A Mommy Story

It felt good to be mostly unplugged this weekend. I still checked my e-mail and Twitter, but didn’t write anything until last night, and didn’t read many blogs. Of course, I checked my Bloglines today and nearly choked when I saw the number of new posts. Don’t you people ever take a break?

Yesterday was spent cooking out at the house I grew up in. The usual gang of relatives were there, and everyone enjoyed seeing Cordy and Mira. Cordy did pretty well, with only a few minor meltdowns. The cause of those meltdowns was immediately traced back to Aunt Dot, of course.

Long time readers know Aunt Dot well. She’s the mistress of bad gifts, and taunter (tauntress? is that a word?) of small children. And when I say bad gifts, I mean bad gifts. My birthday this year? I got a pack of generic post-it notes. Opened. My mother’s birthday gift? The other half of the pack of post-it notes. She was also the giver of the candy pooping cow.

Her Labor Day antics included bringing Cordy a box of Teddy Grahams (which we can’t be sure are cinnamon-free, so she can’t eat them) and a package of Goldfish. When it was announced that we’d all be eating lunch in about ten minutes, Aunt Dot chose that time to bring out the snacks and give them to Cordy.

Cordy came up to me, holding her box of Teddy Grahams, asking, “Eat bears now? Open da box? Bears pweese?” I scanned the ingredients, cursing the FDA for allowing companies to list “natural and artificial flavoring” as ingredients instead of everything they actually used. I had to tell her no, then watch as she ran into the other room and threw herself on the floor in frustration.

The other incident was with Aunt Dot’s Polaroid camera. It makes a loud noise as it spits out the picture. One of Cordy’s triggers is mechanical noises, so it immediately set her off after the first picture was taken. We told Aunt Dot that Cordy was bothered by the noise of her camera, and asked her not to use it around Cordy. But she thought it was funny to torture Cordy, going so far as to quickly put the camera up to Cordy’s face as she walked past and take an extreme closeup. Cordy screeched and ran to me, clearly upset by the noise, while Aunt Dot laughed.

Other than Aunt Dot, it was a lovely day. Cordy played ring toss, she kicked her soccer ball all over the yard, and she got to dig in the dirt in a flower pot, “making a plant” as she called it.

She was pretty good with that soccer ball. The next Mia Hamm, perhaps?

(At this point, I would show you a great video of Cordy kicking the ball, including her amusing run in with a tree. But I can’t work this video camera – it’s a DVD disc camcorder, without a USB connection port, and I don’t know how to convert DVD to a suitable web format. I thought advances in technology are supposed to make things easier?)

Oh, and tomorrow is Cordy’s big evaluation. I’m nervous, hoping that Cordy will show them her full self. I do hope they see the meltdowns, but I also want them to see her sweet, smart side as well. A part of me worries she’ll act perfectly normal and average and tell me she is fine.

Edited to add: Finally found a way to convert the DVD. It’s not a long-term solution, but it’ll work for now. Here’s Cordy versus the tree in a one-on-one soccer match-up.