What brand and model do you have?

I have a Janome Hello Kitty Machine. (It is a 3/4 size machine, I believe it is just a Janome Jem with a Hello Kitty Shell)

How long have you had it? A couple of years

How much does that machine cost (approximately)? I believe it costs around $100 though I got it on clearance for $25

What types of things do you sew (i.e. quilting, clothing, handbags, home dec projects, etc.)?
I mend with it and sew a wide variety of things. Tote bags, purses, a quilt for my niece, doll clothes, a Waldorf doll, various household projects. Just whatever hits my fancy or is needed at the time.

How much do you sew? How much wear and tear does the machine get?
I spend a couple hours a week sewing on average.

Do you like/love/hate your machine? Are you ambivalent? Passionate? Does she have a name?
I really like my machine, it's the perfect starter machine. Very simple,but surprisingly usable. It looks like a toy but it's a good little machine. It's nice and light and easy to use.

What features does your machine have that work well for you?
It doesn't have a lot of features but it has a fair number of stitches and is easy to thread.

Is there anything that drives you nuts about your machine?
The bobbin winder does not work very well. That may just be my particular machine though.

Do you have a great story to share about your machine (i.e., Found it under the Christmas tree? Dropped it on the kitchen floor? Sewed your fingernail to your zipper?, Got it from your Great Grandma?, etc.!)? We want to hear it!

I saw this machine on the clearance shelf of a variety store near our house and waited it out until it was $25 and then snatched it up. It was probably the best $25 I've ever spent.

Would you recommend the machine to others? Why?
I would for a beginner's machine or a child's machine. It's cute, it gets the job done. It even does fine with fairly heavy weight fabrics, it constantly surprises me with it's strength and all around usefulness.

What factors do you think are important to consider when looking for a new machine?
I don't know, this is the first machine I have bought. I guess getting a brand you can trust is a good thing and making sure it has the stitches you'll be needing a lot. Also that you understand how it works/ it isn't too complicated.

Do you have a dream machine?

I don't have one particular dream machine. I do occasionally drool over the machines that can quilt.

My husband thinks it's a bad idea to subsist on a steady diet of Red Rose tea, soda crackers and popsicles. Obviously it's been a while since he's had a truly soul crushing cold.

Oh lordy. I didn't see this but I read about it and my intial reaction was "Dude, noooo." Because we parents of special needs kiddos can be some touchy people. No offense me and everyone else, but come on..you know it's true. And it's not for nothing- our kiddos and other people with disabilities have been some of the most marginalized by society through out history and into recent history and heck, even present day.

My daughter and I were out and she was flapping her hands and shaking her head (this was quite a while back when she still did that to deal with the stress of being so close to strangers). Anyway a lady near us said loudly enough for me to hear (you know in that "I'm purposely speaking loudly enough for you to hear" tone that kids "like that" should be kept at home so that other people don't need to be subjected to their behaviour. My daughter was no flapping her hands in this woman's face, she was disturbing nothing and no one other than being fairly obviously autistic which was apparently a crime in this woman's eyes. What killed me about the whole thing? WE WERE AT THE GROCERY STORE. Is my family not supposed to eat so that this woman's delicate sensibilities are not disturbed by my daughter's existence? This is not an isolated incident. Some friends of mine and I (all with special needs kiddos) had a list of our favourite inappropriate comments people had made. Well..it started out like a list..but if we had actually written it would have been a fair sized book.

I wish people would start thinking of the words "retarded" and "retard" and "short bus" like they think of the n-word. If you wouldn't say something about a race don't say it about a disability. "Stop acting like such a Hispanic" "I felt like such an Asian when I forgot your phone number"

And Obama? Duuuude. I admit I would have laughed. If a friend said it. In private..not on LENO for pete's sake. I would have laughed and said "Man, you are sooo wrong" But you are the President. You just need to not say the words "Special Olympics" or "Short bus" outside the context of "We are so looking forward to attending the Special Olympics" and "That is an awfully short bus, do you think we'll all fit?" *




* (Note- as far as I know the words "short bus" never crossed his lips. It's just a phrase that's quite popular lately)

Our daughter wants to speak. She says she wants the doctors to "fix her voice". This is a bit heartbreaking as her voice will likely be of little use to her throughout life. (Though she can say "Mom" and "Mama" now and a fairly close approximation of "No" (Well ok, we know that she's saying "no" it's likely no one else would.) But that's two words in 13 years. She has, essentually, no useable hearing. Even if she weren't autistic it would be extremely unlikely that her voice would be much use to her communicationwise.

But how can you say that to your kid? And so we try and help her say the things she wants to say and we paciently listen to her "talk" when she is refusing to sign. Our son is probably the most pacient with all of this. It is a credit to him that she can say "Mama" and "Mom" He grew up around speech therapy and spent hours with her hand on his cheek and then pressing it to her's Annie Sullivan style trying to get her to say them. And it worked! We're trying to help her say Dad or something like it and still working on "No" because that seems like it would be the most useful thing for her to be able to say aloud.

We went to this expo a while back. The "Sustainable Living Fair". The state's relay service had a booth that my daughter excitedly dragged me to. Their motto? "Giving a voice to the Deaf" *sigh* The man at the booth averted his eyes and my daughter excitedly signed about how she wanted a new voice.

I feel like we've failed her somehow. I don't think we have but it's hard as a parent not to feel that way. We have always signed to her, we sign to each other as well. I don't think that growing up in our house you would get the idea that signing is somehow a less worthy form of communication. But our daughter doesn't just live in our house. And when she goes out into the world it is obvious that more people use their voice than their hands to talk.

The transition from the old new school to the new new school happened this week with shockingly little uproar. Our daughter took the change like a champ and has surprised everyone working with her with how well she is doing. Everyday we get pleased notes about how funny she is and how happy she seems in the new program etc. (She is still not a big fan of math. This seems to be a family trait.)

So this seems to have been the right program for her after all. We are as pleased as we could be with the teachers and other staff there, they really seem to know their stuff.

A couple of things we did that seemed to work well- first I kept her out of school for the week before she started at the new school. This gave us all a bit of a break from dealing with school and gave her more of a fresh start. Also distanced her a bit from the school she had been going to. Then when we went to visit the school we made sure that her aide (who moved with her from the old new school) was there. I also took pictures of the school and my daughter at the school and the various teachers she would be working with and made her a book about it.

Of course the thing that probably made the biggest difference was that the interpreter they are using for her and the aide who works with her in the afternoon are both from the old new school. Having them move with her was such a blessing that I could just cry. Next year when she goes to high school the aide she has now is planning to go with her, we are strongly advocating for this as it would make the transition to high school sooo much easier. (Plus there aren't a whole lot of ASL native speakers who also want to work with a child with autism. Her current aide is both.) Heck there aren't a whole lot of people who sign AND are willing to work with a kiddo with autism. In the old district they found someone who was willing to work with our daughter and taught her to sign (it wasn't as critical when she started as our daughter was in the Deaf program for the first few years she had that aide and by the time she left the Deaf program the aide could sign very well after spending years surrounded by Deaf people all day long.

Well, as sometimes happens as soon as I am all "You know what school district? Thanks but no thanks, I got this one" They're all "Oooooh you needed us to do xy and z? In a timely fasion? Why didn't you sa...oh you did? My bad" Well they was one person with the power needed to hold things up and I'm sure good reasons to do so. But issues have apparently been ironed out and (for the time being) my homeschooling my daughter is back off the table. I think that for the most part people did have my daughter's best interests at heart there was just a severe disagreement as to what was in her best interests at this time. I think things are going to work out for the best, I hope, I hope, I hope. That's all you can do sometimes. (Well ok hope, and kick and scream and fuss and call meetings and rewrite IEPs etc etc etc.)

All is not completely ideal in our new home. Well...it's fine in the home itself but school issues have once again reared their ugly head. Heaven forbid we have one portion of one school year without a major hubub. Anyway long story short I am about to do a perhaps foolhardy thing and offer up the suggestion that I could homeschool my daughter for the rest of the year and then transition her back into public school when she starts high school next year.

"When she starts high school next year"? I'm 34..how did this happen?

Moving on...I am alternating between thinking I am making a terrible mistake for all involved and fantasizing about days of homeschooling both kiddos in which we take long nature walks in the nearby woods and identify trees and junk. When the reality will probably be that a lot more days will spent with me going "Do your math..no you must finish your math..no math..no computer" (and then ultimately spending the evening hunting down a math program for the computer.)Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Hey people who know me in r.l. remember when I was all "I couldn't homeschool I don't have the temperment for it blah diddy blue blah" and then I was all "Well I guess I could homeschool my son but my daughter and I are too bullheaded and my husband would come home to us unconscious with our hands wrapped around each other's throats if I homeschooled her"? Hahahaha. Remind me to never make another declaritive statement. Ever.

We've settled in nicely to our new home and our new routine. A routine that is slightly screwed up this week thanks to record breaking low tempuratures. MAN it is cold. So very, very cold. It got down to 29 degrees below zero Farenheight the other night. With windchill I guess it was closer to negative 50. Even during the day it was in the negative 20s and teens. It was so cold that your nose hairs would freeze as soon as you walked outside. The kids have to stay in all the time because frostbite can set in in ten minutes in temps like that. And school has been canceled for the last three days due to the extreme cold.

In some ways it's kind of cozy. My husband worked from home one day because of snow and got off early today so we've had more family time this week espessially with my daughter being home almost all week. We've been spending a lot of time indoors this winter between the bad weather and now the cold. It's not such a bad thing. There's been more baking and knitting and kitchen science experiments going on than there might have been. A funny side effect of the cold and us being such homebodies is that the cats are very lovey both with each other and us. We've seen piles of cats that include all three girls, a previously unheard of event.

We closed the day before Thanksgiving and moved right in. Right from the closing we went and (after picking up the kids from my mom's) bought a bed for us and a scratch and dent sofa. We moved in that day, our stuff moved in that Friday. (Well most of our stuff, some of our stuff yet lives at my mom's house.)

The new house is perfect for us, plenty of space and in a nice quiet neighborhood close to everything we need.

After a month or so off of interferon I went back on it Sunday night, that was fun. Interferon (at least the form I take) beats the crap out of you espessially if you haven't been on it before or haven't been on it for a while. It was worthwhile to make sure that the pain I've been having wasn't a side effect of the meds though. (Something recomended by the last rheumatologist I saw.)

Our daughter started school last week. Today she was supposed to start riding the bus but the weather is no good today and school is canceled. She's been enjoying school, she's happy to be back in a Deaf program (as opposed to an autism based program) though I think they are a bit at loose ends as to how to handle her while they are still awaiting a one on one for her. The teacher seems excellent though, she is the seniormost special ed teacher in the district and has actually had another student who has been both on the autism spectrum and Deaf! It's rather exciting for us to be working with someone who has actually done this before.

We are supposed to close on the new house tomorow. We closed on the sale of our old house on Friday. The new house is only a couple blocks from my mom (stepmom 1.0)'s place and maybe a half mile from my sister's place. We're walking distance to our doctor, dentist, bank, a grocery store, hardware store, etc. The location couldn't be better espessially considering I do not drive. (Short attention span+ wonky depth perception.)

The children are most excited about having a basement. A standard feature around here but rare as hen's teeth where the kiddos have lived all their lives.

The school district here has a week off for Thanksgiving. I didn't get a chance to visit all the programs I wanted to visit in time to get our daughter into school before Thanksgiving break so she will have been out of school for three weeks by the time she goes back. Then in school for three weeks then out for a couple for Christmas. Our kids are definately ready for us to be in our own place and back to a somewhat normal routine. My husband and I are too.

It will be nice to be in our own place and nice to unpack stuff we haven't seen for several monthes. Living out of suitcases and boxes is getting old.

We're here. The trip was blessedly uneventful. My SIL was able to accompany us back through security which was a life saver when my kids went through the metal detector and my cat was refusing to come out of the carrier. Finally pried her out and she did just fine going through the metal detector. Had a bit of a rough flight into Denver espessially the landing during which the planed bounced a half dozen times. Everyone on the plane was pretty ashen after that aside from my son who was all "Weee!"

The kiddos were as good as gold all day long and Yin remained remarkably quiet in her carrier. To the point that the guy next to me on the last flight didn't realise until halfway through the flight that I had a cat with me.

It's so good to be back with my husband. It will be even better to get into our own place which should happen in a couple of weeks. I get to walk through it for the first time tomorow.

We are flying back on Monday. Unfortunately this is not because we have finished selling the house here but because I just can't do this anymore. It has been nearly six weeks since I have seen my husband face to face and that is much too long. I guess I would be awful as a military wife.

The only thing left for me to do here is sign the closing papers (and as of yet we're still waiting to hear when our closing date will be) so there is no reason to keep my family seperated any longer than it takes to find room on a plane for us and the remaining two cats. (Should be interesting to see them reunited with the cats my husband flew out with.) And that took until Monday which should give us enough time to tie up loose ends here. I hope.

It's so good just to know that this is coming to a close and had a day to look forward to when we will be getting back there. My kids are thrilled, they've been really down lately so it was so great to see them hyped up last night after I told them.

We're still here! It's been almost a month and a half since I've seen my husband in person. Which sucks. A lot. We were hoping this would take a couple of weeks. But we are lucky to be able to sell our house at all in this market so I shouldn't compain too much.

Our daughter's teacher kept asking when she would be leaving because they wanted to do a goodbye party. I repeatedly explained the whole "We have no idea" but somewhere along the way told her that the guy from place that is buying our house thought it would take at least three weeks (while reitterating that he was totally guessing.) So imagine my surprise when she called me the other day to invite me to my daughter's going away party this coming Wenesday. They've arranged for her aide (who has moved on to her new position, though still at the same school) to be there and everything. They are also trying to arrange one last field trip for Friday. This upsets me because my daughter's alltime favourite thing about school is that they go swimming every Friday and this field trip will mean missing swimming. I guess her last week will be this coming week then because I can't imagine the confusion that would ensue in having her continue to go to school after her "going-away" party. I don't feel like she's getting much out of school now that her aide is gone anyway.

This last week her teacher called me to tell me that she had a really bad stomach ache. She said that my daughter (who has a well documented high tollerance for pain) told her that her stomach hurt but the teacher "didn't know what to do" so sent her to gym class anyway. After a very short time the gym teacher sent her back by this point my daughter was literally doubled over in pain. (To save on suspence- my daughter apparently just had a bad case of gas) Who sends a child with a bad stomach ache off to run laps and whatnot in gym class? I told them they were lucky it wasn't her appendix or something causing the pain and asked in the office if I needed to write a note to the affect that if my daughter is having horrible stomach pain she should be excused from gym. Can you tell I'm not going to miss this class my daughter is in?

I will miss her aide though, I already miss her aide. They've moved her to her new position (inspite of the fact that I have yet to tell them when we are moving since WE DON'T KNOW YET.)

I'm very tired of living in limbo, of camping out in our own home with all of our stuff 1800 miles away but mostly I am tired of being so far from my husband. According to our religion when two people are married their souls are joined together and while I've always thought it was a lovely notion I don't know that I ever felt what a literal truth it was until now. But I can safely say now that having a large portion of your soul thousands of miles away from you is probably a bad idea and I hope that we are never seperated like this again.

My daughter's school sent home a permission slip on Thursday for her to attend a reward event today. They had no school Friday so I was unable to get any information about it until just now. It seemed so ill-conceived that I did not sign the permission slip. According to the slip there would be two adults present to supervise all of the kids in the school whose parents attended conferences last week at a YMCA a couple blocks from the school. This is a school that includes three special ed classes for children with Autism. As I expected (from the fact that nothing was mentioned) no accommodations had actually been made so that these kids could realistically attend. None of their teachers or aides will be going. My daughter's aide/interpreter will not be going. And yet our children were given permission slips to go. I imagine that the school knew they would be in trouble if they did not invite our kids but did not think, given the lack of supervision, that any of us would actually send our kids. To me this is worse than not including our kids at all.

(A note for those who are no doubt wondering why we just don't go with our children to this thing - due to teacher complaints last year about having parents at school too much in my daughter's class you now have to jump through hoops, as a parent, in order to be able to come to the school or school events. Hoops we did not have time to jump through given that this was given to us at the last minute.)

The relocube got to my mom*'s house where my husband is staying and they unloaded quite a bit of it last night. He's supposed to have more help unloading it today so hopefully it will get unloaded without any problems. He was telling me last night that our cat Cali was very happy to have her stuff back. Heh. It's nice not to have all of our worldly possessions in limbo anymore.

Selling the house goes slowly here, we have a buyer but still need to do things like the FHA assessment and paperwork and such. Actually for selling a house it is going screamingly fast but it feels slow because it necessitates us being here instead of back with my husband.

I got our daughter a Rubic's chain puzzle the other day. She was dinking around with it at the busstop and seemed to be having trouble sussing out what you were supposed to do with it but she liked it well enough. Then while we were riding home on the bus it suddenly seemed to click with her and she started manipulating it very quickly and got it solved in about 20 seconds. She held it up and the whole back of the bus was all 'Damn'. My husband revived an old family joke of ours and declared that must be her savant ability**. (It's not of course, her savant ability is Ski Ball.)

*stepmom 1.0)
**Only a small portion of people with autism have a "savant" ability, I believe it's something like 5% but that doesn't stop people from asking you what your child's savant ability is when they find out that your child is autistic. That's not to say that our children don't have special talents. Our daughter draws very well, is obviously quite good at puzzles, has a knack for computer games and such and is a really snappy dresser. Our son has an excellent memory for facts that he reads, can tell you anything you want to know about the planets, can built just about anything from legos and is very good with mechanical things.

Having trouble posting, sorry if this popped up as a blank entry initially.

The relocube is gone and my husband started his new job this morning. The relocube ended up being plenty big for everything we wanted to move though I kept some stuff behind that I wish I would have packed. (There were a couple days there where it looked like we were going to have to put our house on the market after all so I kept back things like the lawn mower.) But nothing critical. I will have to mail off a couple of boxes of stuff before we leave. (Things that missed getting packed and things like my son's homeschooling stuff that we couldn't pack off yet but don't feel like carrying onto the plane.)

I'm missing my husband terribly. I'm glad he took two of the cats to keep him company. We talk on the phone several times a day and i.m. but of course it's not the same as being there. In 12 years together we've never been apart for more than a night or two before and those were very rare occations. (And thinking back there was only one time when we were apart for two nights.) So being apart for weeks is going to be tough.

It's hard on the kids who want us to move NOW. On the upside I am not as worried that they will be upset about leaving.

I am seriously done with the whole packing thing. Not in the "At last, everything is packed!" way but in the "Screw it, we don't really need the rest of this stuff anyway" kind of way. I am so ready to stop living in this bizzarro world where the most valuable items we own are tape and sharpie markers. Both of which are coveted and longed after and hoarded.

The relocube is supposed to arrive any time now. I'm anxious to see how big it really is and how much of our stuff it will hold. Should be interesting.

My husband got the job and we are moving across country quite soon. Well, my husband is moving quite soon (the 25th) and our stuff is moving quite soon (sometime between the 23rd and 25th) the kids and I will be here for a bit tying up some loose ends. Hopefully not more than a couple of weeks though.

I just had an argument with my daughter about wasting food which culminated with her drinking a solo cup full of root beer mixed with orange soda and cherry limeade (and I suspect just a smidge of powdered mustard) because she wanted to prove me wrong. Ahhh, aren't logical consequences grand? I happily admitted that I was wrong, that clearly she was not playing with food she was simply preparing herself a refreshing beverage. (This was after I had alread poured out about 20 ounces of a similarly delightful mix and warned her against wasting the soda.) I have to say I was impressed with her commitment. I probably would have taken a swig or two and declared it delicious, she drained that cup.

School starts Wednesday. Here's hoping my son's school books get here before then. If not I guess we'll start off with field trips, nothing wrong with that.

The garage sale was not exactly a roaring sucess but we did get rid of a TON of stuff and one of our neighbors bought a bunch of stuff and then gave my son and I tickets to the local History Museum. So that was very cool. I met my goal which was to make enough money to pay for the ad and the kids both made some money and were quite pleased with themselves. The vast majority of the stuff we got rid of got given away at the end of the day but either way- it didn't come back into our house which was the whole idea.

My husband has an interview in my hometown Wednesday so..Wednesday looking to be an all around big day for our family. He'll be flying out Tuesday and back Wenesday.

I've been doing various projects around the house trying to get it up to snuff to sell it. This has been interesting with both kids home. Yesterday when I went to lay down after spending the morning painting my daughter decided to help and painted part of a wall that I hadn't intended to paint..but will be painting now I guess. I'll save the rest of the painting for when she is back in school.

Life dearly loves irony.  Well...not real irony, the Alanis Morsette kind.  Yesterday we were chatting with our son about what various places are famous for and he concluded with "And *name of our neighborhood* is known for having lots of crime."   We granted him that that was true but pointed out that it was getting much better and was FAR FAR better then when my husband was a kiddo.  (Much of his family lives/lived here and he spent a lot of time here growing up.)   And we pointed out that we had not been a victim of crime the entire time we have lived here.

This morning I got up and was surprised to see some of our car's paperwork in the mailbox.   Turns out someone broke into our car, ransacked it and stole anything that looked valuable.  (Thankfully that wasn't much they got maybe $40 worth of stuff for their troubles.)  Also thankfully they didn't break a window or steal the paperwork so they must have just been a petty thieve no doubt a product of the serious meth problem we have here (and from what I understand everyone has everywhere these days.)  (A helpful neighbor had found some of our paperwork strewn around this morning and stuck it in a mailbox.   Another neighbor was out and commiserated with us.  The same thing happened in our last neighborhood (in a "secure" parking garage with a coded gate no less) so it's not like this is something rare to our neighborhood.  (My husband was just saying yesterday, in comparing crime rates around town that every car his family ever owned had been broken into).  This was just a minor glitch in our day, not a big deal.  Just funny timing.