Laurel knows what color our car is!
I picked Laurel up from school today to take her to her massage (she still gets one most weeks, although we've been struggling to find a time that works well since she started school). When I got there, her teacher told me that she'd been asking Laurel what color car she had. "Is it a blue car? Is it a white car?" (If Laurel looks at you when you ask her a question, it means yes.) Laurel looked at her a little bit when she asked her if it was a tan car (the teacher thinks this was because it has a tan interior, but it might just be that Laurel was confused - I'm not sure if she knows what tan is, we haven't talked about it much). But when the teacher asked if it was a green car, Laurel looked straight at her! Both our van and our station wagon are green.
I'm so proud. 
March 9, 2004
Speaking of bedtime [which somebody else had been doing], I've been feeling like I practically have to ambush Laurel. That thing I've always heard about having a routine is SOOO not working for her. The thing is that she doesn't want to go to bed so the minute she twigs to the idea that we're going into the bedtime routine, she isn't having any of it. I can change the routine but within a few days she'll figure it out and we're back to square one. The real problem is that somewhere in there, ultimately, she has to have her last tube feeding and she always knows what that means. She hasn't been eating well orally since she was sick (actually, she still seems kind of sick and I'm starting to think she's got a sinus infection - I've been waiting all afternoon for a call back from one of the nurses at her doctor's office to see if we should bring her in) so we're still nowhere near eliminating that feeding. Plus we still have to give her her seizure med before she goes to bed (at least until May when we finally get to see the neurologist). If we can avoid the "you're trying to get me ready for bed and I don't want to go" tantrum, she'll actually fall asleep pretty quickly, but if we have the tantrum then she ends up swallowing a lot of air and getting gas and then we have to wait until she calms down enough to burp (with Laurel, this can be awhile). So lately even though I'm still finishing her last feeding a lot earlier than I used to, we've mostly been back to going to bed really late.
Of course, as always with these sorts of things I'm perversely proud
of her, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like us both to get more sleep.
OMG...you remember how I said a while back that we were going to get
new carpeting? It's a really big deal for us, we're replacing the
25-year-old brown shag in our huge basement family room. Bob has been
working hard for two months cleaning mildew, fixing drywall, and
painting in preparation, and in the process we completely trashed the
shag. Anyway, so we were told, today was the big day! We stayed up late
moving the last of the furniture out of the room (and darn near killed
Bob moving a big armchair). Bob has been home all day waiting for the
installers to show up. He just called the store - and found out that our
salesman no longer works there and they can't find a record of the sale!
They're going to keep looking and call him back. Meanwhile I'm a nervous
wreck...the very least this means is that it'll be a long time before we
have carpet (and I just can't see moving that chair any more times than
we have to, but now it's blocking the door to the unfinished part of the
basement) and the most, I'm scared to think about. I could just crap
right now. I know it's not a life-and-death thing, but it's a LOT of
money and I can see this becoming one giant headache. I'd gone and got
some coffee not too long before Bob called, but boy I don't need it now.
Well, PHEW, they have found the paperwork. So that's a huge relief.
They have NO clues when they can install the carpeting, though, we're
not on their schedule at all, so who knows when we'll get our family
room back? I'm still pretty PO'd. 
But at least I'm not in full-tilt-panic mode any more.
Laurel's in a photo contest!
Now that my brain has recovered somewhat from its earlier panic mode, I wanted to tell you guys that Laurel is in a photo contest. Aside from thinking it would be nice if Laurel won something, I'm very proud of the contest because I'm the one who put it together. It's for brain-injured kids and we did it to get more pictures for the BRIGHT website, but it got some very enthusiastic participation from the families, who were obviously very happy to have a chance to show their kids off, and it turned into a pretty neat thing!
It's been kind of a headache even since I posted it, though, because
we had problems with the part of the voting script that was supposed to
check IP addresses and we had to turn it off, and then some people
figured that out and went to town. I've been having to go through the
logs periodically and clean out duplicates, 30-plicates, and
100-plicates, even though I've made it clear to everyone involved that
all they are accomplishing is creating work for me. (And I need to do it
again.) So, if you do go vote, please only vote once per category!
Thanks!
Here's the site:
http://www.brightonline.org/photo_contest/id_photocontest.html
I swear, those people at the carpet store aren't going to know what hit them. So far, I've been letting Bob handle it. Every day he calls, every day he gets some story about how first Bob and then Vanessa stepped out, is with a client, went down to the warehouse, whatever, and will be sure to call back as soon as they are free. And every day, they don't. Once or twice Bob has actually caught Vanessa when she answered the phone, and the last story he had (last week) was that the carpeting hadn't even come in yet, but she would order it and bump somebody so that we could could get our carpeting installed this week. Well, it's this week and two more days of evasive maneuvers. Bob called at 5:30 and was told she'd be SURE to call back, then called me about 6:30 and asked me to check our messages. Of course, there wasn't anything. So he asked me to call the carpet store again. Which was closed. I left a steaming message on their answering machine about the consumer advocate at the local paper, and I'm not kidding. If I haven't heard something by noon tomorrow, I'm calling the consumer advocate, the company that they're a franchise of, the Better Business Bureau and anyone else I can think of. I've already been making a point of telling as many people as possible around here about their terrible service. We don't have a guest room for Laurel's teacher this weekend because of this (she's providing the respite care while we take our "respitality weekend" from Cerebral Palsy of VA and go to Virginia Beach). I mean, we'll have her sleep in our room and go anyway, but that feels kind of weird to me - and it means an extra level of cleaning in there, too - so the fact that we have to is just pi$$ing me off that much more.
Vanessa is going to be sorry she didn't call Bob back when she had
the chance... 
We are so depressed...our babysitter gave her two weeks' notice today.
We just feel sick about it. She is quitting because she got an offer from somewhere that can pay her .50 more an hour, for 40 hours a week vs. 27.5, and includes health insurance and dental. I did the math and just to cover the difference in pay and the health insurance would cost us another $700 a month - which is pretty much what I'm clearing over what we're paying her. So that makes no sense. She says she loves Laurel and we're the best employers she's ever had, but she just can't make ends meet. I understand, but I'm worried sick about finding someone even close to as good as she is who *can* afford to work for what we can pay. I already tried calling our #2 choice from the group we interviewed when we hired her, but that number has been disconnected! And after that it gets into the lady who wanted to be paid under the table and the occupational therapist. So it looks like we are going to have to advertise and go through that mess all over again.
That and the carpet (I had a sit-down with Vanessa yesterday; she has told me that their account is screwed up with Mohawk carpets and has to be straightened out before they will ship our carpet - charming, huh? But yes, they do already have our money) and the recent panic that we had because someone I bought Laurel's formula from on Ebay didn't ship it for almost a week and we weren't sure we'd have any for this weekend when we were planning to be gone (we managed to solve that one), I am just worn out. I had just barely recovered from all the people blasting me over deleting duplicate votes in the BRIGHT photo contest (people kept insisting that their kids couldn't possibly have any illegal votes and I kept having to defend myself and send them copies of the unedited log files to prove that they did). I guess we *really* need this respite weekend now but at the same time I kind of wish we hadn't found out till Monday so we could have not had this to worry about, since we really can't do anything about it this weekend since we'll be out of town.
Wah...we are having a hard time even wanting to eat dinner... 
[Posted by Bob]
Laurel laughed out loud tonight while she was awake, for the second
time ever. [Note from Rochelle: Actually it was the third time, but
who's counting?
] Amy (her
teacher) was here and was sitting with Laurel as I was running around
getting ready to leave and then I heard a noise from Laurel and Amy
exclaimed "she just laughed." Amy was making silly noises to
go along with the book "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb," which is
one of Laurel's favorite books, and Laurel decided one of them was just
hysterical. And Amy made the noise again, while I was there. And Laurel
laughed again. And we all laughed, and Amy made the noise again, and we
all laughed again. This went on for 4 or 5 times. It was amazing. Sadly,
though, Rochelle missed it by 10 minutes. Still, it was a great thing to
have happen this week and puts us in a great mood as we head out. I just
had to share this with you all.