My plan was to get up and play with the kids while my husband made pancakes for breakfast, just as he does every single Saturday - just as he has done every single Saturday for nearly four years now. The one and only time he missed a Saturday was when our sweet little Milla was born. Actually, she was born on a Monday but we did not come home from the hospital until the following Saturday, due to a stay in the NICU for jaundice and low blood sugar. Even then, if I recall correctly, my husband made pancakes on Sunday of that weekend.
James made pancakes. Since beginning this quest to eat gluten and casein free, he has been experimenting with several different pancake recipes to find one that meets a few particular criteria:
- The pancakes must be fluffy.
- There can be no "gummy" texture to them - a result that sometimes occurs in GFCF recipes if xantham gum is not used in just the right proportion to the other ingredients.
- The taste needs to be as close to a traditional pancake as possible. Because GFCF pancake recipes require alternative flours to replace the regular all-purpose flour used in a regular pancake, there is sometimes a bit of an after-taste.
- The recipe can only call for ingredients I deem "allowable." For example, no artificial sweeteners or refined sugars may be used.
After breakfast, it was time for James and Reiss to go to the bank in "the Daddy truck." We have been working the last few days on saying, "I love you." I have been telling Reiss that I love him and then I ask him if he loves Mommy...I ask him if he loves Milla...what about Daddy? And Miss Udder (that's Miss Heather, his preschool teacher), do you love her? Yes, yes, yes, yes to all those.
My husband and I tell our kids all the time that we love them but Reiss has not said "I love you" without being prompted since he was probably around 18 months old. For those who are not aware, conveying emotions just isn't something a lot of autistic children do, let alone vocalize their feelings and emotions. Anyway, so that is one of the things we have been working on lately. So James and Reiss were getting ready to leave and I told Reiss, "I love you." and he started to say it back! My husband, not realizing that we were in the middle of a monumental moment, walked in and interrupted Reiss right after he had said, "I love...." So I don't know if he was going to say, "I love you" or "I love you, Mommy" or "I love you, too" or "I love you, Milla" or what....all I know is he said "I love...." and that was the best thing that could have happened - not just on Valentine's Day, but any day!
After the bank, James and Reiss came home and came inside to get Milla and take her outside to play. I had left a Valentine's Day card by the phone from the kids and me for James so he could see it when he and Reiss got back from the bank. He didn't notice it so I pointed it out. Then they all went outside and played long enough for me to get some housework done. I'm not going to say that I enjoy housework but I do enjoy the feeling of accomplishment I get after I've done something that has been on my "to do" list for quite some time or if I clean something that has been staring me in the face for several days begging to be wiped down with a cloth or scrubbed to a shine.
For lunch, we did the usual Saturday thing: Chinese from a hole-in-the-wall place not too far away. We have been getting lunch from this same Chinese place for I don't know how long...nine, maybe ten years? What can I say, we are creatures of habit. Can you tell?
After lunch we took the kids to Meijer to get Grandma a Valentine's Day gift. As with all birthdays, holidays, and heck, sometimes just because it's Tuesday (or Thursday or whatever), Marie had gone overboard buying gifts for us and for the kids. I felt badly that we had not gotten her anything and Reiss and Milla hadn't seen her in awhile, anyway, so off to Meijer we went and purchased a pet nail trimmer. I'm sure anyone reading this has probably seen what I'm talking about here since this is one of those "As seen on TV" kinds of products. The trimmer itself is like a Dremel sanding wheel inside a protective case. You put the dog (or cat or whatever animal of your choosing) paw up to the wheel and as it spins, it literally sands the nail away.
Then it was over the railroad tracks and through the housing addition to grandmother's house we went. The kids played with toys. My mother-in-law, Marie, wandered around looking for and bringing out more and more toys the longer we stayed. My husband fixed something on her computer and on her TV and on her TV remote control. And I sat wondering - as I often do when we are there - why Marie has so many of this item or that item. Yesterday, it was me wondering why she had two TV's in her kitchen while another sat just a few feet away in the living room. Yes, they were all turned on. And as is usually the case, when I asked, the answer was, "because that one (pointing to the one most recently purchased) was cheap."
My mother-in-law is a hoarder. No, not a hoarder like you see on Oprah or Dr. Phil where the house is so full that you have to kick a path to get through. No, her hoarding has (thank the Lord above!) not gotten that bad yet. At this point, she just hoards things to the point where one of anything is never enough. I think she has felt an extreme emptiness since my father-in-law passed away in 2001, but I'm not a shrink. God love her! It's so sad to watch and I just want to hug her and tell her that she doesn't need all these things...that she has family to love her and that things will never love her back....but we have never had that touchy, feely loving mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship so all I can do is sit by and pray that someday - hopefully some time before she gets buried alive in a too tall pile of "because-it-was-cheap at Goodwill" items - she finds some peace.
After Grandma's house, we came home for naps for the entire family. I got up and for dinner, I made flank steak with caramelized onions and mushrooms, rice pasta shells and "butter," and salad. Later on, I tried a recipe for chocolate cake with chocolate sauce. It was so good and the chocolate sauce recipe, which made way too much (oh darn!), tastes almost identical to Hershey's syrup. We ate dinner and cake and then I cleaned up the kitchen. We played and had a dance party, which is just our lingo for turning on one of the music channels on cable on the tv and dancing around with the kids until they are exhausted and we are all ready to collapse.
Nothing the rest of the day could possibly top the "I love..." that we heard from Reiss in the morning and despite the fact that we did have a few tantrums from both kids yesterday, it really was a perfect day.
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