This morning Rachel was a little groggy. It was hard to tell what kind of mood she was in, because I'm not sure she was completely awake. She got dressed okay, as long as I kept reminding her what she was doing. I usually don't put button-up shirts on her because she has a hard time getting them on, and figuring out which button to put in which button hole is usually beyond her, but for some reason I pulled one out today for her to wear (possibly because most of her shirts were downstairs in the laundry room, clean, but still all the way downstairs). Anyway, since she was just staring blankly at me I went ahead and put it on her and buttoned it up for her, something I won't usually do. Being a good mother, however, I realized that sending her to school unclothed was a bad idea, and doing it myself was the only way it was going to happen. Anyway, she made it out to the bus okay, and was at the very least not in a bad mood.
Last night we watched the championship basketball game on TV, and Rachel was not even remotely interested. We had worked on cleaning out the garage earlier, so we ended up eating while watching the game. The combination of her lack of interest in the game and the fact that we had taco salad for dinner, which is a little difficult for her to manage without a table in front of her, led me to leave her upstairs to eat at the table, while we were downstairs. Apparently that was a bad idea because when I came up to check on her and see what she was doing, she had left the kitchen. I found her in the bathroom, and got her to go back in the kitchen to finish her dinner. When I came up again she had once again left, without eating, and was back in her bedroom "looking" at books, in the dark, not having bothered to turn her light on. I decided I'd better stay with her until she had finished eating. I ended up feeding a lot of it to her because she simply wasn't eating on her own. She was happy, but was uninterested in feeding herself. She doesn't have any extra body fat on her that allows me to just decide she's not hungry and let her skip a meal, so I have to insist. She didn't mind eating as long as I fed her, she just wouldn't feed herself (she would get a bite halfway to her mouth and then just stare off into space. When I reminded her to eat it she would dump the bite back in her bowl and get another bite, which also never made it to her mouth).
By the time she had eaten a sufficient amount, it was time for her to get ready for bed, so I sent her in to put her books away and get her pajamas on. I tagged along, since she had been so easily distracted all evening, but I found other things to do in her room, so I wasn't "watching" her (she will frequently pretend to be incapable of doing things if I'm watching, to see if I'll do them for her). Out of the corner of my eye I saw her put her books back on the bookshelf, which was really awesome! She has a hard time getting the books turned the right direction, and then getting them to fit on the shelf with the other books there. She usually won't even try, and if she does try she generally has them at an angle that won't quite work so she pushes for a minute, and then gives up and leaves them on the floor or stacks them up on her desk. If there are too many books on the shelf, so there's not much space for additional books, it's hard for her, but it's even harder if she's removed so many that the books slide down and aren't upright anymore. I've tried just stacking them on the shelf so it's easier for her, but they won't all fit that way and she doesn't keep them in separate stacks. They just all end up shoved onto the shelf in a jumble, and then they get ruined. So, most of the time I help her by holding up the books already on the shelf, or if she's tired I'll just do it for her. But last night, although it took her a little while, she patiently kept at it until she had put all her books away. I want to think of this as a milestone that we've reached, but in all actuality she has done this quite a few times before, sometimes as isolated incidents and sometimes she's become quite good at it and done it consistently for a time, and then for some unknown reason lost the ability to do it. But I'm cautiously optimistic. It's not that putting her books away for her is a burden I'm unwilling to bear, it's that she is so much happier when she can do things herself, and it frustrates her when she just can't manage it.
I'm not sure why, in one evening, I had to help her do something she usually does on her own, but was able to watch while she accomplished something that she generally can't do. I guess it was desire. She was able to accomplish the things she wanted to do, but not the things that were uninteresting to her. Unfortunately, creating a desire in her to do something she doesn't want to do is difficult at best. And by difficult, I mean that I'm unable to do it about 95% of the time. But I am so very pleased that when she really wanted to do something, she was able to accomplish it. One of the most difficult things is to watch her struggle and get upset and cry because she can't quite get her body to do what she wants it to do. One of the best joys of my life is to see her light up and smile and say "I did it, Mommy!"
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