Theater of the Absurd

I'm sure something exciting happened today. Let's see...

Load of laundry, load of dishes, an hour of homeschool, clean cat bowl, re-assemble all of the mechanical pencils, re-stock the TP in the bathrooms, feed lunch, take both kids to computer camp. Oh wait. Take The Girl to The Boy's computer camp. Yeah. Actually, that went pretty well. The Man was going to pick her up pretty quickly from the classroom, but she wanted to see "stars on the ceiling", so I took her to the planetarium.

I promised The Girl a trip to the fabric store, swung through two drive-in's to get lemonade. (How does McDonalds run out of lemonade on an autistic child?) She's gotten really jumpy lately. By jumpy, I do not mean nervous, I mean jump-y -- she jumps and runs around a lot, usually hooting loudly. I had to cut her off and drag her back to the cotton gauze aisle a few times, but it was okay.

Not so much the book store tonight. The Boy (who has been stressed all week) misplaced his dad in the book store and panicked. He went into full "Who are you? Can you help me find my mom?" mode on us. He has a way of looking directly into our eyes with God's Honest Truth in his eyes and telling us that we're not his parents. He gets so afraid of being taken off by strangers that he decides that we're strangers too. So he hid from us.

The husband bailed and made me go find him. I sneaked up on him and pinned him in a chair in the corner to calm him down. He just sat in the chair and wept. We were lost to him forever and replaced with these strangers who had taken over his parents identities. (Trust me, I showed him some I.D., but he wasn't convinced. Not only had I stolen his mother's identity, I had been spying on him.) Needless to say, this wacko-attack wore off enough after 15 minutes that he could pick out a Garfield book and make it to the car, still sniffling just a bit.

But the entire time, all I could see was being arrested for child abduction as my five-foot-tall, ten-year-old boy swore with honest eyes that I was not his mother, nor was The Man his father. THAT would have been interesting.

I've always said that life is a really a cabaret around here. Tonight it was a little more... theater of the absurd?