Kites and Kiddie Pools and Pals, O My!

My, what a lovely weekend we had.

Seriously.

Sunshine in abundance on Saturday, a kite festival at which James not only held the kite string (well, for a second or two, anyway), but also ate and drank and ran around and PLAYED CATCH WITH US (<--- See those caps? They mean possible milestone alert!) with an inflatable beachball and giggled and scampered and generally had a blast. Wheee!

And then Sunday, we had chillin' in the new kiddie pool, and despite the fact that if you so much as touch his feet to bathwater, he shrieks like you're dipping him in lava, he got in that pool voluntarily and stomped and sloshed and played and didn't even make a peep when his sister 'mistakenly' (this is the Devil, after all) got him in the face with a full cup of water. In point of fact, after a long pause after which we expected to hear air-raid siren-quality howling, he instead simply licked the water drips off his nose, grinned, and went about his splashy business. Much fun had by all!

Which is good, because this scheduling evals and therapists in between earaches (his), pediatricians (theirs), and dentists (ours) grows tedious already. And of course, when not blathering on nonsensically to one blog or another, I have also become one of THOSE people... You know the ones: I sit at the computer, scouring Google (and now Bing) for autism links, alternately finding myself all superior and dismissive and HAH!-I-already-knew-so-much-more-about-this-than-you,-and-I-don't-even HAVE-an-autism-website,-what's-wrong-with-you?? and then also overwhelmed and confused and panicked and worried about not happening to find the exact right combo of therapies for my non-verbal but otherwise quite bright and engaged child and dooming him to an adulthood of sub-par group home life because I'm old and stoopid and feeling a tad incoherent myself these days and I can't Google properly or even stop a run-on sentence and, oh hey! Squirrel!

Yeah.

One of them.

So the good news is, I have the coolest, most knowledgeable, supportive, wonderful group of friends EVER. Some are fellow moms, some have special needs kids, some are professionals in the field, some are just smart and concerned and funny, and all of them are keeping me - hey, I almost said "sane"! HAH! I'm such a kidder, I slay myself - focused and able to get up every day psyched to have another day with my beautiful Jamesy and to handle whatever that entails.

So, as they say in my beloved Wayne's World, I say to you all:
I love you, man!

I have no idea what this road will look like when I look back on it in 20 years, but I damn sure know who will have been on it with me. Thank you.