One of my coworkers has a ringtone of a horse neighing. After overhearing a conversation I realized the horse ringtone is for his wife. I asked him about it. His answer? “Oh, that’s not just any old horse you hear. That’s a nag.”

Ouch. I told him that wasn’t very nice. He thought it was funny. I didn’t ask if she knew what it was or not. To be honest, if she does then I’d rather not know about it.

Another coworker has what he calls “their song” as the ringtone for his wife. The song is an old one “Close enough to perfect for me“. At first I thought that wasn’t terribly romantic, but this couple has been married over 30 years, and for this particular wears-boots-with-business-suits country guy, it’s probably as romantic as he’s likely to get. Put in the context of what I know about him, it’s actually pretty sweet.

Oh, and one father has the chorus of “We don’t need no education” as the ringtone for his 16 year old daughter. The 13 year old artistic daughter has Xanadu for her ringtone. His ex-wife’s ringtone is the instrumental version of a song with the B word in it.

Once upon a time RK had a ringtone for me that was this really sexy voice saying “Honey, it’s your wife”. That didn’t last long because when you’re in a meeting and your cellphone goes off with that ringtone it’s hard to pretend it was a business call. I probably only call him two or three times a month while he’s at work, but invariably it will be when he’s in a meeting, or teaching a class of new employees.

So, here is the experiment. Wait until your DH is home, and then call his cellphone from your cellphone. Then come back here and tell us what your ringtone is. If you have older kids with cellphones it might be enlightening to try the experiment by calling their cellphones, too.

I could use a good laugh, so if I get at least 20 responses then I’ll share what RK has as my current ringtone.

I have to confess that I don’t do the ringtone-song thing. I used the regular “rings” that came with the phone and gave various rings to the people who call me the most, so I can tell who is calling by the type of ring.

The great thing about taking your kids bowling is that you’ve got an excuse to use the bumpers.

Bowling is so much more fun without that pesky gutter.

TT’s speech therapist spent several weeks slowly working up to saying the L sound. For a few minutes at the beginning of a session they would look in the mirror and make their tongue act like the elevator that TT rode on to get to therapy. Finally, they added the sound. Magically, TT made the L sound almost right away. They had been doing the motion without the sound, so adding the sound at that point was easy.

And over the course of the past month since the sound was introduced, she’s become an expert at using the L sound when we are practicing words. She doesn’t use it in her normal speech, she falls back on habit in normal speech and uses the W sound in place of the L. But we weren’t supposed to worry about that yet, we were just supposed to concentrate on our practice times and let it go the rest of the time.

Last week we were finally given the go ahead to start correcting normal speech when we heard the W in place of the L. If she said “I wove you” we were to say, “wove? Is that right?” And that worked, she would shake her head no and say it again, correctly that time (usually). Eventually she started self correcting. And then the self correcting went into overdrive and now she is using the L sound in place of all W sounds. Sure, she can say lick and love correctly now. But instead of will it is lill, and instead of watch it is lotch, and instead of wet it is let. So speech therapy this morning was mostly working on the W sound and W words. Those were just fine before, but now they are a mess.

The other step backwards is that verbs and articles have gone away again. This morning TT was trying to tell me her doggie (stuffed animal) was in the floor.

Do-ee in fuh-loor (which is doggy in floor – she can do the blends, but she has to emphasize them).

I responded with “Your doggie is in the floor? Can you say that? Say, ‘My doggie is in the floor’?”

“Doggie in four” (got doggie right, but missed the L in floor.. and she left out the verb and both articles)

We went at it for several minutes and she absolutely could not say the sentence. Two weeks ago she could have repeated it with me prompting. The words wouldn’t have been pronounced correctly, but she could have repeated the sentence back to me and included all words. Today it was not physically possible for her to say the sentence. I didn’t want her to get frustrated so in the end I got her to say it in groups of two “My doggie” and then “is in” and then “the floor” and told her that was good trying.

The speech therapist assures me this is normal, that other things backtrack as a new skill is learned and then we have to relearn the other skills we spent so much time learning already.

And little TT worked so hard in therapy today. She really tries. She wants to talk right. For such a little thing she is so determined. And her speech therapist is great at moving TT away from something before she has a chance to get frustrated. I’ve taken my cues from watching how she does it and I’m pretty good at it, too.

Now if I could just figure out how to keep myself from being frustrated…

GlitterGirl was watching the squirrels running around up in the trees. Which would normally be okay, except she was walking as she was doing this. And there was a low concrete wall in front of her.

She managed to not actually fall down, but she tore up the front of her shin on the top of the wall in the process. A spot just a little bigger than a quarter, with no skin on it, and it was a bloody mess.

I have some bandages left over from a wound RK had that we had trouble getting to heal. The bandages are large and have silver laced into the little pad on the inside to help keep infection down. So, we cleaned it up, put Dermaplast on it (I love that stuff), and put a bandage on it. As it turns out, GG’s winter skin coloring is the exact same color as the bandage, so you don’t really see it on her leg even if she wears a skirt and sandals. That didn’t make her happy, so she put stickers on the outside of the bandage.

But the biggest part of the story here is how this affected TwinkleToes. She woke up around midnight that night crying, and I went to her room to see what was wrong. She was half asleep complaining that her leg hurt. I asked her to show me where it hurt and she pointed to the spot on her leg that corresponds to her big sister’s pretty significant boo boo.

I tended to the “boo boo” and helped her get back to sleep. The next morning she didn’t remember waking up, or her leg hurting in the night.

When I told RK about it he grinned and said, “What do you call it when the husband also has morning sickness?”

I laughed at first as I said, “Sympathy pains?”

But then, it almost made sense. I really can’t explain how close those two are.

This morning I had RK take TT downstairs to keep her occupied while I changed GG’s bandage. I think the less she’s exposed to the site of it the better at this point.

TwinkleToes had a little boo boo. Nothing major, just a scratch or scrape she got at school on the playground.

Every day during dinner we heard “See my boo boo?”

Eventually there was just the smallest bit of scab left, but we all looked at it and said, “Yes, we see your boo boo… now you need to eat, please.”

And then one day we’re eating dinner and out of the blue she bursts into tears.  Real, genuine, tears. Full of pain and sorrow. Nothing fake about it, something was really wrong.

“Baby, why are you crying? What’s wrong?”

(deep sobbing breath) “My boo boo is GONE!!!!!!”

And then I had one of those “bad mommy” moments, because the relief of it not being anything terribly serious, along with the humor of her being upset because her boo boo healed… I must admit that a shot of laughter just kind of came out of me. Which just made her cry all that much harder.

GlitterGirl glared at me as she rose from her chair and rounded the table to hug her sister and tell her it would be okay. I managed to get my laughter under control so I could offer sympathy as we talked about how good it is that our bodies heal and that makes our boo boos go away. And how bad it would be if she still had every single boo boo she ever head.

The next day GlitterGirl ended up with a much bigger boo boo. But more on that tomorrow.

We’re eating dinner, a sort of Chinese dinner, so we’ve all got chopsticks. TwinkleToes is using a pair of zoosticks, blue ones with a toucan on top.

TT:  Thi   i’  a pawwot?  (This is a parrot?)

GG:  No, it’s a Toucan.

TT: No. Ih’ noh’ a touca’. Ih’ a one ca’  (No, it is not a toucan, it is a one can)

RK and I gave each other a one and a half second look before we both cracked up.

TwinkleToes is able to dress herself in some types of clothes now.  On days when she is capable of handling her clothes I lay them out for her and leave her to it. She loves coming to me and showing me that she did it “all by self”.

This morning she walked in with her shirt on backwards. I pointed it out to her and she stomped her foot and said “No I dint, the tah boes…. oh.” (Translation: No, I didn’t, the tag goes… oh.”

As she was talking she pulled her shirt out to look and as she saw the tag she realized I was right, which is why she stopped and ended with “oh”.

Poor baby. She walked back into her room and returned a few minutes later with it on the right way, the look in her eyes clearly telling me she didn’t want to talk about it. I wisely kept my mouth shut about it and just handed over her toothbrush with the toothpaste already on it.

Fast forward forty five minutes: She puts her shoes on once we are downstairs. Her little athletic shoes have velcro closures so she can do those by herself now, too. But it was RK that pointed out to her that her shoes were on the wrong feet. He completely didn’t understand why she burst into tears once she realized he was right.

I hope the rest of her day goes better.

Glittergirl had an exceptionally good teacher this year. Maybe the best teacher, ever.

I got a Thank You card, just a generic one with flowers and a Thank You on the front, and blank on the inside. I’m going to write a little note inside to thank her for making the school year so wonderful for GG this year, and for making learning fun. I’ve also got a Target Gift card for $50 to put inside of it. I know she has to dip into her own money for some of the things she does for the class, there is no way the school gives her the budget for all of the decorations and visual aids she has.

The owner of APC is a teacher and she usually says that writing a letter about the good job she does to her principal would be great, so I think I’m going to do that as well.

This morning my mother called me on my cellphone while I was on my way to work to tell me about the earthquake in China.

I posted the initial post from home this morning, which means I knew all about the quake when she called. Way more than she saw on the morning news, which was where she got her information. And I told her what I knew, told her I’d seen the news story on TV plus I’d read about thirty more news articles online. But she completely ignored me and spent ten minutes telling me everything she had heard. Even though I knew everything she was telling me. I corrected her on a few points she had wrong, but even that didn’t get it through to her that I already knew what she was telling me. I gave up at some point and just listened. I realized that she was worried and that she just needed to talk, so I let her.

When she was done telling me what she knew she gave me a lecture about how I shouldn’t talk on the phone and drive.

She called ME!!!!! Knowing I would be on my way to work when she did!!!!!

Mothers.

GlitterGirl has shiny hair. I mean, not just shiny, but glossy. When the sun shines on it, it’s like shining on oil or water, it almost glows. When she is under florescent lights it looks  a little blue the way it reflects the light. When it swings around her shoulders it almost glitters it’s so shiny.

When we brought TwinkleToes home her hair was dull and lifeless and I assumed that was a product of her malnutrition. But now, over a year later, it’s grown about two inches and the new growth looks pretty much the same as the old growth. It’s not lifeless anymore, but that is probably more about the products we use on it than anything else. But the fact remains that she has matte blackish-brownish hair that is obviously not as shiny and healthy looking as her sister’s hair.

I wonder if this is just a product of them having different hair textures, or if TwinkleToes’ hair is still not recovered from her years of malnutrition. Her nails grow like wildfire and have to be clipped every second or third day, but her hair doesn’t grow very fast and what has grown in is not healthy and shiny looking.

They both get plenty of protein and good fats in their diet, and they both eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Nutrition-wise I know they are fine, but when we are outside on a sunny day the difference in their hair textures is very noticeable. Even by strangers.