Today is a Hard Day

Oooof! We are just at the end of our first nine weeks, and I have set each kid the task of getting various assignments like vocabulary lists learned, book reports completed, quarterly tests taken. The loose ends must be tied up.

Unfortunately, this is the week when my slacker tendencies rear up to bite me in the butt. I've got some grading to catch up on, and the kids have some heretofore-unnoticed gaps in their school work to complete. My fault. Bad me. I should have been on top of things better. Live and learn.

And I'm a little worried about my youngest. She seems hypersensitive to EVERYTHING, especially sound. Noises bother her and there she sits, hyperventilating and making squeaking sounds and generally pitching little fit after little fit. It takes every ounce of self control not to scream and yell. I want to beat her butt but I don't. She hates it when I get stern, but if she only knew that stern is the current "nice version" of me, she'd be kissing my feet. At any rate she seems to have some sensory issues and it's driving me nuts. She can hear (and freaks out about) the TV if it's turned on with the volume on silent, says it's a high pitched whine. I believe her, because I've read of this before, but her reactions are annoying nonetheless.

And I'm in the middle of filling out forms to have my son evaluated for Autistic Spectrum issues, and seeing the questions makes me think I need to have an evaluation done on each of my kids.

This depresses me.

This one information dumps. That one monologues and has obsessions. This other one is afraid of her own shadow and seems to be having senory overload issues and panic attacks. None of them have social skills nor do they seem able to "pick up on them" as several miserable years in public school have already proved.

What the heck is WRONG with us??????

My entire life is spent walking on eggshells through I-have-senosry-issues or I'm-on-the-spectrum or I-am-mentally-ill land. Just me being normal sends the people around me over the edge and into melt down mode. On the inside I want to scream and rage and yell at people because they can be so gosh darned difficult-but I try to be patient instead. I try to control myself. But that's not good enough. Like the kids have e.s.p. or mind reading skills or something, they react negatively even to my attempts at loving guidance and self-control, since usually in those cases my voice gets stern and flat and commanding-better than raging screaming attacks, but I've not yet achieved that saintly peak of loving gentleness, soft spokenness and perfection. One of my kids, I can't even correct her (such as "you need to load these plates in the dishwasher this way so that they'll come clean) without a complete melt down on her part. "See, I'm bad! Everyone hates me!" Curled up on a ball on the kitchen floor.

And this happens multiple times a day. This is our life.

And so today is a bad day. Right now I think I want to explode. I bet a bunch of my kids want to explode, too.