A Mommy Blog About Raising Men, Not Boys.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

God's Favorite Creature

We spent a much needed Saturday out of the house at the Fernbank museum. You can never have enough dinosaurs in your life, from what I can tell, and despite the fact that we've been going forever, the giants in the atrium NEVER fail to inspire awe.
Giganotosaurus is about to go for the undercarriage of Agentinosaurus in the tableau behind and above Charlie. He's not concerned. this late Cretaceous ultimate battle is frozen in time, so we don't know who won and thus we don't have to expend any grief. Also, he's been seeing these dinosaurs since he was four, so he's ok with them.
Charlie is terribly shocked by Megatherium though. Ok probably not, I think I caught him mid yawn, so he's probably a bit bored.

One of the things we do is that we don't just tell Julia and Louis about the things we see, we tell Miles and Charlie. Their receptive language is very good. Sure they don't understand how many million or thousand years something lived, but we explain it like they do. We explain everything. Sometimes in simpler terms for them (and Julia) but hey sometimes NOT.
"What's this?" he asks Miles. "Dinosaur" Miles whispers out of the corner of his mouth (that's his thing lately. "VERY GOOD" he daddy hugs him.

It IS very good. He doesn't understand that it's a cast, or how many million years ago this thing lived but he knows this footprint belongs to a dinosaur. I find that amazing.
Charlie puts his hands in, and says "HANDS". Charlie isn't as advanced as Miles and I find this to be great. He's seen this thing many times, but this time he went right over and put his hands in.

It's little things with these guys, little things that I mark as victories in their development. All progress is good.

This would be the dinosaur that made the said track. Julia and Louis are acting how they would respond to a sudden appearance of a T-Rex. Personally I question their choice and would suggest RUNNING.
Our day started out terrible. Early AM Charlie was demanding to get up very early, screaming and carrying on, he attacked Louis' foot trying to get his attention to GET UP. Miles and Charlie had a nonstop early morning fight going on. Miles kept demanding Charlie give him his cereal spoon at breakfast, then Charlie would scream and shriek because he had no spoon. I had to keep going back in and getting Charlie's spoon. Every time I returned to the kitchen to try to make my own food, once again - spoon theft occurred.

Really it was spoon bullying as Charlie was being intimidated into giving up his spoon. Why? Autism. Only Autism knows.

Getting out of the house and into distraction and activity was the key. The fighting ceased and everyone was fine all day.
Don't let the girl navigate for your ship though.
The twins like trying to do various activities even though they don't necessarily do them right. Sometimes they DO actually get them right. We did fail at brain assembly - but hey that wasn't as easy as it looked.
The girl was a different child in the play area. Five days of school transformed her into someone I didn't recognize. She immediately RAN off, into whatever she wanted to do with no regard for whether or not we were with her. Running running running, jumping, over and over, do this do that do it all run run run. I never saw this in my life.
As the museum closed we decided to go take a walk through the rose garden. There is a really beautiful rose garden on the premises and I love roses. I suck at Gardening and weeding and shit. I don't do it. So I like to admire others work. As we walked in, I saw a sign that the roses had been moved to the Governors Mansion. Oh that's nice, so now they aren't for EVERYONE anymore. Perfect.

I still wasn't prepared for the gardens.
They have let their beautiful gardens grow over.
I can't even express how much this annoyed me. Why wouldn't you plant something else?
They could do a community or school initiative and do SOMETHING here in this space rather than let it look like this. It was so upsetting to me, I just loved this small simple garden.

Oh well, they are apparently trying to grow hipsters. That's an interesting experiment.