Halloween at work

10-29-09

Today has to be better.

Let’s start off with some good news. First, Bobby passed his hearing test with no problem. This was good. It also means when he doesn’t answer me it isn’t because he can’t hear me, it means he doesn’t listen. This is good and bad at the same time.

After the hearing test, Bobby sat down with this super nice lady who was the speech pathologist. It was in a classroom at this school in Gardena. The teacher of the room was also there, and also super nice. There also was a corner for Dax to play with a bunch of toys. He was calm and sweet, playing while Bobby got tested.

Luckily, I was allowed to sit with Bobby while it took place. She opened this book of pictures and words. It looked like a pretty standard kid’s book. She then started asking him what things were, and like when I kid was wrapped in a towel, asked him what the kid had just done. When they got to an animal page, he also was asked to name all of his pets, which to the pathologist’s credit, she did not bat an eye at the number of names he listed. Bobby also opened up a bit more at this point and told her about the new “baby dog” we have and how she sometimes bites him. He also said that Monarch sometimes scratches him, but that Ittles licks him a lot. Super cute stuff.

So after all of this, she had him go play with Dax, and she went over her assessment with Ken and I. She said he has a great vocabulary. First off, this made me all kinds of happy. She said he doesn’t stutter in the bad way. She says that mostly, he seems to only have problem with the sentence includes a lot of information. Short things, no problem at all. She said all of the things that seem unclear are due to age. She said he seems totally within range of his age group. She actually seemed pretty impressed with him in general. He passed everything with flying colors.

I am sure that my mom isn’t going to feel 100% comfortable with the results as she thinks he has a problem. But I have to trust the pathologist. She seemed to be pretty thorough, asking him to pronounce different kinds of words, and asking lots of concepts. She said clarity will improve greatly with kindergarten. I would imagine preschool will also help. I am considering picking up some books to help work on him enunciating words better. I figure it doesn’t hurt. I can work on teaching him to read along with this.

My evening was spent looking for babies and lips.

Let me explain. I decided at the last minute to go back to my original plan for a costume for today. I thought being Octomom was super easy and funny. I don’t anticipate winning any contests here at work, but I thought it would be funnier than trying to explain my “Dax” costume.

We went to the Dollar Tree where the boys picked out 8 babies for me. Now, all I needed was some of those big fake lips. I assumed the Halloween shop would have them. They did not. We went to Party City, hoping for something. Lucky for us, we lingered a bit more than we needed to. We came across a bag of lips with whistles in them. It would work for what I was trying to do. Plus, I now have a bag of stuff for the boys.

I am currently covered in baby doll. Ken strung them up on two necklaces and I am wearing all 8 around my neck. The lips will come out for pics and showing off. I don’t know how many people will get it, but I am going to hope most. I have similar hair to her, too, so I was able to just wear my hair down. Sure, I could have picked up the Kate Gosselin wig, but I don’t know that that would have been as easy to pull off.

The string the babies are on is digging into my neck, so that isn’t too fun. I won’t be able to wear this all day if this keeps up. I just put the string on my shirt, so hopefully that will help.

So the other day, we were watching some kid’s show. One of the characters sounded like a really bad Katharine Hepburn impersonator. So of course, I start mimicking the voice, adding Kate to the mix. Bobby could not stop laughing. He was giggling and kept telling me how much I crack him up. Since then, I have broken into my bad Kate voice for his pleasure. Every time, he laughs like the first time.

I feel out of sorts today. I am sure it is just coming down from two days of chaos. Today and tomorrow are pretty quiet. I need to clean up the house a bit more since my folks will be coming by on Saturday. They may just meet us at the park, and there is almost no need to come in the house. We will see. But either way, house is still too cluttered when I tried to walk from the front door to the bathroom and bumped into like 8 things.

My day is going far too slow this morning. My head hurts (it has since yesterday) and I am tired. I was so hoping the cold night would help me get cozy. Not sure what was going on. Although, I do know I slept a little since I had some funky dreams where the Scrubs cast opened a private ranch hospital where things kept falling down. Luna and I were there, but not sure in what context. Very odd.

The “town hall meeting” here at work is in an hour and a half, which will significantly speed the day up once I am there. At least it is something to “do” and all I have to do is sit and I am sure answer questions regarding my costume. I would say it has been about half of the people who have seen me that knew instantly who I was. Not bad, really.

I am considering tapping some folks in my department to pretend to be paparazzi for my costume entrance. I think then we could enter as a “group” maybe and I could win them something?