This is a VERY LONG post about cooking. The only thing it has to do with autism is this: when your child is self-entertaining, it’s easier to cook while he’s around, because you don’t have to worry about him being all on top of you - because he can entertain himself (although there was a point Saturday night when I was in bed trying to figure out what the song running through my head was, and realized it was from the keyboard that played in the background all day).

Luckily, Tim realized it was ‘The Big Cook’ weekend, and planned his work accordingly so he could spend extra time with the J-Man. Oh, and that sometimes we run out of time to make a ‘fresh’ dinner because we’re running around with therapies and whatnot, and that’s when it’s great to be able to pull out something frozen and quickly reheat it. I love the microwave for that.

This past weekend, I did what we call ‘The Big Cook.’ It’s the reason we have two cabinets full of Gladware individual serving containers. Here’s how it works:

* The week before: sit down with a yellow note pad and come up with a list of foods you want to make. These should all be easily divisible into portion sizes and freeze and thaw well. Write down ingredients needed for each recipe, then add like together. For example, I ended up needing NINE POUNDS of ground beef total!

* Thursday night: make lists - we made the Costco list, the Super Target list, and the Harris Teeter list. We knew we could get meats and some larger sizes of canned goods at Costco, but didn’t want to buy a flat of 12 cans of diced tomatoes for example. That’s what the Super Target list was for. The Harris Teeter list was for the things we couldn’t get at the other two stores. HT is much more expensive, so I go there last.

* Friday immediately after work: load up into the car and go to Costco, list in hand. Buy most meats, that 105 oz can of crushed tomatoes, a new monitor for me, laundry and dishwasher detergents, and the best thing ever found at Costco: a red stapler.

* Friday night after putting J-man down: go to Super Target and get that list’s worth of stuff.

* Friday night after Super Target: Divide hamburger into portions needed for recipes, freezing the other 3 lbs in bags for later use, using your new digital kitchen scale. Rhapsodize about how much you like your new scale.

* Chop onions and garlic, and fry with 4 lbs of hamburger; drain. Add to giant stock pot, along with 105 oz can of crushed tomatoes, plus another 28 oz can, and lots of Italian spices (oregano, basil, parsley). Taste. Add more salt. Have Tim taste. Add a few cubes of frozen homemade pesto. Portion into many containers, label, and have Tim take out to the deep freeze in the garage, because the garage is also home to the giant cockroach, and seeing it skitter makes me shivery. WASH THE POTS.

* Saturday morning: instead of sleeping in, get up and start cooking again! Take one of the two chickens, and put into the giant stock pot. Cover with water. Put on the back burner, and let it boil for an hour or so.

1. While that’s cooking, chop onions, garlic, and green peppers for sloppy joes, hotdog chili, chicken chili, and penne bake.
2. Put onions, garlic, chicken broth, spices, hot sauce, and frozen chicken thighs into crock pot for chicken chili. Turn on and forget about it.
3. Brown hamburger, onions, garlic, and green peppers for sloppy joes; transfer to other stock pot, and add tomato sauce ingredients to it.
4. Brown hamburger, onions, and garlic for penne bake; drain. Put that into a container and into the fridge.
5. Brown hamburger and onions for hotdog chili; drain. Make hotdog chili while sloppy joes mix is simmering.
6. Remove chicken from stock pot, and refrigerate. Pour off chicken stock into big containers. Repeat process with the second chicken!
7. SHOWER, you stinky person!
8. Containerize (OK, seriously, Word thinks ‘containerize’ is an actual word,) both the sloppy joe mix, and the hotdog chili, and place in garage freezer. Clean out garage freezer so more can fit. Make SURE you label everything - we just use masking tape and a pen.
9. Make the first batch of chicken and dumplings. This is a long and arduous process that I hate, but we love chicken and dumplings, so I make them, but only on The Big Cook weekends.
10. Wash the pot, so you can use it for chicken chili: dump everything from the crock pot into it, shred the chicken, then add 4 assorted cans of beans, 2 cans of corn, and lots of cilantro. Stir and containerize.
11. Eat PB&J for dinner. Never want to look at cooked food again.
12. Put J-man down for the night - and have Tim separate the meats you bought at Costco into individual servings - freeze those as well.
13. Make the other batch of chicken and dumplings. Force Tim to come downstairs and help with the dumplings. Containerize everything and make Tim take them out to the garage. Realize we are now out of individual-size containers. Put one giant container in the fridge. Cram pots into dishwasher and run it.
14. Moan about feet hurting until Tim rubs them. Sleep like death.

* Sunday morning: up to make the 3 pans of penne bake. Reheat container of hamburger mix you refrigerated yesterday - add mushrooms you just chopped, and diced tomatoes and spices and let simmer.

1. Fire up the giant stock pot to make 8 cups of penne. While that’s cooking, go ahead and chop the onions, celery, and green peppers for gumbo, and the onions and garlic for spinach/onion quiche.
2. Freeze the gumbo veggies in freezer bags since you don’t have any more individual containers, so the gumbo will have to wait, but now you’ve done the hard part.
3. Make cheese sauce for penne bake. Put 3 pans of penne bake in the oven.
4. SHOWER, stinky!
5. Containerize the penne bake in bigger containers, consoling yourself that you’ll probably have that for dinners, so won’t need the individual-size containers.
6. Chop up the ‘meat for stew’ into smaller pieces, and freeze in bags for later. We throw a couple pounds into a crock pot with some soups, cook all day, and serve over rice. It doesn’t have to be cooked beforehand since it’s so easy.
7. Make spinach/onion quiche and bake. Cool, slice, and freeze 2 slices each in freezer bags for quick lunches. (I was going to make a ‘quickie/quiche’ joke, but figured you had already thought of it.)
8. Marvel at the state of the freezer. It’s FULL!
9. Take a couple containers of food over to a friend’s house - three of the four of them (including both adults) are sick, or have wrist issues that preclude cooking.
10. Make marinade for ham, and put it together with the ham in the fridge for overnight.

* Collapse on couch. Fold four loads of laundry done during the cooking ‘downtime.’

* Get J-man ready for bed.

* Soak feet. Even though you knew to wear shoes all day, your feet are still killing you.

Today I still need to bake the ham, and I truly would have made gumbo if we weren’t out of containers. I thought about going to buy some more, but just couldn’t do it. At least ham is easily freezable in freezer bags. I was also going to make 10 lbs worth of garlic/onion mashed potatoes, but again, no containers. I actually MAY go buy some, since potatoes will go bad. What? You didn’t think you could freeze potatoes? The only issue people have with that is the texture, and since in this case they are mashed, the texture isn’t affected.

That, my friend, is ‘The Big Cook.’ It will be a LONG TIME before I cook anything complicated again, and that’s the beauty of it.

Hints for your own big cook:

• WEAR SHOES. Your feet will hurt less.
• Clear the counters and make sure all the pots are clean the night before. You will need the room!
• Double, even triple, recipes. (Or in the case of spaghetti sauce, quadruple) It doesn’t take much longer to chop two onions instead of one, and saves you from having to do a big cook that much longer.
• Be able to multi-task.
• Label everything. Trust me: hotdog chili looks like spaghetti sauce, which looks like chili with beans, and they all sort of look like veggie soup.
• Use pockets of time where something is cooking to accomplish other things, like doing laundry, or chopping onions/garlic/green peppers for other recipes. Or, use a chopper/food processor. I didn’t use my mini chopper this time, because I knew I would only have room on the counters for a few things at a time, and anyway, I kind of like chopping,
• Wash as you go.
• Have someone available to rub your feet at the end of the day.

The Holland Tourism Board would like a word with you…

If you’ve ‘gone public’ with having a special needs child for about this side of 37 minutes, odds are stellar that someone has sent you the “Welcome to Holland” poem by Emily Perl Kingsley. For the uninitiated, click that link and go read it. I’ll wait.

While it’s not as controversial a topic among parents as say vaccines, you’ll still get a wide range of reactions and emotions about it, and those may change drastically depending on the mood they’re in at any given moment.

Regardless of what I say next, most people who have sent it to us have done so out of concern and love for us. To them I say, I appreciate you more than you know, and I hope you’ll understand that the emotions of parents of autistic children are complex, varied, and wild. And we get more honest about that as time goes on.

At first I hated that poem. Then I felt like I got it. Then I felt like the poet was a bad parent and I cursed her name to the darkness (I was bitter then - duh). Then I kinda got it again. Now I have a completely different reaction to it:

What the hell did Holland do to deserve this?

I’ve never been to Holland or Italy, and beyond one having the Pope’s house in the middle of it and the other having a higher population of blond women, I don’t know what the primary pros and cons are. I have no clue why the plane full of all the special needs kids and families got rerouted to Holland, except perhaps the flight attendants thought the screaming indicated a potential terrorist threat.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this wondering. A funny reply came in the form of “Holland Schmolland” by Laura Krueger Crawford. Apparently a cottage industry of these things is popping up.

Then I found “Welcome to Beirut,” by Susan F. Rzucidlo, which is utterly brilliant. It’s got me wanting to write my own.

In the end, I only have one reaction to the Holland poem, and I think this one is here to stay. Neither Italy nor Holland nor all the countries in the world combined can hold a candle to our son.

Our house can range from idyllic to insane, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not even all the artwork in Italy together could impress me more than what my son struggles to create with crayons and computer paper. The art on our walls at home is the symbol of all the hard work he’s put into overcoming his challenges. He is our masterpiece.

Rzucidlo lasers in on one of the biggest truths I’ve learned so far when she says, “You will know sorrow like few others and yet you will know joy above joy.” We celebrate every little step, no matter how small. We give thanks to all those parents who’ve gone ahead of us and given us roads to follow. We feel affirmed by those parents who see us go to tears when he says a new word and know why. We rejoice for the gifts given to us by skilled, committed, kind-hearted therapists who work for pay far less than the weight-in-gold salaries they deserve.

We have very high highs and really low lows, but between that vast expanse, we see all the little details of the world. I sit and stare at the sky because he does. I discover microscopic pieces of dirt in the carpet just because he does. I wonder what all I would miss if he didn’t show them to me.

One more thing I’ve learned - There are a lot of good and kind people in this world, and we’ve only just begun to meet them. We wish our son didn’t have to struggle like he does, but he is accepting it with bravery and grace and determination. We can do no less.

While I’m trying not to act like the above title (10 points if you know where it’s from. 20 if you sing it!), it’s a little glum around the ol’ Flashlight house these days. We’re still trying to work our way through the stages of grief everyone talks about – and I’m stuck in the anger/despair part.

Really, why does this have to be so hard? I, like all parents, want my child to have an easier life than I have had. I want him to have the good things from my life: to grow up loving to learn, go to college because it’s just what we do, find a wonderful partner like I have, and have beautiful children that I can spoil someday. It reminds me of that line from Steel Magnolias where Julia Roberts’s character says, “I want to sit on the front porch, covered in grandchildren, and say ‘No,’ and ‘Stop that.’” I want him to skip the bad things…

Instead, his life will be immeasurably harder than mine. He will have to work harder at EVERYTHING than I had to. Everything (ok, except peeing while standing up, which I still can’t do unless in the shower… it’s OK, I’m the one who cleans the bathroom).

This changes our lives for the long term. It changes our plans for ourselves (second baby? Moving to the mountains someday?) and our plans for him (doctor? Lawyer? POTUS!?).

Interestingly enough, it doesn’t change our lives for the short term. J-man will still have the same therapies he had before, since he was already in developmental, occupational, and speech therapies. He will still attend the special preschool. He will still pull us to the back door to go out and swing every day. He will still continue to delight us with his smiles and giggles and sense of mischief. He will still be the wonderful boy we know. He will not know the difference that 3 letters can make.

We will though.

I had a rough night last night. It was one of those cumulative sort of episodes where you stockpile stress and worry and get to the point where you have to empty some of what’s in that bucket to get to the next day. I’m sure that means I need to focus on better ways to deal with that.

Part of this is not paying enough attention to all the positives that happen every day. So before our big appointment today, let me tell you one.

Yesterday, he ate a mouthful of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

This may sound utterly trivial to a lot of parents, but this is the equivalent of me orbiting the earth without a spaceship. There are a number of textures in a PB&J that normally make him gag (the literal, retching kind). He didn’t look terribly excited by what he ate, but he chewed it and swallowed it - no taking it out of his mouth and handing it back to us in a panic.

He earns every triumph, and every one is cause for celebration. I needed to be reminded of that yesterday.

I read. I read a lot. I mean… a lot. I can’t stop myself from reading if there are words in front of me. I read for work, I read for pleasure, and I especially read because a book is about someone else’s troubles and not mine.

Lately (and by lately I mean the past few years) I’ve really worked on reading books with a strong female protagonist. Usually that means I’m reading either mysteries or fantasy/science fiction. I try my best not to read scary stuff, since I get nightmares from that. I also own a lot of children’s fiction, especially historical fiction. I have learned a lot about living in the 1850s through early 1900s. This is part of the reason that I am the Mary-pedia.

I learn from reading (verbal), and I learn from listening (aural). As an education major in college, I found that most children learn best from those two methods… but that there is a sub-set of kids who learn through body movement (kinesthetics), or music, or from visual stimulation like art.

I wonder… how will Mister Man learn the best? Will his sensory issues stop him from wanting to learn through movement, or will that be the best way for him to learn? Will he be unable to “get” art class because he spends the whole time concerned about getting messy? He loves music… is that the best way to help him remember? (I remember learning specific literature quotations while listening to music, and being able to remember them by just thinking of the song’s melody. Of course, that didn’t amuse the people who sat near me during an exam, because I would unconsciously hum!)

What do you do to escape from life for just a little while? Tim turns on the iPod and tunes out the world. He watches science programs on TV (best when they’re narrated by William Shatner). He used to just stand in the shower, but since we’re in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history… he doesn’t do that anymore! He goes on solitary walks.

Me? I read.