Mood:  silly

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Mood:  mischievious

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Mood:  energetic

It's always fun to go to grandma's house! Today, in honor of Joshua's birthday, we went to the University of Tennessee's Knoxville campus where they had a fantastic model railroad display set up in their botanical gardens. All of the boys love model railroads so they were really excited. Cousin Olivia came along to join in the fun.

The display was amazing and the gardens were beautiful - even in late November! Pictures are below. Check out the aquarium cars. They were really cool. Santa Clause was even there! Jacob wasn't so sure about Santa - notice he isn't in the picture. There were even a couple of hands on activities. It was truly an awesome afternoon.

If you are in the Knoxville area, I really encourage you to go and see this. It's very inexpensive - $5.00 a person and it runs every weekend until the first of January. To find out more about the "Holiday Express", just click here. All Aboard!

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All right! All right! For those of you who have been following my NaBloPoMo challenge, you know that I'm supposed to post at least one thing on my blog every day for a month. Since it would have been kind of cheesy to use my disclaimer as today's post, I decided to write something else to add to it. The following is a humorous story that took place a couple of days ago.

Most of you know that our son, Joshua, was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome about a year ago. Asperger's is on the autism spectrum. Some folks even classify it as high functioning autism while others place it in its own category. One of the characteristics of asperger's is being very sensory. Sensory means that his senses over react. For example, when he watches a movie on his TV, he usual has the volume up very high. It's not that he can't hear, it's quite the opposite. He has very acute hearing. You see, we live in a fairly small house, and he has two rambunctious brothers. He turns the sound up to drown out all of the other noises that he hears that are distracting him.

Another example is his very strong sense of taste. He loves spicy things! He puts a gallon (not really but it seems like it) of pepper in his soup because he likes it to be hot. In fact, instead of taking medicine with sugar or jelly or something like that, he takes it with worcestershire or barbecue sauce! He takes medications two or three times a day, so we go through a lot of Lea and Perrins and A1. He will get stuck on one for a few weeks and then switch to the other and then vice versa. That's where the strange title to this post comes in. The other day, I poured a little worcestershire in a table spoon for his medicine but before I could pour in the capsule contents he stopped me. "No Dad! I want to take it with steak sauce today." What was I supposed to do now? One of the problems with some asperger's kids is that they have meltdowns. If something doesn't go the way they planned, they might fall apart - even little things like what they take their medicine with. Now, I know, he needs to learn. And, if it would have been a large thing, I might have used one of our techniques to convince him of the change. But, a little bit of sauce was not a big thing. So I fixed his meds with A1.

Well, I still had the other spoonful of worcestershire. It certainly wouldn't go back through that little hole at the top of the bottle. However, I didn't want to waste it. I know! I love worcestershire sauce. I'll just eat it myself. Five minutes later, after much coughing and sputtering, two large glasses of water, several slaps on the back, and me flailing my arms to stop an almost 911 call, I was able to squeak out to my wife what had happened (that is a slight exaggeration but not much). I was left in wonder at how powerful raw Lea and Perrins can be, and how much my dear son can stomach. How in the world does he do it? I'm not about to try what pure steak sauce tastes like. Ah well, that's what it's like living with an asperger's child. Never a dull moment. I wouldn't trade him for anything. Especially a bottle of worcestershire sauce!

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Mood:  irritated

I just wanted to repeat a disclaimer that I had posted some months ago. I do not have control of the ads that are at the top of my blog - outside of my green refrigerator blog background. I noticed today when I checked my blog, that there was an ad for the movie Bruno, which is one of Sasha Cohen's, what I feel is disgusting, movies. As you can tell by my comments, I do not approve of him nor his films!

As I wrote before, since my blog provider is free, it covers it's expenses with advertisements at the top of the page. To have no ads, I would have to upgrade to a fee based category. At this time I am not able to afford paying for my blog space, but would like to in the future. Until then, please forgive me if there is something questionable at the top of my page. It is not of my doing.

Thanks,

Tim 

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