flea

I keep forgetting to mention, Dillo's 2 year molars are coming in. They don't seem to be hurting him, much - neither of my kids has been a painful teether at any phase - but he can definitely feel them and thinks they are weird. He puts his finger in his mouth to touch them a lot, and asks me to put my finger in and rub them.

In day care news, it occurred to me that even if the current day care moves to a new facility next July, they are planning to only have children up to age 3. And, of course, Dillo will be 3 next July. They would welcome him at Athens Montessori, but that is not a year round program. And I actually think McPhaul is not a year round program either; need to call them to be sure. Ten months of full-day care does not allow one to hold down a job, yo.

Aren't there any freakin' working two-career families in this town who aren't university professors with summers off? Honestly, I don't know any. And it would be nice to have someone to commiserate with.

The Dillo is a drool fountain the last few days, and fussy today, and hand-gnawing and refusing the paci in favor of anything else, so I wonder if teeth are coming? None visible or feelable yet, but Casper got teeth at 4 months so it wouldn't be too odd. Except the baby on the corner who eats roast beef and is about to turn 1 has no teeth yet!

Books:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon. For book club, which I did join. I thought this was well done - gave the impression of really being written by an autistic person, while being much more engaging than a book actually written by an autistic person would really be. I imagine the author did a lot of research. I was sorry there wasn't really a detective story, though, and found the wrap-up a little unsatisfying, once the secret is revealed (not that it wasn't a totally obvious secret to the reader).

So then I sought out a book actually written by an autistic person, and read
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Grandin consults on animal welfare, especially in meatpacking plants - she is able to see what bothers animals, so has been able to make the plants more humane. (She's mentioned a lot in Fast Food Nation, working with McDonald's.) Grandin, even with a co-author, is not as engaging as Haddon's narrator! Lot of interesting stuff here - most interesting, to me, was Grandin's explanation of how she sees similarities between her autistic hyper-specificity and visual thinking and trouble with abstraction and the ways animals think.