Up/Down, Up/Down, Whee!

I've been on an emotional roller coaster! Whee!

The up! I've gotten some great feedback on my writing. The thing about my stories, is that while I know they're not perfect, they really have a lot of 'me' in them. I use a lot of my own experiences and write about things that bother me so that I can work them out. Like, I'm bothered by death. I'm bothered by cruelty. I think about morality and how people relate to one another. Stories help me make sense of my thoughts.

I think that people think in different ways. I tend to think in stories. It goes back to how I was as a kid. I remember driving in the car, a story in my head as I'd stare out the window. The best times I had sometimes were sitting in the car, working a story through my head. I can't say they were good stories. They were crap! But all the same, that's how I think.

And I'm an observer, too. Honestly, my observations have gotten better since I got onto anti-depression medication. I find that I'm able to pay more attention to details and that's helped with my art and, in a more practical way, fixing things around the house. *grins*

The down! :(

My daughter is making me crazy!

I don't know what's up with her recently, but the past week or so she's been just awful at home. The thing that gets me, is that when I talk to her teachers, I find out that she's a perfect angel at school. She listens, cheerfully works and enjoys herself very much. At home, she seems angry all the time.

It has made me wonder what I'm doing wrong. I have tried to come at this from many different angles. I figured, maybe she's tired. My daughter is 3 1/2 and she goes to school 8 hours a day! She's in a special autism program. I changed her bedtime to an hour early. No dice. She just woke up in the middle of the night instead and ended up sleeping in my room, which is what she does when she wakes up. I don't even know she's crawled into bed until the alarm goes off in the morning. That's how sleepy I am. :P

Then, after that didn't work, I figured, maybe she needs to go to bed later. At first that seemed like it was working OK. This Saturday morning started off great! Then the badness started... every time I said no, there was a meltdown. Then my son hops on the bandwagon and when Rei cries, he cries. Soon I had 2 crying, screaming children.

I'm having trouble getting her to eat anything besides Quaker Rice Quakes, cereal and chicken nuggets. She doesn't want to use the potty anymore and so that's a battle. Bleh.

One extra cool thing happened though: Rei can now put on her own socks. She bitches about doing it, but she can do it. Finally! I'm really proud of her.

I know that she tries hard and I think, in the final analysis of the situation, that she's just tired and stressed out. Today, taking that perspective, I let Rei watch a ton of her favorite movies (Baby Einsteins and Shrek). I also taught her how to play Dead or Alive on the X-Box. That was pretty cool, too actually. She has always liked karate and stuff. She liked the background with the underwater glass building the best and always picked the same character. I can't remember her name, but the chick wears denim. I put the game into sparring mode so she didn't have to compete. She just had to figure out what the buttons do. By the end of it, she was able to do a tag-team match and was showing me what buttons to press. Pretty cool.

Yep. But I didn't draw all weekend. I thought my brain was going to explode most of the time. But it didn't. Cool school. :D