Ups and Downs

This morning at home and all through church we endured a litany of all the worst words Rachel could come up with. Fortunately she doesn't know any really bad words. I was told it isn't my birthday, I can't come, to shut up, and to go away. Obviously she's not in a good mood. When one friend said hi to her she simply said "puke." Lovely. I'm glad she's at least relatively quiet and that most people are willing to just ignore the inappropriateness of some of her words.

Yesterday we had some errands to run that were going to be relatively quick and not very fun, so we left her home with her brothers and she watched a movie. While I was fixing dinner and throughout the evening it was evident that her happy mood of the morning was gone, and I wondered if it would have been better to take her with us when we went out to give some variety to her day. She loves shopping when she's in the right mood and we do things that are fun, but not so much when it's boring, so I thought she'd have more fun at home. Who knows.

We decided to watch another movie last night. I'm not a big fan of lots of movies and especially not a fan of TV, but if the options are staring at nothing (which is what she was doing) or at a screen, I think the screen is probably better. She was obviously watching because she said "ouch" when someone got hurt, and she laughed at the appropriate times. We took a break and got a snack. When offered a cookie she said "butt head. kill you." So she didn't eat a cookie. Not sure where that came from. After her bath I was helping her get ready for bed and she bit my finger. Hard. It hurt a lot. She's only done that once before and it was years ago, so I wasn't exactly trying to protect my fingers. There wasn't any indication that she was going to bite me, but I could tell from the look on her face that she was angry. I'm still not sure at what. It would be so wonderful to be able to sit down and talk to her and figure out what's going on in her head and what is bugging her. It's nearly impossible to solve a problem when you don't know what the problem is. Right now she's sitting by the window looking at the same magazine she looked at yesterday, but not turning any pages. In fact, I'm not sure she's really even seeing it. Her left hand is all clenched and her head keeps turning. There's almost no expression on her face, and she won't interact with me. Hopefully things will get better this afternoon.