Down syndrome and autism, you win this time, but we’ll see you in a few years at independent living.

After all the anticipation leading to Jordan’s finally aired segment on national news, the story featured only the kids with obvious disabilities. There was one shot of Jordan at the very end where you could see her on the pitcher’s mound wearing her pink baseball cap. Great narration of the story celebrating how these kids are marginalized and almost always left out, then it managed to marginalize and leave out the ones who didn’t visibly illustrate their point.

I’ve got this six-inch tummy roll that I’ve carried around my entire life. I’ve always had vague plans of getting rid of it, but most of the plans never involve any type of exercise or change in diet and, interestingly enough, giving birth three times kinda worked against it. Am I going to die with this belly? Probably. But just in case I have 40 more years of low-riding jeans to go, I’m thinking of becoming more proactive about flattening it. Once I get started, I’m gonna write about it here.

My stories at emagination.org are unlocked again. I can see this job search being about as successful as the last one, so there is no real need to believe potential employers are tossing my resume because we don’t share the same taste in microfiction. I’ll get back to the 90-in-90 project with new stories once my life settles into its autumn routine.

My first Texans gameday is Thursday! It’s the Texans and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I missed last Sunday’s preseason game against the Cowboys while I was in Williamsport, and the regular season starts the first week of September. I’ll try to sneak a few pics here and there.

Addicted to milk and chocolate syrup lately. In completely unrelated news, my tummy hurts.

We took our annual first day of school photos yesterday in the clothes the kids were planning to wear since things were likely to be a little hectic the next morning.

This is the first year Jordan ships off in the mornings before JA. With teenagers’ sleep cycles being better acclimated for later wake up times than nearly any other human, why high school starts at some God awful time, I will never know. Upon request, I will walk her to the bus stop.

my fourth grader and new high schooler

Before going to bed, JA asked me about my fourth grade experiences, and I went on some kind of tangential rant about how I skipped from third grade to fifth and how I’ve regretted that and a whole lotta other decisions since then. Confused and dejected, he surveyed his sister. For whatever seething-old-bag-lady reason, I missed Jordan’s answer while pushing my cart of fleas back to my room.

I forgot to say "no bunny ears"

Each of them lost their glasses while I had no vision coverage. I need to launch some sort of fundraising campaign before the school vision screening. JA fails every time.

They don't call Ehren Cranky McCrankyPants for nothing. Notice how Jordan keeps her pose throughout. She's a professional.

We’ve got practice for Jordan’s Little League World Series exhibition game and practice for JA’s Saturday football game right after they get out of school. We’ll have time to gobble dinner and fight with Ehren before it’s time to head to the fields. Just to get a breather, we should become a family of lazy bums. Lazier bums.

By the way, stay tuned for Jordan’s postponed ABC World News Person of the Week segment. There are stories more important than a team of kids being invited to play at the pinnacle of youth sports whose parents had each been told at some point or another that their baby probably wouldn’t live through the night. The producers will get to us eventually.

First day of school 2005:

Their very first first day of school photo, 2005

Jon Alex was sporting the Ziploc bag of Corn Pops, Jordan the messenger bag that I splurged on with a whopping $9.95 at Target. I had no idea what was coming fewer than three years later. These days, I’d kill for something that cost me 10 bucks for her and satisfying JA with a plastic bag of cereal.

Present day or past life memories in comments…

I picked Ehren up on Saturday afternoon, and he’s been cranking it out ever since.

Either he hates being away from his cattle ranch or he’s so relieved to be within 400 yards of a Starbucks, he is unable to control his emotions. We are both crying ourselves to sleep.

Day 7 of 31DBBB means I’m supposed to write a post linking to another blog in my niche. Can I tell you I hate the word niche? Do we who speak American even pronounce it correctly? Is it “nitch” or “neesh”? I love the words clandestine, ennui, desuetude, cacophony, symphonic. I love the sound of my own name and those of my children. When Q calls me darlin’ or dumplin’, my heart pounds.

Another word I hate? Blog. It’s ridiculous. Blog. Sounds like I was about to throw up, but got lucky with an intervening gag reflex. Blaaaaahg-g-g—oh, okay, never mind, whew.

With the baby reclaiming the world title Cranky McC, and the 31DBBB lesson filled with two of my most hated words, I’m skipping Day 7. I have Angry Birds to conquer, Bookworm levels to reach and maybe an unopened book or two to look at on the night stand. Researching a blaaaaah-g-g-g post doesn’t feel very relaxing to me.

Hey, so Jordan was invited to her school awards ceremony to receive an outstanding student award from her social studies teacher. She was morose for most of the ceremony and nearly in tears by the time we got home. Some of the award recipients shared a personal cheering section that was whooping it up for, it seemed, everybody else but Jordan. It didn’t help that when her name was called, her six family members in the audience were silent except for Ehren cranking it out. Here’s the deal: when you participate in real world activities such as a general student population awards ceremony, you find out not everybody shouts your name for simply zipping your jacket correctly. Special needs kids can be extremely insulated, sometimes to their detriment. We spend so much energy protecting them from evil typical kids, we forget to build relationships with the kids who would be excited for them at public events.

On a weird note, one girl got an achievement award for hardest worker, most improved, something-or-other. Wheelchair-bound with obvious multiple physical and mental impairments. She got a sustained ovation as her certificate was handed to her attendant, and I could feel the audience more than once debating if it should stand. Really, audience? Why? Maybe that is what upset Jordan more than the typical kids, now that I think about it. We all work hard, I’m sure she was thinking, and if you mofos stand up for her, I will shoot somebody. Wait, maybe that was me.

Jordan’s award has a footprint or two on it from its place of honor on the car ride home, and she quietly told me to tack it to the wall of my cubiffice since she wasn’t going to do anything with it. Do you think she thought it would be an exclusively private ceremony like the Nobel prizes? We’d all fly to Stockholm dressed in our Macy’s sale rack finest? Dunno. Something dancing in her head got knocked on its butt. She’s a kid, she’s a teen, she’s adolescent and she has a brain injury. The possibilities of what disappointed her are myriad.

I like the word myriad. I’d like a moratorium on plethora. Prodigal doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Disappointment theories and favorite words in comments…

But I still would have missed capturing Jordan’s single-handed double play which caught me by such surprise, surrounded by parents and two teams of kids, I yelled at Q: holy shit, Jordan just turned a double-play!

Holy shit, did I say holy shit out loud? No one heard me but Q. I was kinda behind the bleachers watching the game from a sidewalk because I’d also forgotten the baby stroller, and I was trying to walk Ehren to sleep on my shoulder.

The play: she caught a pop-up at the pitcher’s mound, then hustled to home plate, beating the runner who’d failed to tag third before heading home. This team is the most competitive one fielded by the coaches since we joined the league four years ago. The first year, we got smoked by this team from El Paso whose pitcher’s only disability was his three-and-a-half foot height. That guy, to put it mildly, was demoralizing. I think he had six no-hitters by the time the team bus pulled away.

Family picnic tomorrow. I’d better go toss my camera in the car before I forget.

Well, her brain injury anyway.

I have a guest post published on A Wild Ride today. I may make it a semi-regular habit, dunno.

The post wasn’t edited for language, but it has a warning label attached to it as though reading the word motherfucker might give you cancer. Ah well, anything is possible, I suppose. Wait thirty minutes after reading it before going swimming while you’re at it.

I don’t think the readers over there are used to leaving comments on posts, but mine are, so if you visit, please let me know you were there. Clicky can only follow you so far.

A few thoughts brought to you by my hatred of labeling people:

The American Psychiatric Association is considering a change in the DSM-V from the term “mental retardation” to “intellectual disability.” In twenty years or so, the nastiness of “retard” will be replaced by the nastiness of “dissie” or something equally, derivatively caustic because it’s all about context and less about terminology when it comes to referencing those who are different and, possibly, conceptually, lesser human beings than we are.

I hate the term already, and I only heard it for the first time yesterday. Do I go around calling people by their diagnoses? Hey, there’s emphysema guy and his wife benign tumor lady. Their kids schizophrenia and dissociative disorder star on the local team of potential psychopaths and eventual domestic abusers. They bought a new car last week; it smells like sudden death from cardiac arrest.

I know the DSM is a medical reference that happens to be adapted for use by non-medical professionals. I’m not complaining about medical labeling since we need our doctors to know what to call that thingie growing sideways out of our other thingie. It’s the un-doctors who work for the state or window shop at the mall or sit next to my kids in class that concern me. We give them labeling license and it doesn’t stop. It grows worse. We get pejoratives and epithets like lame, retard, cripple, and dissie (you heard it here first) which get lumped in with racial, ethnic and sexual orientation slurs. It’s not enough to change the name, we’ve got to change our way of thinking, and why hasn’t Obama fixed this, yet? He’s had a year.

There is a post here on my blog that gets a lot of search engine attention from universities. In it, I complain about potential employers Googling interviewees and finding something offensive and non-hire worthy on their blogs or Facebook pages. I don’t know if the hits I receive on it are from people agreeing with or disagreeing with my position, but I find it interesting how quickly our snapshots, our mall photo booth filmstrips become our entire media portfolio within seconds.

To wit:

I had a bit of a back and forth with a daddy blogger who offered me a reciprocal publicity relationship—fringes, you pub my cause (oh, and help me rewrite all my marketing material) and I will link to your blog from mine—until I asked him to visit my blog to make sure he understood who I was. Writer, mom, occasional user of the word fuck.

Go figure, that last one eliminated me from consideration. As did, perhaps, our free fringes discussion about sex. With our partners. In our own homes or cars.

It’s the Internet, goddammit. Behave yourself.

Yep, Ehren sleeping in his crib is going well, thanks for asking.

It’s been a week now and his why are you doing this to me wailing time has decreased significantly from 33 minutes the first night to right around five minutes by night #3. I no longer think I’m abandoning him or that he thinks I am; I know it is the best thing for the both of us. I just don’t want him to think I don’t want him around.

Which, I suppose, I actually don’t. Not in my bed, anyway, as the other two were until they were more than six years old. Sometimes, a 12-year-old Jordan would join her brother in bed with me and it was a big ol’ kickfest to the face until my alarm went off the next morning. Ehren is a much bigger baby than those two ever were, and he’s strong. He hurts me and, thinking my howling protest is the height of hilarity, starts pulling my hair while punching me in the face. It’s now also time for him to play on the floor and not in my lap.

Jordan starts high school next year, two years later than planned, yet, I suppose, right on time. Last night was registration for the Challenger League, a division of Little League Baseball for special needs kids. This will be her fourth season which made it all the more odd when we walked in and one of the moms pantomimed swinging a bat while asking Jordan if she was playing this year. One: we’re standing in the registration line, so yeah, we’re probably playing. Two, even if it’s hard keeping 40 kids’ disabilities straight, you should know by now she’s not deaf. Three: I don’t think an air bat is the ASL word for baseball.

Jon Alex is going to camp this summer. In freaking Missouri. For nine days. Talk about sleep-training. This may just be the trick to his keeping up with his glasses, losing the annoying little brother shtick, his chronic insomnia and companionate waking me up at one in the morning to ask why would Galileo think planets had ears…I mean, isn’t your first trip away from home supposed to be the light switch to instant maturity?

Other unicorn sightings in comments…