Tuesday 19 May 2015

Aspergers and partying at home!

Beginning to regret having my 40th birthday party at home.

Ethan is single-handedly turning our back room into a nightclub with an excess of lights, lasers and twinkly stars all over the place.

And he's just announced that he's going to put a padlock and hazard tape over our trampoline to stop drunken revelers from bouncing on it. Feel like a teenager about to have a party with my well-meaning but embarrassingly uptight dad.

Also, unless he cheers up, it's going to be like hosting a party with Victor Meldrew. He's been totally miserable to live with the last few days. Shouting at the kids, speaking aggressively to me over little things like whether the hamster needs to go in his exercise ball and managing to turn even positive, kind happenings (my sister offered to have the kids for us so we can pack for holiday) into something negative ('We both need to be packing that day. You can't go driving the kids over to Rotherham'). In actual fact, I think the issue is over his mid-life-crisis of a car that he doesn't want me to drive which I would need to drive if I was to take the kids to Rotherham so that he could be packing our family car with the camping stuff. The car in question is the ridiculous purchase that almost ruined us that I never agreed with him buying, that we don't all fit in, that we can't afford and that now, I've discovered, I'm not even allowed to drive!


Happy birthday me!

Thursday 14 May 2015

Aspergers and having two of everything!



Our house is full of money...

We have change everywhere – in pretty much every drawer of the house and in both cars. It can’t be touched or, heaven forbid, used. It’s our back-up money which, it seems, is destined to a life of sitting idly in a drawer doing nothing. Knowing it’s there – that each drawer in the house is fully stocked with loose change, somehow brings security for Ethan. Personally, I’d feel more secure if we gathered all of this change up and used it to pay off at least some of our overdraft. 

Still, that’s the way it is and, I must admit, the emergency stash of pound coins in the car have come in useful more than once (even if I do get told off by Ethan for actually using the money!) 

What’s rather more frustrating is his habit of having to have two of everything...

A toothbrush in both bathrooms (plus a spare in the bathroom drawer), deodorant in both bathrooms, his own special towels in each bathroom, two pairs of sunglasses – one for each car, boxes of tissues everywhere (in the car, on the kitchen side, in the front room, on the hall table, on his bedside table, in the bathroom), two cars, two microwaves, two sheds...

You get the idea. It’s a small matter but why he can’t pick his toothbrush up from one bathroom and take it into the other is beyond me, same goes for his sunglasses. He lost a pair recently. We had a couple of days of frustrated, moodiness when he couldn’t find them. I knew, from previous experience, that they would turn up. And they did – but not before he, unable to live in the knowledge that he only had one locatable pair of sunglasses, that things weren’t right – bought a new pair. The next day I found his old pair, without even looking. That pair has now become his ‘house sunglasses’...for those days when the sun coming through the windows in our north facing house is just too bright!