Wolf-Bears, Swamp Orchestra, and Frogs With British Accents

I'm not sure if I mentioned Christmas (aside from the X-rated dinner talk) - but it was very easy, and probably one of the best Christmases I've had. And not because I got a pony (thirty years of asking and still - nothing), and not because my sister and I stayed in our super ugly, all-gray sweats all day, even when we went to the grocery store, which just exacerbated the ugly because with the gray clothes and the fluorescent grocery store lighting we looked so washed-out and sickly that I'm pretty sure the staff thought we were just let out of the hospital as some sort of diseased-twin-Christmas miracle, because no one would help us, probably totally afraid they'd catch whatever it was we had that made us look like that/made it totally impossible for me to tuck my t-shirt in so that it just hung out of the back of my sweatshirt and down to almost my knees like it was hiding my tail.

"They want to know what aisle the graham crackers are in."

"I'm not gonna show them. That one looks like she might be a leper and the other one has a tail. I don't want a tail."

"You can't catch a tail."

"How do you know?"

"Good point. Let's go on break."

Anyway, we did shower eventually. But the thing that made Christmas so good was the fact that Becky and I picked Michael up and brought him over for presents and he was so happy all day it was infectious.

This picture is right after we picked him up and I was singing Do You Know The Muffin Man to him as Christmas-y as I could. (Sidenote: there's not way to make the muffin man Christmas-y. Same goes for Mickey Mouse Club. Which was what I was told to alternate with the Muffin Man. Muffin Man. Mickey Mouse. Muffin Man. Mickey Mouse. It was a very alliterative Christmas morning.)

Look how pleased he is with my singing! I felt like Celine Dion!

The past few years he's had so much bad shit going on, that he's been just miserable. Imagine for a second that ALL of your sinuses are completely blocked/infected, so you can't even chew without ripping pain, and you've had tubes in your ears since you were three that are still there that the doctors forgot about, and you get migraines, your sister still calls your Sugarbutt, and you get generally depressed like anyone but you can't talk through your sadness because you don't have the skills so you just suffer in silence, occasionally stripping naked in public, or biting, or bruising or whatever it is you do because you can't communicate the pain you're in.

(You probably don't get naked when you're mad, but whatever. He doesn't know - that's the beauty of his Autism. He could be naked all day long in a Church full of nuns and baby birds and wouldn't care a bit so long as he got some peanut butter and jelly and the nuns and their weird little birds left him alone for God's sake.)

So, my mom has taken him to various doctors and therapists and specialists for the last few years trying to find a combo of stuff that will make him not so miserable and I don't want to jinx it, but holy crap! Look at that smile!

He even sat at Christmas dinner and had a good time, and then I put Rupert and the Frog Song on for him and he retired to his room to watch the movie which I can only describe as his way of trying to tell me he used to be really, really stoned in his previous life.

A little bear, that looks more like a wolf-bear, spies on some frogs that do a synchronized song and dance number and there's an old grandpa frog that smokes a pipe and yells at his son in a British accent while ogling a lady frog who has just had a baby. Just like any other normal family.

Anyway, the holiday was fun. Next year I just hope Michael will let me work some more songs into my repertoire, because if I have to sing Mickey Mouse Club one more time it'll be through gritted teeth, and will have a lot more curse words than Walt originally intended.

I'm just saying.