Boys and girls and girls and boys. Two totally different ends of the rainbow, in this house anyway. My oldest, Skye, the infamous TEENAGER, is a girl. My other two munchkins are boys and nowhere near the teenager years--although when it hits these two it will be teens at the same awful time and my gray hairs will multiply by the thousands. Tonight, my boys have completely ransacked my house. I left a house a somewhat in order this morning and as it stands apparently a weather anomaly in the form of tornadic activity swept through several rooms of my home while I was at work. As I stand amid the rubble, I have to remind myself between what is normal and what is not. When you have an atypical child, you tend to forget what is typical. When you work with atypical children you forget what is typical. As I survey the damage and make a list for my insurance agent (aka, the husband), I remind my self that this part at least IS normal.

Not to say that my daughter has never made a mess...ack, sorry I just about choked on my candy cane there from the irony of the words I just typed. Her room is an official disaster zone, I am awaiting my check from FEMA to recover the 12X12 space that used to be a bedroom. As I learned more about Ewan, autism, and listened to discussions about executive functioning I began to think Miss Skye had a frontal lobe that could not understand how to organize, plan, and implement the cleaning of her room. Now I understand this problem to be inherent to all chronologically challenged teenaged children. Room cleaning is more than those little brains can tackle but somehow her brain manages to play volleyball while texting all simultaneously.

No, when Skye was a young child there were other toys scattered to and fro and she was more interested in animals than toys. Luckily for her, her first few years were on a semi-farm replete with horses, cats, dogs, ducks, geese, and more. Now as stumble from my bed to the coffee maker in the morning it is a small plastic dinosaur that wedges itself between my toes and if not a dinosaur it's a Percy engine and I'm literally taking a trip on a train.

As I type I am listening to the boys chatter in their beds in the dark. Now Ewan wants to be a teacher (last month it was a doctor). I think he is entertaining the idea only because he can boss people around. Right now, he is chastising his younger brother for not getting his homework done. If you know Ewan, you know that his true calling is a drill sargent--everyone is humbled before his mighty Asperger is always right attitude and all are equal under his gaze--from principal to parent to check out guy at Walmart--we all hear about what we are doing wrong and how he knows what we should be doing and how to do it! Vaughn says that he wants to be a singing man / angry teacher / police officer who arrests teachers named Ewan. I'm not sure how many positions are there for this particular career choice, but if I know Vaughn, he'll find one.