Short and Stocky

Dan had a business proposition.

"Grace! I have an idea!" Such enthusiasm, such enthusiasm. He rarely gets that excited about something that's not a perfectly-rare, disgustingly-bloody restaurant steak.

"OK, you know how you don't fit into any clothes? What if, if you had more money and more people skills, you started your own clothing store? You could call it Short And Stocky. You could even get Chevy to market the Short and Stocky Built-Like-A-Truck line!"

I didn't speak to him for at least three days.

But he does have a point (kinda). I really am built like a truck. I have wide shoulders, wide thighs, wide hips, wide calves, and wide feet. I was created in the mold of my Italian peasant ancestors, who were all short and stocky and wide and did hard work in the fields all day long. I am not fat, I am just thick and very dense (physically, just so we are completely clear on the implications of that word). I am short, my legs are short and my arms are short. In short (how funny I am!), I live in clothing hell.

In order for me to not look like I am totally drowning in my clothing, I need to shop in the petite section. The pants kinda fit me, the shirts kinda fit me, and I can sometimes get away with not looking like a hobo. But I have two major beefs with the petite consumer assumptions that the overlords of the petite clothing sweatshops dictate upon us all from up high. When I shop for petite clothing, I am expected to fall into one of two types of petite consumers.

First, there's the petite grandma section. Since the population is getting taller as the years go by, and since older people generally shrink a few inches when they start getting up there, designers and Yemeni production line employees both assume that if you're five feet tall, you must be over the age of fifty. Department stores are especially guilty of this particular urban myth. Poor little me has spent many hours desperately scouring stores for basic long-sleeved tees that are not three inches too long at the bottom and not two inches too long at the wrists, and all I can see are racks upon racks upon racks of sweatshirts that say things like "I Love My Grandkids" and "Proud Grandma" and "No One Spoils Kids Like A Grandma" and "My Grandkids Think I'm Awesome". It's almost like the store is trying to tell me something about the years I have left on this earth.

And it's no better when I try to find some basic jeans. We've all heard of mom jeans, but there are grandma jeans out there that nobody ever talks about because even grandmas are too ashamed to admit that they voluntarily purchased grandma jeans. While mom jeans can be baggy, have weird washes, and are otherwise not fashion-forward, grandma jeans push the envelope even further, sporting elastic waistbands and created out of material that's not actually jean but comfort pseudo-jean. And they actually want my money for this stuff. Dude, I am not going to pay you thirty dollars of my own money to be the laughingstock of my twenty-something cohort. Besides, that's like four or five meals at McDonald's.

And then there's the petite hott skinny section, commonly found at short-and-stocky-unfriendly stores like Banana Republic and Loft. I can seriously walk into a store and tell you how I'm going to fail to fit into their clothing by the type of music that's playing. Is it breathy hott girl music with twangy guitars and a message? My stomach has way too much bulge for those shirts, thank you very much. Because if you're not a petite grandma, you must be a petite fashion-forward Asian with a metabolism exponentially greater than mine or a petite hott skinny babe who lives on weight-loss shakes, salad, and Chobani. And because petite hott skinny people are perfectly proportionate and beautiful, just a scad shorter than the rest of us humans, they fit beautifully into thirty-inch inseam Addie or Madison or Jackson pants or whatever trendy naming scheme Banana Republic is currently marketing to its hott consumer base. But I confess: I don't fit into the petite hott skinny clothes, but I keep trying on those stupid Madison trousers in the hope that I have magically become hott and skinny in the previous six weeks.

But let's be real. I'm not a grandma. I have too much pride to wear grandma jeans. Loft Sunwashed tees have a neckline that hits around my ankles and shrink in three dryer cycles. Madison trousers threaten to rip at the thigh every time I try them on.

So what to do?

Well, there's always a tailor. That's what I usually end up doing with my jeans. I spend a couple months looking for a style that doesn't fall off my non-existent waist to rest upon my more-existent hips and then slog half a mile down Easton Avenue to the drycleaners. Then I try to communicate my specifications to the Chinese lady who owns the place and hope that she doesn't try to chat me up in Mandarin because my last name is Huang. Twelve bucks a pop for making my normal petite jeans Grace petite jeans rankles me, but at least it's a fix.

There's always places like Ross and TJMaxx. Every once in a while, malformed clothing finds its way into a TJMaxx and somehow happens to fit me. I once found some nice Donna Karan jeans at Ross that fit me perfectly. Once I wore them to pieces, I made a point to go over to the Donna Karan outlet store and ask where I could find those jeans.

"Oh," apologized the hott skinny petite cashier. "Sometimes our clothing rejects end up in close-out stores. You probably bought a pair of jeans that was made incorrectly."

Crud.

There's always three-quarter length shirts. These shirts are not too long on my arms, but then again, the sleeve length makes my arms look even shorter than they already are. But at least it's something.

And there's always other options. Like that time my mom gave me some hand-me-downs from a friend of hers. There was a plain grey t-shirt in the mix that fit me perfectly. I needed more. I asked my mom if she had been told the size of the shirt, since the tag was no longer attached. And once again my hopes and dreams of becoming fashionable were dashed to the ground: the shirt had originally belonged to my mom's friend's eleven-year-old son.

Crud.

So the search continues to this very day. At least I only have twenty-two more years until I could probably get away with faking my procreative abilities with "I Love My Grandma" cozy sweatshirts.

Brain power!

Most of the little guy's bad behavior happens because he either can't communicate something or he doesn't understand something. He only has about thirty pecs in his book that he knows and can effectively use for communication. Since he's a creature of rigid routines and very specific likes and dislikes, this works pretty well for him most of the time. But sometimes, not too often, LG still can't really talk.

But he is, I think, quite a bit smarter than we often give him credit for.

He has this colored pom-pom sorting activity that he does (it's like... beginning beginning math concepts). I have a container with a few compartments and pom-poms for each compartment. He enjoys it a lot, although I think the shine is starting to wear off. He is nine, after all. When I created this activity, I put the pom-poms in a plastic bag and put the plastic bag in another small container. Thus, to complete the activity, LG has to take the pom-poms out of the bag, put them into the small container, and then sort. It recently occurred to me that the bag was completely unnecessary and I had no idea why I had originally put the pom-poms in the bag in the first place, so I threw the bag out and just filled the smaller container. Simple.

LG did the task just fine and stimmed to high heaven over all the colored pom-poms in all the right compartments looking all orderly and stuff. Then he started to clean up. Disaster struck.

He quite obviously wanted to communicate something, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the heck he needed. First he started pointing over to the shelves near his desk. There about about 378 things on the shelf, so I had no clue. Then he started rifling through the drawers where we keep his academic materials. He was obviously getting frustrated. He was getting weepy and, uh, pinchy. I gave him his pecs book and implored him to tell me what he wanted, but he wanted something that wasn't in the book. LG gave me a look of utter disgust and hit me with the pecs book. OK then.

"LG, I don't know what you want," I told him with as much sympathy as my (literally) bruised ego could muster.

"DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH!"

"Yeah, I know. I know you want something."

"Dee dee dee dee dee DAH."

"What could it be?" I really was thinking hard. LG was not amused. He started saying DAH in the tone that sounded like a five-alarm fire engine siren. A full-on meltdown was fast approaching.

"OK, it's not in your book, that's for sure," I said with more than a little desperation. "Let's do this. Show me what you want."

That LG understood. He got up and left his area. I followed.

He walked on over to the craft supply closet and pointed. Since the closet was closed, I needed a little more information. I opened the doors and started pointing.

"Do you want this?"

"DEE DEE DEE!"

OK, it wasn't the rubber bands.

"Do you want this?"

"DAAAAAAAH!"

And it wasn't the stapler. Thank heavens.

"What about this?"

Bingo. He wanted the bag of pencil toppers.

That definitely wasn't in his pecs book. Mystery solved. But then again... why the heck did he want a bag full of pencil toppers?

I was quite curious at that point. Checking to see that no disapproving eyes were watching me voluntarily gifting LG a prohibited bag of costly pencil toppers, I handed it over and settled back to watch the magic happen.

LG trotted on back to his area. He took a task off his shelves, one that used pencils to try to pound in the concept of one-to-one correspondence (he's not really getting it). He dumped the bag of pencil toppers into the pencil task. Then he happily started shoving his colored pom-poms into the now-empty pencil topper bag.

I laughed for about ten minutes straight. Never try to mess with the rigidity and sameness that is an autistic child's mind.

But think about all the steps that LG's brain needed to go through to get the bag to satisfy his OCD.

1. I need to put the pom-poms away.
2. There is no bag for the pom-poms.
3. I need a bag for the pom-poms.
4. Let me look for it on the shelves.
5. Let me look for a picture of it in my pecs book.
6. Let me point at the shelves, maybe she'll understand.
7. Let me start hitting and kicking, maybe she'll understand.
8. Wait! I know! I've seen a bag in the craft closet before.
9. I could get a bag from the closet.
10. I could dump the contents out of the bag.
11. I could use the bag to put my pom-poms away.
12. All will be right with the world!

He was able to plan ahead several steps to get what he wanted. It's a non-issue for any other fourth-grader, and barely worth mentioning for even a toddler, but it took a lot of (successful) cognitive gymnastics for LG.

So I think he's smart. And awesome. And totally going to be able to communicate very well some day down the road, if he's given the right tools.

Merry Not-Christmas

I have a love/hate relationship with the holidays. Love because I want to love the holidays. Hate because I usually hate the holidays.

My issues with the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period began in childhood (sorry, Mom and Dad, you failed on this one!). My first problem was all me. Basically, I was an ADD wreck during the holidays. Happy Holidays meant that:

1. There was no schoolwork to do.
2. Most electronics were vetoed in the name of "family togetherness".
3. I was forced to play group games in the name of "family togetherness".
4. I was forced to go out in the sunlight and the snow and the stupid nature so "Mom can get some stuff ready".
5. We didn't go out anywhere or do anything because we were engaging in lots of "family togetherness".
6. The radio was playing horrifyingly bad Christina Aguilera covers of traditional Christmas carols.
7. There was no Christmas until Christmas.

It was the last one that really rankled me. Being the fairly orthodox Catholics that we are (you know it's bad when all your coworkers at Burger King lovingly nicknamed you "Christian"), my mom refused to do anything Christmas until it was actually Christmas. And Christmas, according to the Catholic liturgical calendar, began at the vigil mass on Christmas Eve and ended twelve days later. There was no celebrating before Christmas because you know, Advent, and the Incarnation had not yet occurred, and we were all still preparing the way for the Lord and all. So this basically meant that, prior to 5 PM on December 24th:

1. There were no Christmas lights.
2. There was no Christmas tree.
3. There were no Christmas decorations.
4. There was no Christmas music.
5. There were no Christmas cookies.
6. There was no fun allowed. At all.

So after all this horrible torture inflicted upon me at a tender age, I learned to dread Christmas. Everybody else got to celebrate all month long and we couldn't. Everybody else forgot about Christmas on December 26th. On December 26th we still had ten more days to go of family togetherness.

Eventually, however, our Christmas orthodoxy began to change.

The catalyst was the Christmas tree. Since Christmas was taboo until it was actually Christmas, we got our tree on Christmas Eve. This posed a number of problems. First of all, everybody else had already purchased their trees, and the tree-sellers, amateur economists that they were, assumed that the tree-buying season had passed and had pretty much all closed up shop for the season. Perhaps, I thought, by not selling Christmas trees on Christmas Eve, they were instead choosing to engage in good ol' family togetherness with their own Christmas trees! At any rate, buying a tree on Christmas eve was like finding one particular needle on a fir tree. My dad would literally drive around all morning searching for the lone remaining tree-merchant in the tri-county area. He was usually successful, but only after a full tank of gas had been expended. And lo! When a Christmas tree was finally located, we would often get a deal! Like a huge Christmas tree for ten dollars! What a savings!

So we'd cart the tree home and count down the minutes until 5 PM, when Christmas began. All of us would engage in ritual family togetherness and decorate the tree together in solidarity. Sometimes we'd even eat Christmas cookies! Sometimes there'd even be snow falling outside!

But then the true folly of our rigid Christmas observations began to emerge.

It took many years for this realization to dawn upon my parents. If you bought a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, after everybody else had already purchased a Christmas tree, that meant that our Christmas tree had been passed over by all other purchases for some mysterious reason. Perhaps... the tree-merchant was trying to... get rid of the Christmas tree! Could it be... those last few trees were... flawed?

So we got our Christmas tree.

We put up our Christmas tree.

We decorated our Christmas tree.

Our Christmas tree fell over, shattering all of our ornaments.

The next year, we got our Christmas tree.

We put up our Christmas tree.

We decorated our Christmas tree with new ornaments.

Our Christmas tree fell over, shattering all of our (new) ornaments.

The next year, we were wiser.

We got our Christmas tree, checking it carefully before purchasing.

We put up our Christmas tree.

We decorated our Christmas tree with new ornaments.

Our Christmas tree fell over, shattering all of our ornaments, again.

The next year, we were even wiser. Finally. It just took three deformed Christmas trees. We rejected Catholicism for a week and bought a Christmas tree a week before Christmas Eve. We kept it in the garage, where its unholy Christmas would not invade our home before it was right and proper to do so. It also cost more Christmas tree money to be bad Catholics, but we made up the money in all the ornaments that we saved from destruction. We think that our Christmas trees all had crooked trunks and that's why they were all rejected by other buying and fell over once they were carefully decorated by all of us, but it could also be that the trees just had some gross motor issues. That's what I think, anyway.

So I grew up and got married. We got an apartment. And for our first Christmas together, we put up our tree on Thanksgiving weekend. We were all merry and bright by December 1st.

God did not approve. Our very first Christmas tree collapsed on our rug a few hours after we had flaunted the true celebration of the Virgin Birth. We had to contend with evil pine needles everywhere.

And this year, we bought an artificial tree. We'll let you know how that goes.

How I Discovered I Did Not Have Rheumatoid Arthritis

Maybe I had fibromyalgia. Or maybe it was rheumatoid arthritis. Same achy joints deal.

It was May of my sophomore year in college, and the bottom knuckle on my right-hand ring finger had been aching all day long. And before anyone (correctly) crowns me Miss Overly Sensitive, my painful knuckle was only the latest in a six-month string of seemingly-arthritic joints. It was almost funny, if it hadn't been so much of a pain in the left bicep. I would wake up every morning, come down the stairs, and make my mom guess where I hurt now.

"So, guess what joint it is today, Mom?"

My long-suffering mother sighed.

"Your left toe?"

"Nope, that was last week," I cheerily chirped. "It's my left pinky today."

Mom rolled her eyes. Doubtless she had crowned me Miss Overly Sensitive years ago.

However, ever conscious of my extremely low pain threshold, I wanted to give my syndrome a name, so I could chalk up my aching calf muscles to something a little more exciting than Wimpy Disease. MedlinePlus told me that I could have fibromyalgia. Or rheumatoid arthritis. I was fine with either one, as long as it was a medically-recognized condition.

But while it was fun to goof off on MedlinePlus and pretend I wasn't such a fraidy cat, secretly I was a little more worried. What if it was cancer? Could I have a tumor? Could you even get a tumor in your palm?

So I made an appointment to go get my (probably psychosomatic) aches checked out by our notoriously flaky doctor and her notoriously incompetent office staff. You knew my right knee had to be killing me when I willingly consented to play phone tag for three days straight.

I got checked out. After a record four days of phone tag, I was told to go get blood work. Luckily, I'm a huge fan of bloodwork, so this was exciting. I got to see several vials of my blood sucked out of my body at 7 AM on a Thursday morning! What could even beat that? Oh yeah, that one time when I had a root canal done and they put it all on closed-circuit TV and I got to watch the entire procedure. That was even more awesome!

(For the record, I'm actually not kidding about the awesomeness of the root canal. I really did find that enthralling. Oh, and you thought my irrational love of zip codes was off the wall, did you?)

I got my bloodwork done. I treated myself to a McDonald's breakfast sandwich afterwords. I instantly regretted my choice of an English muffin. Way too bland. Five more bucks down the drain.

I waited anxiously for the neuroblastoma diagnosis.

Thankfully, the tests came back negative for the neuroblastoma. Phew. However, I was told (by the incompetent office staff, two days after we had begun our most recent game of phone tag) that the test had come back positive for Lyme Disease.

Lyme Disease is the name for the various problems you start developing upon being bitten by a deer tick. Lyme is a famously elusive syndrome, with no medical consensus on how it develops, why it develops, what is the total symptom range, and if there's really any way to tell if it's ever cured or just goes into remission (like cancer! Cancer can go into remission, too!). Nobody knows much about it, but I've heard stories from people shrugging it off to stories of people permanently disabled by the disease.

We lived in the woods, and we lived in Pennsylvania, so the deer ticks just fell from the sky during the summer. Kind of like rain but with insects and possible pain, suffering, and death. I remember I did get a tick lodged in my chest once, probably when I was about six years old. Lacking tweezers, my mom opted to remove the tick her way. WHICH WAS DIGGING IT OUT OF MY BODY WITH A VERY SHARP PIN. WITHOUT ANESTHESIA. WHAT THE HECK, MOM. HOW COULD YOU.

But I was told that my Lyme Disease had been caused by a much more recent tick bite, probably within the past year. My skin was pretty pasty as it was with all the Starcraft and lack of sun and all, so I really had no clue how a tick latched on, but oh well. I was still possibly doomed.

On the plus side, although there was still ample time for my illness to develop into a tumor and/or death, at least I just had aches and pains. When I was eleven, my sister was bitten by a tick and also developed Lyme Disease. She didn't have many aches and pains, but she did develop Bell's Palsy, where one side of her face was pretty much paralyzed for two months. Thankfully, my craniofacial orifices seemed to be intact.

I started a course of meds that was supposed to cure (Or put into remission. Like cancer!) my Lyme Disease. Since my doctor is notoriously flaky, the course of meds did not cure my Lyme, because the meds she flakily prescribed were the wrong meds. I got my aching behind over to a different doctor, who gave me the correct drugs, and the Lyme started clearing up. I mean, my aching knees periodically collapsed while I was walking up the stairs, but at least my pinky didn't hurt. That's an improvement, right?

Currently, nobody knows if I have Lyme Disease or not, since nobody actually knows if Lyme Disease ever really goes away. I still get random aches, but now I can identify the source of the pain, so it's probably not Lyme Disease. It's probably the gallon of milk I dropped on my toe last night.

No big deal.

Frodo And Sam Are Homeless

When I was growing up, my dad read many books aloud to his multiplying progeny. Some of the books, while absolutely enthralling, were not the best known books of all time (I'm looking at you, Brighty of the Grand Canyon). I occasionally submitted my own requests, like Anna and the King of Siam, which were unceremoniously shot down. Our favorite books by far, enjoyed by kids and Dad alike, were The Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings series.

It took us over a year to read through all four books, and they made a lasting impression upon all of us. We finished the series about ten years before the movies came out, so you can only imagine our excitement at watching the whole adventure unfold onscreen. I bought myself all four books at a library book sale and read and reread the series over the years.

Most memorable, however, were the frequent Frodo and Sam sightings In The Wild.

It started with our rides. For several years, after church, we would go out for breakfast at our favorite diner, and after breakfast, we would take a ride. We'd go out in the country (the country being a mile down our street) and drive around, listen to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, and look at the fields and trees and empty spaces of Pennsylvania. In general, we all loved to take rides, except when my dad insisted on taking rides on Christmas Day and Easter. Seriously.

We took one particular route every few weeks that passed over a few little streams and next to quite a few "haunted houses," which were crumbling circa-1850 farmhouses in the middle of nowhere. Near the end of the drive, there was a large grassy field that looked like it hadn't been touched by humankind since, well, ever.

When we came near the field, my dad would slow down the car to a crawl. He'd roll down the windows and point.

"Look, kids! Do you see that?"

"What is it, Dad?" We knew what was coming, but it was fun to pretend.

"I see something in the field. Kind of small, brown hair... oh wait! It's Frodo and Sam sneaking across the field!"

"Wow, there they are!" said First Sister.

"I guess they're coming from Mordor," said Second Sister.

"Guys, it's just a field. We've been through this before," muttered Second Brother. Geez, what a spoilsport.

And so it went for several years. We'd drive past the field and have Frodo and Sam sightings on Sundays. Occasionally, My dad would also spot Fred the Buffalo, but we don't talk about that.

Then the diner closed. We added a few more kids and a lot more family expenses. The rides stopped for a few years.

One day, in a magnanimous mood, my dad decided to take us out for breakfast at a new place. After breakfast, we went on our ride. Past the haunted houses, past the gun club, past the streams and the hairpin turns we went, bouncing up and down in the back two rows of our fifteen-passenger van (a van that, years later, Dan fondly nicknamed The Death Van). Then we got to the field.

We all gasped in horror.

There, smack in the middle of the Shire, right where Frodo and Sam had lived, there were houses. Lots and lots of houses. Kids, playsets, shrubs, SUVs, green lawns, the whole nine yards. The paradise of Middle Earth had fallen before the eternal march of suburbanization. Eternal night had fallen upon the Shire.

Frodo and Sam were homeless, and, presumably, continue to be homeless to this very day.