Keys and Maps and Rabbits.

These are all over the house.

I usually find them on the floor waiting to be gobbled up by the vacuum, should anyone ever decided to vacuum. But, they are also on the kitchen counter, in the bathroom and sometimes in the pool. They are the ring part of a key ring. Anya is fixated by keys, key rings, carabineers, clips, dog leashes, dog collars, padlocks, key leashes and all the associated pieces.

They belong in here.

This is one of  the glittery, pretty girly boxes she got for her birthday. And that’s where all things keys go. But, just at first glance I can see many pieces that belong in here aren’t in here. Well, at least when she complains about not knowing where the ______ is, I can claim that I didn’t take it out of the box.

She will literally spend hours taking all the things apart and reassembling them. She put a charm (formerly on a key leash) on a ring on her necklace yesterday. I swear it took only 6 seconds. It’s like I turned my head and when I looked back, she already had the charm around her neck. I hate those key ring things. I would rather sit with her weeping in my lap for 30 minutes than to thread one of those. They always separate the layers in my nails and sometimes I have to use a tool to get the thing started. They just plain old annoy me. And my daughter LOVES them. I have to watch my mouth when I help her so I don’t blurt out any words I don’t want her saying! I find the dog with a different collar on every day. It's either a real dog collar, or party ribbon or a ball chain, but the tags are always hanging from his neck. She even puts her charms or bells on the dog with all his tags, then quick as lightening, they are off. We even bought new sneakers and just had to get the pair with the charms on them. They have since been taken off and put on toy dogs as dog tags.

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Then there is the whole, “That’s not America. It’s not orange.” Scott said a phrase in Spanish to Anya and in order not to confuse her, he thought he’d explain how all countries speak different languages. He brought down the globe for a visual explanation. “In Russia, see over here? You spoke Russian. In America, see here? We speak English. See here below America? This is Mexico, they speak Spanish.”

“That’s NOT America. It’s not orange.”

Please reference the place mat she uses daily pictured below with the globe. Whaddya know? She’s right. America IS orange!

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About four months ago, my parents and I took Anya to a Chinese restaurant. She was really grumpy as we sat at the table. Previously we had been having her circle the mac-n-cheese picture on the kids' menus at restaurants (or the cheeseburger or grilled cheese). Well guess what was on the  place mat at the restaurant? The Chinese animals based on what year you were born ie:The Year of the Monkey. So, poor Anya was looking at the place mat, thinking it was the menu and saw monkeys, dragons, bears, etc. It took her a LONG time to calm down after getting so worked up over the gross menu!

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Then there is the time a couple of days ago I caught her quietly headed out into the backyard with a green trash bag. I’d previously told her that the wild rabbits in the yard will scratch if you try to catch them and put them in a box in your room. Well then, doesn’t it seem logical to use the bag to protect yourself?!

Off to work on the reading. Hopefully by the holidays she’ll be reading at about a 3^rd-5^th grade level, by finishing the book. I might even get an hour or two of quiet every once in a while as she reads a book!! We’ll see.

~Monica

I wasn't kidding-I just found this on Anya's chair in her room.

The vet office and school.

Our little Pug, Chico, has been limping for several months now. We took him to a chiropractor, who did all he could and told us the issue was more than structural, so off to a vet we went. But this was a new vet, one Anya was instrumental in finding out about.

One day I was at the mailbox with my daughter when a woman came down the street with her Golden Retriever. I knew this dog. I met them at the park once on a trip with Anya and the dog is the most calm and sweet dog I have ever seen. The funny thing about knowing them is this, I can’t stand going to the park and meeting new people in public! Anya has changed the way I live considerably. I even found myself on a beach chair sitting on our front lawn eating ice cream out of a coffee mug the other night at dusk as Anya ran around with Chico. This is so not the pre-Anya Monica. I again was talking to new people who know her and then later meet me. Anyway, Annie and her owner were passing by and came over to our side of the street to talk to Anya, of course. Anya chatted about bringing Chico outside to meet Annie and I commented that his leg hurt and he should stay in the house. Turns out the dog owner and her husband are chiropractors and she suggested a vet that would do acupuncture in addition to other treatments. So, we went.

Turns out the dog has an injured disc, which affects his walking, as well as cancer (a small tumor on his neck) and we are going for treatments twice a month for the leg-as for the cancer, we're just going to see how that develops. Well, guess who was enthralled with the vet’s office? We had to meet all the animals in the waiting room, learn their name, age, sex and why they were there. Again, more talking to strangers for me. Ah, my life with Anya. There was an emergency with a dog and Anya was very worried. When we got into the patient room, she asked me to pray for the dog and its owner! 

The techs and vet are fascinated by Anya’s intuitiveness with the animals. They even let her go into the back room to see the animals and were amazed that the resident cat walked over to her since it generally hates people. I have a feeling they would let her come in once or twice a month to help clean up or something like that, they just are so interested in her learning about how to work with the animals. I imagine she may work there as her first job too someday.

As we work on learning to read, there has never been motivation to work at it. Now there is. Anya told her brothers, “First I have to finish high school then I can go to school for vet techs or for vets.” Speaking of school, it looks like we found one that may work next year. But first you must know, Anya is terrified of going to school. Basically, she has bonded well with me and doesn’t want to be separated. Also, she knows she is behind and sees what older kids do for school work and it is just scary. We’ve told her that she doesn’t have to go to school any time soon and not to worry. We’ve never told her that she would go to a specific school either. The whole idea is just kind of hanging out there, undetermined, in the future somewhere.

A friend told me about a hybrid home school that teaches a classical education. The students go to the school Wednesday through Friday and do the rest of the work at home on Monday and Tuesday. There is the ability to be in different grade level classes in the different subjects with ease, so she could be in 4th grade math and 7th grade history. I dropped off a telescope at the school and wanted Anya to just see where it was, to ease her into the idea. We had already had the founding family over for dinner and a swim so they could meet Anya in a familiar environment to her, so when we visited the school, Anya knew the teacher. He asked us into the class, literature for 6^th-8^th grade, and we sat in there for 15 minutes or so observing. Anya was lying on my lap near the end of visit and she looked up at me. With a tired, sort of resigned sigh, she said, “School is gonna be really hard for me.”

Matt and I took Anya to a few parks to take a “school picture” for the grandparents and us to hang on our walls. It took me forever to get her calm, dressed and just so for the adventure. The lighting was really bad and the photos didn’t look good at all. In one set, her eyes looked like black dots. Yesterday, we went to a BBQ with friends, and one dear friend, Bob Chezem, took a few shots of her for me. These had great lighting, but she was in an I-don't-want-people-looking-at-me mode, so here are the results!

 Oh well, there are plenty of years left for more school pictures!

~Monica

Library cards...

You may remember that Anya has boxes that we check off with a check mark to use for reminding about listening to parents. The other day I made her a chore chart for the morning so it wasn’t all about me telling her to do this or do that, but that it was an inanimate object that requested it. As she ate breakfast and cleared her plate, I realized that I couldn’t use a check mark in the boxes because that was reserved for bad behavior. So, I quickly put an X in the first two boxes. She fed the dog and got dressed and wanted to fill in the boxes herself (I used words and clip art pictures so she could find the chores). I looked later at the boxes for the morning and she had filled them in with letters (and sounds from her reading lessons), because X is a letter. There was sh and t and p. All indicating she had finished her jobs. So funny how her mind processes all this new information!

At the end of August, Dave took Anya to the Ventura  County Fair and they went to the Beach Boys concert. She called me from Dave’s cell just before the concert started and was excited to tell me that the Beach Boys were going to actually come out live on the stage, it wasn’t just about listening to a CD!!

I came home from running errands yesterday and Scott was watching Anya swim in the pool. She had the rope we initially used to give her a visual clue about where the pool got deeper and was pulling it across the pool. This is what I heard, “Okay kids, stay on that side, go over there, it will be safe. Listen to me kids, listen to me!! WHIRRRRRR, (a sound she made for a whistle) time to get out kids. Do what I say, I am the library card.” Yes ladies and gentlemen, we are teaching Anya a different version of English. Okay, a few pieces of information that will help you understand.

1. Several months ago we went to the Thousand Oaks Library and got Anya a card with her picture on it. You would have thought it was her driver’s license she was so proud!

2. Anya will not call the library the library, it is called the library card.

3. I guess the card has an image of an oak tree on it for the city of Thousand Oaks.

4. Scott, her brother, is a lifeguard with the park and rec department of Thousand Oaks.

5. We have gone swimming at Scott’s public pool while he was on duty.

6. One day, Scott came out to go to work and was wearing a polo with the city logo on it. Anya exclaimed. “Hey! You have the library card on your shirt!”

So now, you can plainly see why playing “lifeguard”, which is a weird thing in and of itself, is called playing “library card”. If A=B and B=C then of course A=C. Yay! She’s ready for algebra!!

~Monica