#kidlet

Fluittle ✦ Alternatively, Fluikid; A little/syskid who's a mix, or fluctuates, between being a "traditional"/stereotypical little and a "nontraditional" little. What this means is up to the little.

When Kidlet was about 2 and change, Mom and I decided, completely spur of the moment, to take him on a trip to Seattle. She had a week off from work and I wasn’t working yet, so she decreed we were heading out of town. We packed a few things, threw his supplies in the car, and off we went.

We didn’t realize until we got to Seattle that it was Labor Day weekend. There was a giant music fesitval in town, not a single hotel to had anywhere, and, of course, we hadn’t thought of something as trivial as RESERVATIONS. Now, you might think that we would concentrate on finding a hotel room first, right? Oh, no. Of course not. We went to the planetarium and we wandered around the music festival (where Mom got quite the education in modern music and dress) and we had lunch. Somewhere around 4ish we decided it might be a decent idea to be sure we had a place to sleep for the night.

Mom’s usual hotel was booked. So we tried her second-favorite place. Booked. Then another one down the street. Booked. By now, we’re starting to realize we MAY have a made a mistake, here. But we’re too stubborn to quit (and she had me to get in and out of the car anyway) so we went through pretty much every halfway affordable hotel in downtown Seattle. Somewhere around 9pm, Mom remembered a pretty nice place she and an ex-boyfriend had stayed at in a nearby suburb. So off we went. And they had a room! They actually had a room with a lil fridge and a king size bed (remember that, this is gonna be important) and they even had an Arby’s down the street, which was a good thing, because we were all starving by this point.

It didn’t occur to us to DRIVE to Arby’s - oh, no, we took the 2-year-old by the hand and hustled his ass down the sidewalk and we booked it. We made it to the restaurant five minutes before they closed, got our food to go, and headed back to the hotel. No problem, everything’s set for a peaceful night and a nice trip to the zoo tomorrow, right?

“Danny DeVito??? Is he in the Backstreet Boys??”

And she has delivered some real zingers in the past...like when she thought Dylan and Cole Sprouse were my classmates upon seeing their college graduation post...

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I wanted to talk about M’s day, because he was so happy.

He was out of school today because of teacher training, so we had a nice day of hanging out and relaxing (M even had friends over!).

But what stands out for me is that he went downstairs when Major Dorkberg came home, and they just had a conversation, laughing and joking and basically talking about nothing. And when they came back upstairs (for M to finish folding clothes, which, !!!), I heard him tell Major Dorkberg: “I feel really calm today.”

And I’m really proud of Major Dorkberg, too, because he didn’t praise that like *that* was a good thing, he said instead: “I can tell. Are you happy?”

And when M said yes, Major Dorkberg told him he was doing a really good job with the clothes, and they talked about other things, just really smoothly, that was it.

Like--I cannot tell you what a success that is for M, and honestly for us. He has a really hard time, I think, just recognizing how he feels, and a harder time expressing that in words. But today, M felt calm, and he wanted to tell us.

I also noticed that he was humming a lot today, I’m not sure if that was related to his feelings of calmness at all. We’ve been trying to see what happens if we don’t ask him to stop (we noticed he does it more in high stress situations, or if he’s worried about something). Today I just asked him, “do you notice that you’re humming?”

And he said he did notice and that he just wanted to, so I said okay, and didn’t draw any other attention to it. We’ll keep trying this approach to see if it makes a difference.

He woke up a giant fire-breathing snail that laid waste to his fortress, rendering his dwarves too depressed to eat, work, or drink, so he had to abandon his settlement and start all over again.