft form" (which means, I've written "Potty Training" as a title, and nothing else so that it reminds me that I promised to write a blog about potty training) but the whole experience was so big and detailed and full of woe that I just haven't been able to get my brain around the idea of putting it all on 'paper'.

Something that happened shortly after the last visit to the doctor, is that we visited a psychiatrist about getting a non-stimulant for Lily's impulsivity. The stimulant experiment (another 'draft') was such a failure that I think we needed at least a year to let life wash the bad taste out of our mouths before considering it again. We visited our magical autism doctor, and I previously blogged THAT little encounter as sort of a venting thing, and the overwhelming response was that we should pack our bags and find a new doctor. But we're not doing that.

So anyway, during that visit, we mentioned to Dr. Autism that we were going to see another doc about prescriptions and he got mildly butthurt that we hadn't come to him but then made some elaborate "fine, go see her, I don't even have TIME to talk to you about prescriptions so it's awesome that you're cheating on me seeing someone else for that. It's better. I WANT you to go. And I sorta felt bad for Dr. Autism, like he felt like we were totally going to date the cheerleader even though he was the plain girl who played drums but was providing us moral support all along, and probably he was screaming in his head, "John Hughes movies don't end this way!! You're supposed to end up with the supportive girl after you verbally burn and dump the cheerleader for being so vapid!!"

But that was the frame of mind I was in during that visit. So we went to see the other doctor. The appointment was at 4:00 I think. Or maybe it was some other time, but it's irrelevant because I could just pick some arbitrary time and tell the story around it and how would you guys know?? So it was 4:00. I mean it.

Leslie had mentioned Risperdal and Dr. Autism had gotten a little concerned and said. . . "Risperdal is a big gun. I don't think Lily needs that big a gun. If I were prescribing something (insert imagined sniffle) it would probably be Tenex." I had that in the back of my mind as we went to see Dr. Cheerleader.

Dr. Cheerleader's office was in this medical complex on Pittsburgh's Northside. Or near a medical complex. It was somewhat unclear exactly where Dr. Cheerleader's office was, but I plugged the address into my phone and listened to the GPS tell me where to go. I zoomed right into the parking garage with about 10 minutes to spare and took the escalator up to the main floor to find the office.

I eased into my parking spot and took the escalator up into what had once been sort of a fancy little inside mall.  I walked past locked doors and empty spaces looking for promising. . . medical complexy type offices but didn't find any.  

I doubled back the way I'd come and started over. This time I spotted a girl cleaning up in front of a coffee shop and I asked for directions. She had no idea. I did a few more laps of the building, starting to get stressed out and maybe a little brow-sweaty. I walked back into the courtyard outside the mall and found what looked like a security guard. Surely if anyone knew where to look it would be him, but he just said, he had no idea and pointed to the bank saying, "They probably know in the bank." Yeah. Cause that's what banks do.

The whole complex was under construction. So even following the bank employee's directions of, essentially "thataway", I ran into fenced off construction and had to go inside the mall to get around it. My feet had blisters the size of quarters and I was more or less limping everywhere I went. 

The "Cruel Shoes"  Apologies to Steve Martin

Time for a brief sidebar: I went shopping at DSW because I needed new dress shoes. My old ones were worn out and I wanted a pair that were a little more current. So after about a half hour i found a pair I liked, and were $75 each.

One aisle over I found a similar pair and checked the price. $50! Sweet. From there it was like this weird sort of reverse "Let's Make a Deal" with me exchanging the pairs of shoes I'd found for new ones that cost less as I progressed through the store. I threw caution to the wind and finally headed to the clearance rack. Two pairs of shoes, $35 each! With the money I saved I bought a pair of casual shoes too.

The dress shoes I bought were cheap. And I don't mean "inexpensive". They LOOKED nice, but 1) The insole kept coming unglued and sliding toward the toe so that I was always walking on a wrinkle of leather and would have to take the shoe off, reach in and smooth it out. 2) They hurt my feet. In fact, it is JUST now occurring to me that the foot pain I've been suffering for the past several months probably has nothing to do with imagined plantar fasciitis and everything to do with the fact that my feet kill me after I wear these stupid shoes all day, and 3) they smelled of cheap rubber. The first month I wore them I'd have to take them off in my office and walk out because the fumes gave me headaches. My boss told me to put them in kitty litter because the activated carbon in the kitty litter would adsorb the cheap rubber fumes. And I did it.

It's not a huge stretch to say I'd just walked two miles in those stupid cheap shoes. I called Leslie, but she was already in the exam with Dr. Cheerleader and said, "I can't talk now, bye!" and hung up. I texted her a terse message indicating I had no idea where I was but that I'd be there if I ever found out.

Eventually I just got frustrated and started walking North up the sidewalk. And there it was.

I had parked in the wrong garage. And not just sorta wrong, really wrong. I was late, and sweaty (it was hot outside) my feet hurt and I was stressed out and frustrated that I missed the start of the appointment. But I was there. Leslie hadn't been able to talk to me because the doctor was working with Lily and Leslie was in the office with them and didn't want to screw it up.

Also. . . to be clear, Dr. Cheerleader doesn't really look like a cheerleader, and there's no "popular" vs. "nerdy" vibe, and I'm starting to regret bringing my whole reimagined "Say Anything" storyline into it, but Dr. Cheerleader works as a nickname for the story since I'm not offering up real names, so we're just going with it.

We talked about Lily and answered questions for 15 or 20 more minutes and Dr. Cheerleader made her recommendation.

Tenex.

So we could have stuck with the plain drummer girl with the bad haircut after all! Not really, but it was actually nice to have a built in second opinion completely independent of the first. She, like Dr. Autism, felt that Lily just needed to take the edge off some of her impulsivity, calm the tooth-grinding and hand-wringing, possibly keep her from feeling the need to pick at her fingers. . . we shall see.

Because Dr. Autism had given Lily four new supplements to incorporate, and because we wanted to first see what the Tenex would do, we agreed to start the medication very slowly and ramp it up and let her get used to it before doing anything with the supplements. We agreed to meet again, and we ended the appointment, I limped Leslie and Lily to the minivan (which was parked about 50 yards from the door) before heading back to my car which was parked in the next county.

When I reached my car is when I noticed the signs that said, "Cash Only Upon Exit" and "Exit via Gate C". I had no cash. I had no idea where Gate C was. I decided to drive around the garage looking for the exit but inexplicably could not find it. After going back and forth about five times I parked the car and took a service stairway up to the mall where at least I knew I could find an ATM for cash.

I got money out then couldn't find the stairway I'd taken to get up in the first place, so I just picked a stairway at random and walked around the garage holding my car remote in front of me like a dowsing rod, pushing the "lock" button and hoping to hear my car's beep in response. But I never did, and ultimately found the car around the corner from the service stairway without TOO much more difficulty.

It probably took me 30 minutes to get out of the parking garage. I was sooooo pissed by the time I left. It was a bad brain day the summary of which is essentially, late to an appointment because I got lost. . . then got lost trying to leave the appointment. It was like the doctor's office was the Sargasso Sea and the parking garage was the Bermuda Triangle.

That was two or three weeks ago. Which brings us to today. I don't know how much the Tenex has impacted Lily. She HAS been less impulsive while still maintaining her happy and energetic personality (unlike the changes that killed us when we tried the stimulants) so I suppose if nothing else it's been a much better fit for her than stimulants EVER were.

And returning briefly to the subject of potty training. . . she's down to about one accident per day. . . many days NO accidents. Is that the potty training we utterly failed somehow taking root? It was better even before the Tenex, but now, when she wakes in the middle of the night, she calls us, and often she's still dry. We put her on the potty, she goes, then we put her to bed and she goes back to sleep. All of that is good good good.

I'm not saying she's completely potty trained, but she's really close (for no apparent reason other than she's doing better).

Her behaviors are way down too. She grinds her teeth a little, but I cannot even tell you the last time she spit. She's happy. She doesn't resist as much when we transition or offer to take her to the bathroom.

Part of the reason I suppose I haven't really been putting much of this down on 'paper' is because things with Lily have been. . . good. . . boringly good. There really haven't been too many stories to tell. And there have been, of course, but with everything ELSE going on, I just haven't made time to tell them.

I've been meaning to mention the ridiculousness of the visit with Dr. Cheerleader for weeks now. Anyway, in the midst of all the autistic kids dealing with tough transitions from structured school work to completely unstructured summer chaos. . . Lily's just been steady as the northern star.

She starts ESY next week, and we've mentally prepared ourselves for some backsliding, but it's really been sweet and stress-less (to an extent) and nice here, at least where little Lily is concerned.