Awkward!

I make a point of being in the living room when Rachel gets home from school. I ask her how her day was, to which she usually says something like "Is too, he's a girl" or "It's not your birthday" or some such thing. I immediately check her backpack (because if I don't empty it, she usually does and then I don't see what she brought home). I comment on whatever is there, and then have her take her backpack and her jacket and hang them up. She uses the restroom, and then she's free to pick whatever she wants to do for a little while. Lately that means she either sits on the couch in the living room or on her bed in her bedroom and looks out the window.

A couple of days ago, our routine got a tiny bit turned around. I was in the kitchen and I took her backpack, but the routine stopped there. A few minutes later I went in the living room where she was sitting, and asked her to take her jacket off while I went in the kitchen to grab her backpack. Returning just a moment later, I was a little (a lot) surprised (shocked) to see her sitting on the couch with her shirt and her jacket on her lap. She had taken her jacket off as I had asked, but she had also taken her shirt off with it. I quickly put her shirt back on her. She was sitting in front of the window where people frequently wave to her from the sidewalk or street, since they know she likes to sit there and watch outside, so speed was an issue. I'm pretty sure the only ones who saw her were me and her younger brother, who happened to walk in just as I was putting her shirt back on her (his "well, that was awkward" comment more or less summed it up). She was completely oblivious to the problem. As funny as this was, I have since watched her more carefully when I've asked her to take her jacket off. It might not have been so amusing in a different context, so I can at least be grateful for small favors. Which reminds me, I should definitely tell her teacher at school.

Rachel struggles with getting dressed in the morning. Often, she just stops and stands there, waiting for me to prompt her. If I'm in the room with her I just have to remind her to hurry, or even just say her name, and she gets back to work. If I leave for a minute, she usually waits for me to come back before continuing. I know she can hear me coming back down the hall, and she tries to hurry and pick up where she left off. Unfortunately that frequently means that she takes off the shirt she just put on, or tries to put a shirt on when she hasn't taken off her pajamas yet. She just grabs whatever is nearest at hand and tries to do something with it. Sometimes it works out right, but more often it doesn't. She usually doesn't do that on Saturdays when she can get dressed a little bit later, so I think it's just hard for her to focus properly in the morning. Working under the assumption that she might need more sleep, I've tried putting her to bed earlier, but it hasn't seemed to help. A lot of the time she wakes up early on Saturdays, even if she doesn't have to, so I think it's really just that she's been awake longer on Saturdays by the time she's actually trying to function. I'm not about to start getting her up at 5:30 on weekdays just so she can be awake for awhile before trying to get dressed, so I guess we'll just keep doing what we're doing. It adds a touch of humor to my morning, and that can't be all bad.