Cake

Rachel usually sits right up when I go in her room to get her up, but today she just pulled the blankets closer to her face. I said "It's time to get up, babe" and she responded with "No. You do it." She kept saying "not going" all while she was getting dressed. At some point her conversation turned to describing cakes. She does that a lot. She pictures birthday cakes in her head, and sometimes she'll describe them to me. The other day she was talking about someone's birthday cake that was blue with "angles" on it (triangles maybe?). Then she went on to describe a green cake. I asked her what color her cake was, and with a classic teenager "duh, mom" look on her face she said "pink!" Then she smiled a big smile and said "it has circles." This morning it didn't sound so much like a description of lots of different cakes, but just a conglomeration of every description she could come up with all run together in a confusing string of words. She mentioned all her usual favorite colors and shapes, but then stuck "bad guys" right in the middle of the description as if it fit somehow, and then went on to talk about "lights" on the cake (candles, probably). She was in a fairly happy mood by the time she left, and she even waved goodbye when she was on the bus.

Last Saturday when she was getting dressed she was pretty annoyed with her shirt. She was having a hard time getting it on properly and she reached down with her right hand and pulled on the left sleeve and stared at it for a second. Then she said "My shirt's name is...it's name is...my shirt's name is stupid!" I have tried for years to get her to name her stuffed animals or dolls, and she's never really done it before. "The dog's name is dog" or "I don't know" were the best answers I could usually get. Obviously she still doesn't quite get the concept, but it made me happy anyway.

Yesterday after school I was again unable to get her interested in anything. She ate dinner quickly and well, but she was uninterested in playing with or looking at anything. In the evening she went to her room and I watched and waited for a couple of minutes, but there was no sound and her room remained dark. I called to her to turn her light on and after a brief pause she turned it on, but when I checked on her a few minutes later she was just sitting on her bed. I eventually talked her into coming in the living room with me, and we listened to some music while I did some knitting. Everyone else had someplace they needed to be, so we were alone, but then her brother and his wife stopped by for awhile and she perked up a bit, so that was awesome. Apparently we need more people around here.