Book 68: With great power comes great responsibility.

I actually finished Regional Office something like a week ago, but various things have kept me from posting about it until now, including but not limited to:

-- Mr F has been having a bad time again

-- I have been tired

Those two things are hand-in-hand, really, so a bit about them.

Mr F had a relapse of sleeping, or not sleeping, to be more precise. Starting about 10 days ago, he began having more and more trouble going to sleep, and even though we were tough-loving it and making him stay in there it was troublesome, because he would pound on the door and wake up Mr Bunches, and then twice he wet the bed too, and we couldn't tell if he simply couldn't hold it or if it was a protest (which he's done in the past.)(I'm going to point out that on both occasions he'd been taken to the bathroom just prior to bed and hadn't gone).

Then, while we were trying to figure out that, Mr F also developed tics again. The last time he had any bad tics was something like a year or two ago, when he spent the week doing involuntary eye-rolls, up and to the right, every 7-10 seconds.  The neurologist said that there wasn't really a treatment for them that was necessary, especially because they'd abated by the time he got in to see a doctor about them.

Over the summer, he developed a tic of a sort of a rhythmic breathing, a kind of three-quick-inhales-two-puffs out, over and over, but that went away after a few days each time.  The doctors figured it was a reaction to stressors in his life. What stresses him out? Everything, maybe.

This time around, the tics are much worse.  MUCH. He has them all over: his legs jerk, his arms jerk, his head snaps back, he inhales, his chest clenches.

He started this past Sunday night. He'd been sort of restless and edgy Sunday afternoon, and kept it up even after I'd taken him out to ride his Green Machine down the hill a bunch of times. So he and I and Mr Bunches went for a walk around the block to help burn off some steam, as I like to say, before bed. During the walk he started getting tics and by the time he went to bed they were full force.

They've not gone away since, going on 5 full days now. We took him to the pediatrician, who prescribed a very mild sedative. "It won't stop the tics," he said, "But it might help with any underlying anxiety."  We'd decided that maybe this was more stress, or anxiety, because Mr Bunches is an anxious kid, so why wouldn't Mr F be, too?

A kid who doesn't talk is hard to pin down. We get so much information from people by talking, by the tone of their voice, by the words they use or don't use. Try spending a day communicating without using words at all, no mouthing words or writing them or pantomiming: all you can do is point and pull. That's how Mr F talks.

When someone's quiet, you tend to think there's nothing wrong with them. Anxious people cry or tell you they are upset or ask a lot of questions. Mr F sits quietly, about 90% of time time, and then explodes into a reaction of one sort or another: laughing or crying or running from room to room or something. He might mix those in with each other, so it's hard to tell what is on his mind. But just sitting and not talking? That might be that he's content. Or it might be that he's suffering crippling anxiety and is off in his corner because everything's got him upset.

He does get some things through, if you pay attention. We've realized he's afraid of the dark: he wouldn't come near the stairs at one point, where I was sitting, because I didn't have the stairway light on and it was night so the stairs and upstairs hall were shrouded in darkness. When I turned on the light he came right over. He sometimes panics when he does something he doesn't understand on the computer, like opening a new tab accidentally so the video he's watching is still playing but he can't see it. We know these things, which in the ocean of information you usually know about a person, is like trying to guess what a book is about by being shown two random paragraphs.

We made an appointment with the neurologist. We called on the 27th, with a referral from the regular doc. The neurologist couldn't see him until October 10th.

 "Don't you have anything sooner?" Sweetie asked.

"It's only about a week and a half away," the nurse said.

 I didn't point out that we were calling at 2 pm to set up an appointment for 2:30 pm 13 days from now, which made it far closer to two weeks than 1 1/2 weeks.

When Mr F rides in the car with me at night his he sometimes leans on my shoulder when he gets tired, and I can feel his arm jerking back and forth. I try to tell him some things to help. If you can just relax, I say, you'll go to sleep.  People don't have tics in their sleep; a tic is your body's voluntary reaction to an involuntary stimulus. To feel what a tic is like, try not to blink for as long as you can: that's a tic, when you finally blink. Telling someone to relax is never helpful. If a person needs to be told to relax, they are probably in a situation where they cannot easily relax. Telling Mr F to relax is worse; we don't even know if that's the problem.

Mr F and I listened to Regional Office on audiobook on our rides, before the tics started. The book is about a place called "The Regional Office," a sort of shadowy organization that recruits superpowered women to fight various forces of evil. The book, as it suggests, is about an attack on the Regional Office, and the story begins with the attack, and then jumps back and forth to the start of the Office, the history of various important characters in the book, and the actual attack.

It's a pretty good book -- funny at times, thoughtful at times -- that sort of reminded me of Nick Harkaway-light, a book that manages to take some fairly serious and sometimes grim or gruesome or frightening scenes and make them feel almost lighthearted.  It's got a quirky feel to it, almost, but not in an annoying way.

It's in the same vein as Soon I Will Be Invincible or The Rook: the 'what if superheroes were just sort of here and nobody made a big deal of it' line of fiction, but doesn't get as detailed or weighty as either of those books, while still not shying away from the sorts of themes all superhero stories seem to trade in.

What I kept thinking as we listened to the book is that the underlying theme really was that being a superhero, and the kind of life having superpowers would lead you to have, aren't that great. Lots of the women in the book are troubled in one way or the other, and it's not clear, really, who is good and who is evil; sometimes the same people seem to be both. That shifting sense of morality makes it hard to root for or against a side, an ambiguity which works well in the book.

The characters are troubled by their powers and how because of them, they are set aside from the rest of the world, at times, even as they take the powers for granted or revel in them. They're people like anyone else, people who want connections and interesting lives and work that means something. They have complex motivations that can't be figured out: Sarah, one of the main characters, gets a series of truths revealed to her about her connection to the Regional Office, and how she reacts to that, and to the attack, and to her life, is somehow inexplicably perfect in its inexplicable imperfection: nothing she does really makes sense if you were trying to create a linear person, a literary character who reacts to things in the way literary characters react, but Sarah (and the others) feel a bit more real than a typical literary character: the book keeps caroming off into unexpected directions, feelings that don't usually crop up in superhero stories about attacks on skyscrapers in Manhattan.

Mr F and I finished Regional Office about a day or two before his tics started, before his bad week this week left everyone feeling drawn and tired as Friday drew near, before Mr F began screaming, sometimes, in frustration as his arms and legs and head involuntarily swing and pull and draw.

Superhero stories are an escape; we dream of people that have greater powers than us and can transform the world, save us from threats that otherwise would be the end of us all. If you ask people what superpower they would like to have, people will tell you they want to fly, or be superstrong, or turn invisible. If you ask them what they would do with that power, they'll say they'd help refugees or foil crimes.

Nobody ever says they want the superpower to cure disease. Nobody would ever use their incredibly powerful armor with supertechnology to take someone for a walk to help them settle down.

It took a week for Mr F and I to listen to the whole Regional Office book, and during that time, we didn't worry about anything. This was, after all, before the tics began, back in the good old days when we were just us. We rode on our nightly rides, listening to cool stories of lasers and robot arms and flying buzzsaws and flamethrowers. We cruised through the college campus and looked out the windows and watched fall become its own season as summer faded away.

In superhero stories, there is always a moment where you can't go back. In Regional Office, there is a character, Henry, who hits just such a moment (I won't tell you what it is.)  For Spiderman, it was when the thief he could have stopped killed Uncle Ben. For Batman it was when his parents were shot. There comes a time in every superhero story when the path ahead is opened and the past behind is closed off forever, and a life, or lives, have changed.

What would it be like, if you were Spiderman, or Batman, if you knew you had this power? Could you ever relax, truly? Every moment that you spent sitting around playing video games or reading or just spending extra time in the shower, someone might be dying out there and you could have saved them.  Even worse, what would it be like to realize that no matter how much you did, people were still going to die? You couldn't be on duty 24 hours a day. Somewhere, sometime, would come a thing you wished you could have helped with, but couldn't do it.

That's the real no-turning-back point in superhero stories, I think: the point where a hero realizes that this is his or her life from now on, that every moment spent not saving someone comes with a cost, when the number of things that you haven't done begins to pile up. Superman and Batman in their fortresses have trophies of their victories. Mr Incredible has his little home office with letters from kids on the wall.

Nobody has a room in which they commemorate the dam they didn't get to in time, the train that jumped the tracks in India while they were in England. Nobody wants to walk past a room where the closed door is a reminder of all the things you couldn't do.

In Regional Office, some of the characters seem to realize this (and some seem to embody it), this principal that being given the power to do something means that you can never again not do something; and, equally, being put in the position of having to do something imposes a similar burden. If I came to you and said from here on out, you are the heart surgeon in town; someone gets a heart attack, you have to save them, you might rail against your fate and say you're not qualified and you don't want this burden -- but when someone starts having a heart attack, it's your job to do it, and if you don't, it will wear on you. Even if you didn't ask for the position, even if you don't really know what to do: it's now your job.

Would you make that trade? Would I?  Would you want to have superpowers, to be superstrong, to be superfast, to be able to fly or change elements by waving your hand, if it meant that you would never truly be free to not do that? If it meant that you had to try to do something, every time, regardless of whether or not you were even capable of fixing it? In Regional Office, one of the characters, Rose, is plucked off the streets to become a superpowered assassin and attack the Regional Office; later on, she complains that this robbed her of the life she was supposed to have -- but forgets that she wanted to come, wanted to escape her life, tried to have the superlife that she says was forced on her.

Nobody can impose that kind of burden on a person from outside. We can only impose it on ourselves. In superhero stories, sometimes, a radioactive spider or a bolt of lightning in a lab creates the power, but it is always the hero's conscience that imposes the duty.

I watched Mr F last night, as we drove listening to our new book. He stared straight ahead blankly. He had his three forks, his tappers, in his left hand. His arm jerked involuntarily and one fork fell to the floor of the car. He looked down at it, and then just tiredly looked back up. His arm jerked again. When we came to a red light, I leaned over and handed him his fork. A few minutes later, it fell again when his arm jerked again.

What if, I wondered, he's like this all his life? What if these never stop this time? One of the scariest stories I ever heard, and it was true, was a man who had the hiccups for decades. He had to eat all his meals liquified, because he couldn't chew and swallow easily. He got the hiccups one time and they stayed.

What if Mr F can never sit and relax?  I wondered.  By then we were driving around the Capitol, and heading back home, the ride half-over.  We didn't know what had set off this latest round of tics, and didn't know how long they would last or how bad they might get. We don't know anything about them, except that they are there, and they are causing Mr F distress. We took him to the doctor. We give him his medicine. We make new appointments. We try to help him calm down. His head jerks to the side, his arm flutters, his legs kick, and we drive on through the night.

Once, on a road trip, we asked each other what superpower we'd like. The Boy said he'd want superstrength. I said I would probably want to be invulnerable. Sweetie said she'd like to be able to read minds.

"Why?" we asked her.

"Because then I could read Mr F's mind and know what he's thinking," she said.

Last night, when we were almost home, Mr F's arm jerked so hard it shook him. He leaned over and hit his head over and over, and I got my hand in between his fist and his forehead so I could take the brunt of it. It hurt; he weighs 140 pounds, much of it muscle. Invulnerability would sure have helped, but I wished for a different superpower right then.

"I wish I could trade with you," I said, "And I'd take the tics."

I couldn't do that. All I could do was put him to bed, check on him whenever he knocked, get him his goldfish crackers at 11:30, try to help him relax, and then lay in my own bedroom, thinking about all the things that lay behind that closed door down the hall, all the things I can't change.

So Aaron Rodgers and Greg Jennings took in the Henry Vilas Zoo on Trick Or Treat Day!* (A Photo Essay)(Life With Unicorns)

* Not actually Aaron Rodgers and Greg Jennings.

Yes, I used the word "blogonym." But that's not the point of this post. (Life With Unicorns)

In a day that has had its ups and downs so far, but which was in danger of beginning a quick downward spiral, I was rescued by this text from Sweetie, which I just now noticed, and which I'll quote verbatim (other than substituting Mr F's blogonym):

Mr F just counted to 10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1-10!!!!!"!!"

I'm guessing at the number of exclamation points Sweetie used, as they're very small and hard to count on the actual text.

This bit of good news comes on the heels of Mr F also learning to say "Set... Go" when we say "Ready."

So things are getting talky around our house.

Also, as you can see from the picture on this post, Mr F has recently learned to swing correctly. I'd like to take credit for that development, but he did it by mimicking a girl on a swing next to him the other day.

It's like we have our own TV show! Only without commercials. Or sponsors. Or "production values." (Life With Unicorns.)

It's here! The video I alluded to in the classic post "The Pancakes Of Time Get Their Revenge."

I finally figured out how to load up ... or upload, as we techies say... videos from my phone onto the Internet, and all I had to do was create a completely new Youtube account because I was completely unable to access my old Youtube account after Google acquired Youtube, even though I have a Google account, and Youtube said I could use my Google account, so the point is that eventually there will be no new email addresses because I will be using every conceivable combination of numbers and letters to bring you stunning high-quality video like the following, which I cleverly call:

Mr Bunches Cooking Pancakes.

It's kind of a twist ending! (Life With Unicorns)

 Looking for a post? It's been removed and can now be found in my book "Life With Unicorns." Look for it on Amazon and Kindle. Click here for a list of all my books.

Sometimes, people just plain SUCK. (Life With Unicorns.)

We live near Lake Mendota. Not on the lake, but within shouting distance of it, were one inclined to shout at a lake, which I never do.

Behind our house runs a "private road," Waconia Lane, in Middleton, Wisconsin. It has about 15 houses on it. The road runs from where it intersects our house to the lake. Here's a Google map of it:



The yellow line is Waconia Lane; the red arrow will be important in a minute.

Waconia Lane, as I said, is a "private road." It runs, though, right behind our backyard, and there's a gap in the hedge where some next-door neighbor kids used to cut through (before we lived there; those kids are grown now.)

About 2 years ago, I started walking with Mr F and Mr Bunches around the neighborhood -- and we'd always walk out our backyard, and down to where you see the red arrow on the map. At that point on Waconia Lane, the road deadends, and there's a small grassy embankment with some rocks on it and a stairway to a pier. We'd go there and look at the lake and I'd point out boats or ducks, and the boys would sometimes throw a rock or two in. That was it; then we'd turn around and walk back to the "public" roads, around our little neighborhood, and home.

Last summer, two or three times, the lady whose house is right at the end of the road came out to talk to us, introducing us to her two dogs and saying "hi" to Mr F and Mr Bunches.

This year, when the weather got warm, we started that again -- but the very first time out, some guy up the street came out on his deck and yelled at us.

"You're not supposed to be doing that," he said.

I said, politely "We've spoken to the lady whose yard this is, and she doesn't mind." (Keep in mind, we do not go down the stairs or onto anyone's property, other than the few feet of grass at the top of the hill.)

"That lake belongs to all of us! You shouldn't be throwing rocks into it," he said, somewhat bizarrely.

I got Mr F and Mr Bunches and we left that day, not wanting trouble. But the boys like that walk, and so I took another step: I drafted up a letter and distributed it to the people on that road. This is that letter:



I didn't hear anything back until today, when I got this:


You know, I never said anything when the "private road" people let their dogs run through the neighborhood, including in my yard, and I never said anything when the lady behind my house came walking all along my backyard frontage removing things (including, I think, wildflowers that I liked.)

But I did now, and emailed Mr. Brzezinski back that he's to remind his people to stay off my property, too.

I'll show those stupid Star-Bellied Sneetches.

As Seen On TV... hopefully someday? (Life With Unicorns)

Sometimes, I consider abandoning my dream of putting Mr F and Mr Bunches onto a Disney TV series so that I can retire, and consider instead simply taking their ideas, patenting them, and then making millions without having to meet the Jonas Brothers.

Ideas like the Bucket O'Blankets, (TM), modeled here by Mr F.


Don't steal my idea: That's a (somewhat worse for the wear) plastic tub that we use to store the multiple blankets that the Babies! use -- they have five or six different ones, each used according to mood, so sometimes it's a Spongebob blanket day, while other days call for a simple red or blue -- and in this case, the tub has a few blankets in it, making it perfect for Mr F to recline in and read his favorite book.

And don't lie: you'd love to have something just like that. I know I would.

Click here for more Life With Unicorns posts.

The Grasshopper and the Ice Cream (Thinking The Lions)

I talk a lot on here, now, about the twins and the trials and tribulations of raising them.

But you should not forget that Sweetie and I also have older children, older children who aren't children at all any more because they're all over the age of 18, but who still somehow end up needing almost constant attention, and can derail an entire day by making me prove a point, as Oldest did yesterday, when I got home a little early from a trial and was looking forward to relaxing for a bit, maybe going jogging at the club and then, possibly, getting to finish up the book The Infinities, which I'm going to tell you I'm only finishing because Sweetie goaded me into it and because according to my Kindle I'm 88% of the way through it, and you can't quit on a book 88% of the way through it.

That's Oldest, helping
Mr F eat some french fries.
Mr Bunches and I are looking down at
her from inside a playland. The reason
this picture is here will eventually be explained.

Can you?

I didn't get to do any of that last night, including not getting to answer the question of whether a book can truly become so bad that with only 10% of it left to read, I might actually stop reading it. I didn't get to do that because instead Oldest called with a crisis

Oldest has been in a crisis for a week, or for 24 years, depending on how you're counting; the current iteration of the crisis has to do with the fact that her car busted a belt and it'll cost $3,000 to fix it; Oldest doesn't have $3,000 and has been going through all kinds of contortions and schemes to get a new car, something that's made more complicated by the fact that she doesn't actually have a driver's license right now, for reasons that are too long to go into in this post.

I became aware that Oldest was having a crisis when, after my trial ended early, and ended, too, decently enough that I would get to spend the 2+ hour drive home enjoying myself and listening to This American Life and eating cold pizza instead of spending the 2+ hour drive home fuming or fretting or reiterating things that had gone badly at the trial; the long drive home from a trial that has turned out poorly is the lawyer's version of the walk of shame, only I don't carry my shoes in my hands, and while I probably still would have ate the cold pizza, I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much, and I certainly wouldn't have begun the drive by actually eating the apple that I had in my lunch, too. When something goes wrong during the day, that apple, or vegetable, or whatever other sop I'm making to my health, is generally the first to go, and it's likely that had the trial not gone as well as it did, I'd have simply tossed the apple out the window and focused on the pizza while trying to distract myself from how badly the trial had gone.

As it was, I was in a good mood, it was earlier than I'd expected, the roads were fine, I had podcasts a-plenty on my iPod to listen to, and thus I set out on the drive in high spirits, spirits which lasted until I turned on my cell phone and got bombarded with messages that Oldest had left me: voicemails and at least two texts asking me to please call her please.

It was the double please that really put me on edge. Oldest doesn't call me in the first place; it's not like she just calls up and says "Hey, how's it going?" She's 24, and we have little in common beyond being part of the same family. So when she calls me, period, it's usually because something's going wrong. The calls almost always start like this:

Me: Hello.

Oldest [grimly, in a monotone]: Hey.

Me: What's going on?

Oldest [even more monotonedly, with an extra slab of grim on it]: I have to ask you a question.

The question is never... thank God... actually as serious as it sounds like it's going to be after that introduction. It never begins with something really ominous like "So I was googling how to dismember a corpse..." or "Did you know that there were not one, but two heavy metal bands staying in a hotel near my apartment?" or anything like that. Instead, it usually revolves around one of three topics:

1. Oldest needing money, and assuring me that eventually she's going to enroll in school.

2. Oldest needing money really badly, and assuring me that eventually she's going to enroll in school, or

3. Oldest asking me if she can sue somebody, which I take as a sign that she needs money and which I refuse to answer until she assures me that eventually she's going to enroll in school.

Put simply, Oldest always needs money, and Oldest, up until the current car crisis, has always found money, in the most serendipitous of ways. Seriously: I have on many, many occasions told Oldest that she needs to attend church far more often than she actually does, because she really owes God a lot of favors. In that sense, Oldest is the exact opposite of The Boy, who obviously has irritated The Universe so much that The Universe now has it in for The Boy.

Oldest has always come into money at the most opportune of times, thereby preventing me and/or God/The Universe from ever teaching her a lesson about the desirability of saving money and planning for a rainy day.

Remember the story of The Grasshopper and The Ants, and how the Grasshopper parties all summer while the Ants worked, and eventually winter came and the Grasshopper froze to death while starving?

That's not actually how it went, of course; in reality, the Grasshopper was welcomed into the Ants' hill and fed, thereby teaching the Grasshopper the all-important lesson that not planning for the future or working hard will result in some momentary discomfort which will soon be alleviated by well-meaning, hardworking individuals. So why bother working, at all? Or why bother working harder than is necessary to avoid just that momentary discomfort that you'll suffer through until the Ants open the door?

I've never understood that fable.

In any event, Oldest exemplifies the Grasshopper, only she's the Grasshopper if the Grasshopper had a bunch of well-meaning relatives who will inadvertently chip in to help her out, and if the Grasshopper kept stumbling across winning lottery tickets left on the ground, thereby frustrating the Ants' attempts to ever get the message to sink in:

Ants: Listen, Grasshopper, it's all well and good that you've been lucky, but this is the fourth straight winter we've had to save your butt.

Grasshopper [scratching off Instant Win Lottery Tickets]: Hey, I just won $10,000!

Ants: Sigh.

Here's a picture of Mr F at that McDonald's. I'm getting
around to mentioning why we were there. Don't rush me.

Oldest once had a bunch of friends planning on going to Great America, a day that would cost about $40 to go on. She tried to borrow the money from us, but Sweetie and I put our feet down and said no. She hadn't saved, and hadn't been working, and we were not going to loan her money to go have a day at an amusement park because that would send the exact wrong message.

Oldest moped around for a week or so, bugging us over and over, and I finally said I would pay, not loan, her the money she wanted. I said if she helped me in the yard, I'd pay her $10 an hour and she could earn as much as she wanted to get to Great America, and she said, and I quote:

"I don't do yard work."

So I decided tough, and let it be, and Sweetie and I were somewhat gleefully-- don't judge me, you're not a parent -- awaiting the day that Oldest would have to watch her friends go off to Great America while she sat home, learning a lesson, but the very day she said she didn't do yardwork, her aunt called her up and said: "I'm going to be coming to town and I remembered that I hadn't gotten you a birthday present, so I'm going to drop that off for you."

And she gave her the money Oldest needed to go to Great America.

And I trimmed the lilac bushes.

And, I must say, I did it badly. But that's not the point, and that wasn't really Oldest's fault. I'm just terrible at yard work. Those lilacs have never really recovered, and I'm pretty sure that, too, is on the list of reasons my neighbors are putting on the secret petition I suspect they're circulating to force me to move.

Another time, Oldest overdrew her bank account... by $800. That wasn't a typo: EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS. Some bank, somewhere, had given a 19-year-old... no, not just any 19-year-old but the only 19-year-old whose immaturity even approached how immature I was at 19... a debit card, and had then let her, in the span of about two weeks, withdraw not only all the money of hers that was in the account, but $800 of the bank's money, too, with the result being that the bank then had to ask Oldest to pay it back, and when Oldest declined to do so on the grounds that she didn't have any money (that's why she had to use the Bank's, you see), the bank then sent a collection agency after her...

... a collection agency that promptly violated federal law collecting against her...

... by illegally calling me about her debt...

...without, apparently, knowing that I make my living suing debt collectors for violating that law.

The end result of that being that I was able to not only avoid her paying back the debt, but I also got her $2,000 on top of that. I'm surprised she didn't try to run up more debts after that.

(And, before you go chiding me for doing my job, keep in mind that she owed us money, too, and she used the debt collector's money to pay us back. Probably because I had the check sent to me at my law firm.)

That's been the pattern of Oldest's life, and it continued uninterrupted until this last week, when Oldest's car broke down and she was suddenly stuck without a car or the money to fix it, and she did what she always does in those situations: she called us.

Unfortunately for Oldest, Sweetie and I had made a secret vow between ourselves to never ever ever lend the kids money again, especially Oldest. That was a vow we've made before, roughly 1 jillion times, but this time we were serious, unlike the time that I swore I'd never loan Oldest money again only to then loan her $80 to buy a winter coat because I felt bad that she didn't have a winter coat, and then felt worse when Sweetie pointed out that Oldest had a perfectly good winter coat, two, in fact, she just didn't like them.

This time, in fact, not only were we serious, but we were also not in a position to go around lending people money, for anything, because not only did we just learn that we'll have to pay taxes this year instead of getting a refund, but in the exact week we learned that, we also learned that jumpropes don't flush down toilets, and that when someone tries to flush one, anyway, you're going to have to spend a week without use of that toilet while the plumber convinces you to replace it entirely with a new toilet, one he promises "could flush a football," but which, it turns out a week later, can't even flush a tiny plastic frog that one of your twins decided to send on a journey, the result being that the plumber has to make a third trip to your house to unstick the brand-new, football-but-not-frog-flushing toilet, all of which makes it very easy to not loan money to Oldest, because the plumber has all of ours.

That left Oldest scrambling for other sources of car-replacing or new-car-buying income, calling other relatives and repeatedly asking us, anyway, if maybe we could after all give her some money ("Why don't you call our plumber?" I wanted to ask her. "I know he can spare some right now.")

And that left me dreading the phone calls and texts I got from Oldest on my phone as I prepared for what should have been a nice drive home on a pleasant March 1.

Rather than call her back, unarmed, as it were, I called Sweetie to find out what was going on, and I got this, verbatim:

"She wants to talk to you because remember that accident she had where she didn't have insurance and you worked out a deal to set up a payment plan so her license wouldn't be suspended? Well she went to the DMV to find out if she could reinstate her license because she can't get insurance to buy a new car unless she has a valid driver's license, but the DMV said it wasn't just the two tickets you got taken care of for her that were holding up her license it was that she also missed a payment on the payment plan so now her license is suspended and she wants to talk to you about it."

I was quiet for a long time after that, and when Sweetie asked if I was still there, I said:

"I was just thinking about pretending that my phone had lost reception and then enjoying my drive home in peace and quiet."

But that clearly was out of the question. I can't lie to Sweetie, not even when cold pizza and This American Life are waiting for me. But I did say that I would call Oldest when I got home, and gave myself at least a little respite, and by the time I got home and re-talked it over with Sweetie and decided to call Oldest, I had a plan firmly in place:

I would bore her into not asking me for advice.

With that, I got Oldest on the phone and listened to her repeat, almost word for word, what Sweetie had said, and I then launched into a lengthy lecture about how she didn't really need a car, and how she should, instead of going through all this money-borrowing and trouble-causing and stress-inducing (for me) maneuvering to get a car, she should use this as an opportunity to change her life around and start doing something she always wanted to do. I pointed out that she'd never really liked her job and that nothing was keeping her from getting a different, maybe better job that was on a bus line and that she could then attack her problems without borrowing money, and that she could use this time to explore and find out what she really wanted to do.

I really was on a role, and I wish I'd transcribed it, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, but even aside from that reason my speech was a 40-minute thing of beauty, in which I actually said "When you've got no options in life, that's when things really get interesting," a pithy little quote that I explained means that once you think you've got no options you've got to get really creative and also that having no options frees you to do what you really want to do. Oldest, I explained, had no option but to quit her job, because she couldn't get to it anymore, which made this the perfect time to really get out there and find out what jobs she might actually like, and I compared that, rather brilliantly, to what it's like when I get onto a plane, where I've got no option but to relax and read, so I get enjoy the fact that my choices are made for me, and I can just go with the flow and do what I really wanted to do anyway but had never done.

I mentioned the plethora -- I used that word -- of options that she had, including going to school for real, and even managed to work in underwater archaeology, because you knew I would, as an example of something she hadn't even known existed and pointed out that she now knew that it did and that was proof that there were greater things out there than she could imagine if she'd just... go... try them and she could use not having a car and being forced to quit her job as an excuse.

I mentioned how she'd wanted to go to San Francisco, or open her own business, and urged her to start actually living the life she wanted to read, and she assured me that she would and then had to go.

And a little while later, texted me back. Not to thank me, but to say that she'd made up her mind to go apply for a job as a waitress at TGI Friday's, but the bus wouldn't get her there until 8:30 p.m., so could I come over there and give her a ride so she could fill out an application?

All of which is how I ended up not reading the last 12% of The Infinities but instead hopped into the car with Mr F and Mr Bunches in tow, heading over to Oldest's to pick her up so she could chase her dreams by applying for a job as a waitress, something that took less time to do than the drive over to get her, and, afterwards, we were heading back to drop her off when she asked if we could go for ice cream.

"I'll pay," she offered, but as I very much doubted that she had the money to pay, I said that I'd buy but that we were going to go to a McDonald's where they had a playplace, so that the Babies! could get out of the car and have some fun.

And we did have fun -- at least, Mr Bunches and I did. While Mr F (who's not much of a one to climb around in cramped labyrinths that smell of feet and diapers) hung out with Oldest and ate french fries, Mr Bunches and I climbed through the tunnels, heading down the spiral slide, waving and hollering to Oldest and Mr F (and taking their pictures through the windows in the playground) and climbing up to the top where they had not just a jet to sit in but a helicopter, too:

Is it really a helicopter?
Or a manifestation of this?

and while we did that, Oldest sat down below and kept an eye on Mr F, and kept an eye on her ice cream, and no doubt pondered whether she should have taken career advice from a guy who was even at that moment telling her that the helicopter in that photo above looked exactly like the interior of a TIE Fighter from Star Wars.

I, on the other hand, wasn't wondering that at all. Instead, as I clambered around the maybe-TIE fighter jungle gym, I was struck by the thought that maybe, Oldest had again worked the system: What if, I wondered getting free ice cream had been her goal all along, and she'd figured this all out as a way to get me to buy it for her?

********************************

UPDATE: I actually wrote this all on Wednesday afternoon, but didn't post it right away. On Wednesday night, I found out from Sweetie that Oldest doesn't intend to actually leave her job at all. So it really was all just a scam to get some free ice cream.

it's like having dessert for dinner. (Life with unicorns)

While Sweetie, Oldest and Middle eat bland Italian food at Olive Garden on their night out, Mr Bunches and Mr F have helped me make this:



And, since they don't LIKE pancakes, it's all mine. (They're having cheese puffs and bananas.)

I didn't get to read the paper yesterday morning. (Life With Unicorns.)

Looking for a post? It's been removed and can now be found in my book "Life With Unicorns." Look for it on Amazon and Kindle. Click here for a list of all my books.

More time at the library (Life With Unicorns.)

Looking for a post? It's been removed and can now be found in my book "Life With Unicorns." Look for it on Amazon and Kindle. Click here for a list of all my books.

Life With Unicorns: Table Of Contents

Life With Unicorns is what I call my series of posts about raising our two youngest children, Mr F and Mr Bunches, both of whom have autism.

Here's the original essay about how I came up with that title -- and why I decided to start writing overtly about this topic: Life With Unicorns.

And here's the rest of them:

Earth's Greatest Superhero Eats Some Cheesepuffs, Everyone Cheers.

The many faces of Mr F

How much unusual is too much unusual?

Don't worry, chicken, you're going.

One night Mr F somewhat unwillingly helped me make Rice Krispie treats. (Photo Essay!)

The Partially Edible Snowman and the Happy Bear

What Mr Bunches is watching, 1.

How about "I'm feeling a little arjvmydgs?"

Chair Pioneer, 6.

World's Youngest Daredevil Leaps Over Kid!

Mr F does not like slides.

I give you People's Sexiest Man Alive, 2027.

Mr F likes his red blanket.

We actually never got near many pumpkins at the pumpkin farm.

The Adventures of Mr F Stardust and the Gargoyles from Mars... or something like that.

Mr F does NOT like blue jeans.

Chair Pioneer, 5

You know what's a match for a good blaster? Bustin' a move. (video!)

The Greatest Chase Scene Ever Filmed (Video!)

The NEXT Greatest Chase Scene Ever Filmed (Video!)

Mr Bunches covers "Sweet Talk Sweet Talk" by The New Pornographers. (Video!)

InstrumentQuest!
Part One

Mr Bunches is camera shy, which poses problems for my career plans for the Babies! (VIDEOS!)

Texts from Sweetie.

Mr Bunches sings Numa Numa. (VIDEO!)

Nailed it!

From here on out, "9" shall be pronounced "mab." (VIDEO!)

Milestones for Mr F!

A pep talk for Mr Bunches ends with a twist.

Today you will learn a word in a new language.

The Pancakes of Time Get Their Revenge
UPDATE: Watch the video!


As seen on TV... hopefully someday

Imagine not knowing what "fun" means.

Crayon tourists.

I didn't get to read the paper yesterday morning.

More time at the library.

Roosters don't live in rainforests, for one thing.

My desk gets reorganized.
Indian Bunnies Wearing Crowns.

Mr Bunches hits the red crayon jackpot!

Chair Pioneer, four.

Mr F's abstract art.

Chair Pioneer, part three.

Also, we did eventually clean up that room.

Be careful what you promise, or you might end up playing in the rain in a diaper.

Singing a song you don't know the words to.

Doing the cookie boogie.

Mr F helps me eat pizza a little faster.

As it turns out, he DID change into a different outfit.

X is for Dog.

Life With Unicorns.

Who knew unicorns could be so clumsy?

Not me.

Unicorns being clumsy is but one of the many things I've learned in the past four years, 74 days, 17 hours and 57 minutes (as I write this.)

First, I'll tell you what happened and then I'll tell you what I want to tell you about that and then I'll tell you why I'm telling you about all this, but let me preface it with this:

If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you know of my two youngest kids, Mr F and Mr Bunches.

But you don't know them.

After this, you will know them, the way I know them.

But first, The Story of The Clumsy Unicorns And The Library Pottery.

I took Mr F and Mr Bunches to the library about two weeks ago. We tend to go once a week, because they both like to read the pop-up books that the library has and look at the bearded dragon lizard the library has and walk around the giant oval carpet with the letters-of-the-alphabet border, and I like to take them there because taking the Babies! to the library seems to me to be better parenting than 90% of the other activities I do with them -- because 90% of the other activities I do with them involve me chasing them around the house and eventually picking them up and spinning them until we're all so dizzy we might fall into the grandfather clock that I had to bolt to the wall when they were two.

(It's okay. That clock hasn't worked in years. It's just for show.)

We had been at the library for a while, and Mr F was getting restless. I could tell he was getting restless because he was starting to wander more, going off into the stacks and making me come find him, and, when I could convince him to stay in the kids' area, he'd pick up books and drop them on the floor, a sure sign that he was bored and about to get crabby.

Mr Bunches was still happily reading the book where, if you slide a tab out of the page, various animals will go from black-and-white to full color, so I tried to stay a little longer, sitting Mr F on my lap and trying to interest him in one of the computer games the library has for kids. But he squirmed out and took off his jacket and jogged off to the teen section, and I decided that we'd pack it in.

I got Mr F back and put his jacket back on, zipping him up. He didn't want to wear it any longer. Mr F is a stubborn little boy, and when he decides something, it's very hard to make him change his mind. He'd decided he didn't want to wear his jacket, and I tried to convince him that he should wear it because it was drizzly outside and we were going to probably have to sit outside on the bench for a few minutes and wait for Sweetie, who'd dropped us off while she went to run errands.

While I wasn't relishing sitting outside with the Babies!, I did recognize that they weren't going to last longer and I didn't want to create a disturbance, so I worked on Mr F and got him to get his jacket on and zipped up.

That was no easy task, because I don't speak Mr F's language and he doesn't speak mine.

He wouldn't look at me, which is a bad sign, and he tried to hit me, which is also a bad sign, but I got his jacket on and zipped up and got Mr Bunches to give up on his book and went to check out the book and CD I was taking out.

There's a self-checkout that ordinarily Mr F helps me with. He stood by me, this day, for only a second, and then let go of my hand. As I scanned my library card in, I looked to see what he was doing, and saw that he was walking over to a small display where two little pieces of art, clay pots glazed in bright colors, stood.

I stopped what I was doing and called his name and said "Don't," but he picked one up to look at it.

He didn't mean any harm.

He just wanted to look at the clay pot, which was interesting to him (I'm assuming) not just because it was shiny and bright-colored and unusually shaped but also because at our house, we don't have any knick-knacks around.

Not a single one, unless you count the row of little S'more figurines on a bookshelf downstairs that we leave out because the Babies! like to play with them.

All of our knickknacks-- all our pictures and vases and the older kids' trophies and decorations -- are in closets and up on top of the kitchen cupboards and otherwise stored away in hopes that someday we can set them out again.

Mr F dropped the pottery, and it broke.

With a loud crash.

I had made it to him just as he dropped it and couldn't stop it and immediately bent down and put my arm around him and hugged him to me. Everyone within earshot and eyesight looked, and I'm sure that all they saw was a four-year-old boy and his dad and a broken vase.

What else was there to see, after all?

I'm not sure if they noticed Mr F putting his hands first to his ears and covering them up as people gathered around, librarians and maybe the public, and I tried to keep Mr F close to me as I scooped up bits of pottery and apologized.

"I'm sorry," I said to the nearest lady, as we were joined by Mr Bunches, who edged in there. I held Mr F's hand as about five or six people crowded around us. Through his sweatshirt they couldn't see it but I could feel him tensing up and trying to pull out of my hand.

One lady brushed Mr Bunches aside and he looked up at her and the crowd and ran over to the corner of a small cubicle as we got the pieces picked up and I apologized again and said that I'd pay for the pottery if someone could give me a name to contact, and as I tried to get Mr F out of the crowd.

In a minute or so-- an eternity to me -- the people had faded away and Mr F and I were standing by the self-checkout again, trying to finish up the ordinarily simple-and-quick task so that we could get outside. We got that done, but Mr Bunches was still over in his corner, hidden from view of everyone in the library but me and Mr F.

Mr Bunches was kneeling in the corner, kneeling next to a stool on which he had his face down and head in his hands.

I went over to him and said quietly that we had to get going. Mr F didn't want to go back into the corner and struggled with me, talking to me in words I couldn't understand but got the gist of: He wanted to go, he didn't want to be here, didn't want to be wearing his coat, didn't want to be talking quietly.

I tried to convince Mr Bunches to leave but he wouldn't stand up on his own and Mr F was now tugging at my hand, pulling me farther from Mr Bunches an inch at a time.

I got him sorted out and standing next to me, asking him to "Walk nice," a request I make of him probably two or three times a minute when he and I are out in public.

Mr Bunches still didn't want to stand up. With my free hand, I wormed his hand out from under his face and helped him to his feet.

"Let's go, pumpkin," I said to him.

He pulled free of my hand and ran over to the other piece of pottery and threw it on the floor.

I got over there, holding Mr F, who had immediately clapped his hands over his ears again and nearly pulled my arms out of the socket, and with my other hand I got my arm around Mr Bunches' waist and tried to pull him to me.

"It's okay," I told him, as the same crowd, or maybe a larger one, convened immediately, and I tried to hold both boys amidst the hovering, overly-tall crowd of adults that closed in, making even me feel claustrophobic, and I tried to help pick up the pieces of the second vase, too, until one lady said this:

"Unbelievable."

I looked up and around and tried to see who had spoken but then bit my lip and didn't say anything, I just apologized again and stood up and took the book and CD and held on to both boys and one lady said that they could clean up and I didn't have to worry about it.

Walking slowly, and making sure that both boys held my hand, one to each hand, we left the library. Mr F had to be asked twice to walk nice but we made it outside, where I sat them down on the bench and told them that I expected better of them, that I needed them to behave, that they hadn't been very nice in there, and that if they couldn't be nice then we wouldn't go to the library anymore.

Unbelievable kept ringing in my mind.

And the only reason I didn't speak up right then was because I knew what that lady, the lady who thought it was unbelievable, had seen -- and I knew what she had not seen.

She'd seen two little boys who broke two vases, little boys who appeared to be so poorly parented or improperly supervised or just badly behaved that they could get away with breaking two vases in the span of about two minutes.

She hadn't seen the unicorns.

When Sweetie was pregnant with Mr F and Mr Bunches, when we hadn't yet met the Babies!, I had plans for them -- plans that ranged from "One of them will quarterback the Buffalo Bills to a Super Bowl win while the other becomes an astronaut" to littler plans, like "I'm going to teach them the words to all the songs I like."

To that end, I'd actually made a CD for the Babies! to listen to as we drove around, a CD that I planned to play for them as often as I could when they were little so that they would live those songs, the songs would be as familiar to them as my face and we could sing the songs together as we ran and played and went to museums and taught them how to throw a perfect spiral and watched movies together and did everything else we were going to do.

One of the songs on that CD was the song "I Was Born A Unicorn," by The Unicorns:



I put that song on there not just because it's been one of my favorite songs since I first heard it, but also because it seemed to me, in the months before the Babies! arrived, to speak to how I felt about these newest additions to our lives: they were going to be magical, special additions to our family, little people that Sweetie and I and the older kids had for so long imagined would one day be there, making preparations and buying baby clothes and putting a list of possible names on a blackboard in our kitchen and voting on which ones we'd liked best, people we believed in but hadn't yet met.

They were going to be unicorns.

And now, four years, 74 days, 18 hours and 30 minutes after I first saw them, after I first held them and after I spent the night trying to warm them up because they were so little and so cold when they were born, I realized that's exactly what they are. They are unicorns.

They are unicorns because they are magical and rare and special and wondrous, but also because my boys, like unicorns, don't exist in the world you and I live in.

Mr F and Mr Bunches are autistic.

Our family has known that for a long time, probably longer than we realized, and certainly we've known it for longer than just since the time that the boys were formally diagnosed as autistic. I say that because even though, when the doctors and school teachers first said that the boys were autistic I railed against it and tried to lawyer my, and their, way out of that word, that category, I knew they were right.

I knew it because I'd seen it.

I sat in that first meeting where a group of professionals said my two youngest children were autistic and I argued with them that it might be just a speech delay, that it might be this or that, that they were making progress or weren't quite how the examiners described them, but in my mind, I kept picturing the night I'd watched Mr F and the paper.

When he was about 18 months old, Mr F's hobby was to take paper -- any paper -- and tear it into little pieces, which he would then hold up above his head, one at a time, and drop to the floor. He then would pick up the next one, and drop that one, too. And then the next.

One night, I'd gotten out my video camera and was just going to take some videos of Mr F and Mr Bunches while they played. We already had hours of footage and literally thousands of pictures of them, but I could always use a little more. As I got the video camera ready, Mr F took no notice of me, but kept tearing up paper and dropping it, watching each piece flutter to the ground intently, and then looking at it, then taking the next piece.

I sat and video taped him for a few minutes, doing that, and then I moved closer. He paid no attention to me. As I got closer and closer he still never looked at me. Eventually, I was sitting right next to him and he hadn't looked at me even once as I'd come across the room.

I said "Can I play?"

He didn't react. He just kept taking the next little shred of paper, dropping it, and watching it flicker and spin until it landed on the carpet.

I picked up a piece of paper and dropped it.

He paid no attention to me.

I picked up another piece of paper and held it in front of him and then dropped it.

He paid no attention to me.

And on that day when the school teachers sat us down to explain that the Babies! were autistic and what we could do to help them exist in our world, I kept trying to convince these well-meaning professionals that the Babies! were nothing of the sort, but in the back of my mind was that scene, which I knew wasn't the way things were supposed to be.

I saw all that, and more, and eventually gave in to the diagnosis because no matter how long I spent saying that they weren't, they still were.

But I've always kept it to myself; our family has kept that diagnosis, that word, that label, to ourselves, only our family members and some close friends knowing about it, because I didn't want Mr F and Mr Bunches to be a word.

Sometimes, the very first thing you ever know about someone colors everything you ever know about them, everything you ever think about them. And I didn't want the Babies!' lives to be filtered through the lens of autism. I didn't want them to be those autistic boys. I wanted them to be those boys, and only after people knew them would they then realize that the boys are autistic, which, in my mind, was better, because it's like finding out someone you know has the flu or broke their leg: You don't forever after think of that person as "that broken-leg guy." You think of him as that guy you know, who once broke his leg.

That's why, on this blog and in my life with coworkers and acquaintances, I've never referred to the Babies!' autism before. Someone reading this blog, or listening to me talk about the Babies!, would be hard-pressed to determine that there was anything unusual or very out of the ordinary about Mr F or Mr Bunches, although if you go back and re-read entries about them now (or, if you know me in real life and think about the stories I've told of them) some of the more unusual things will make more sense.

More unusual things like the very limited number of direct quotes from either Mr F or Mr Bunches -- the product, as I said, of them not really speaking our language, of them not existing entirely in our world: they don't talk much, and they talk in our language even less.

Mr Bunches, of the two, can talk quite a bit now, but that's a recent thing, and one that's growing exponentially each day, albeit with hitches. Mr Bunches can recite the alphabet and even sing the alphabet song for you, but he gets tripped up sometimes on new words. For a while there, Mr Bunches thought "milk" was called "more," because when he'd finish a glass of milk and hold it up, we'd ask if he wanted more. Eventually, he surmised that the white stuff he liked to drink was called more, and he'd ask for more even if he hadn't had any yet.

And he can sing the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song for you, if he's in a good mood and wants to sing-- but you have to listen carefully, because he doesn't know all the words, so he fills in his own, but he gets the end of each line right.

Mr F doesn't talk even that much, and is more limited in the sounds he'll make. He knows two words for sure, though. He knows Dad and No. The former sometimes comes out with an accent: Dod, he'll call me, and Dod is usually coupled with No as he tries to get me to not do the thing I'm making him do -- whether that be to stop swimming for the day or to get his pants back on or simply to let me take a break from picking him up by his armpits and swinging him back and forth like a bell while saying "Ding Dong Ding Dong," a favorite activity of his.

That's why you don't see Mr F and Mr Bunches much in the quotes of the day and the like: because they don't have quotes, very much. They have a lot to say -- yesterday, Mr F didn't stop talking for nearly an hour as we left the grocery store and drove home and unloaded the Thanksgiving dinner supplies -- but I don't speak their language and they don't speak mine.

And it's why they don't react the way we do to things; they're unicorns and our world is curious and maybe mystifying to them because they only make occasional trips to our life. They don't see things the way we do, and the things that are important to us aren't important to them. Sweetie showed Mr Bunches a picture of me in my office once, sitting at my desk. "Who's this?" she asked him.

"Chair," he said, focusing on what I was sitting on.

To Mr F and Mr Bunches, there's no distinction between a knickknack and a toy. That doesn't make them so much different than any other two or three or four year old little boy. But what sets them apart is their inability to talk about it -- to understand why the plastic elephant in their toy box is a toy and the metal elephant on Nana's glass table is not -- and our inability to enforce and convey that message. When Mr F wants to play with a table lamp, and I tell him no, he might go right back to it with a singleminded focus because the lamp is interesting and he wants to turn it on and off. When I then tell him no more sharply, it may or may not have an effect. When I then try to give him a time-out, he'll just get up and walk away -- so I have to sit and hold him down in his timeout. Even a spanking, something we rarely resort to, may not work if he really wants to see that lamp.

You can imagine how exhausting that is -- policing someone who not only doesn't want to be policed but maybe doesn't understand he's being policed at all. Imagine if you were a guard at a museum, and a small child who doesn't speak English and had never been in a museum before came in. How would you keep that boy or girl from touching everything? Now, consider if that boy or girl thought that everything was equal, that this thing was no more or less special than that thing, that being able to touch the door meant that you could touch the glass things on display, and consider how you would explain that difference to that little child.

It's hard enough doing that with adults. I was in the Art Institute of Chicago once with Sweetie, and we saw a chair that had a sign next to it that said Do Not Touch and before I even thought much about it I'd leaned over and touched the chair.

Sweetie and I opted not to try. We got rid of knickknacks and clocks and pictures, putting them away because the only alternative was to spend every single minute of every single day constantly stopping the Babies! from picking up the vase of flowers and then dropping it when they were bored. And you can be critical of that and think Well, if you'd just done the work when they were two, then by now they'd know that some things are to touch and some things are just to look at, but you don't know them and also you don't know what else we were focusing on -- you don't see them and us.

So it might seem lazy or unbelievable that we'd opt to simply put away every single little object in our house rather than teach the Babies! what can be touched and what can't, but we didn't see it that way, because we were focusing on teaching Mr F and Mr Bunches to talk -- to communicate with us when they were hungry or thirsty or tired or wanted to play, to know who they were and who we were and who their sisters were, and that wasn't just a matter of sitting down and saying "Mommy" and "Daddy" and "cat," if only because the Babies! don't like to sit, so oftentimes sitting and teaching them requires one person to physically hold them in place while the other teaches. We used flashcards and pictures and books and repetition and games and songs and even sign language to teach them things -- and some worked better than others. Mr Bunches learned sign language watching videos on TV and one day sat me down and taught me how to say tree and swing and help and park and even hair salon, the result being that I had a son who could tell me, via sign language, that he wanted to go get his hair fixed but who couldn't tell me what kind of cereal he wanted to eat.

It wasn't that we didn't want to teach them about not touching things. It was that more than that, we wanted to talk to them.

Which is how I ended up in the library with two boys who didn't understand that pottery isn't for touching, and that picking up pottery can be tricky, and that if you're not careful with that pottery, it's going to drop out of your hands and break and make a loud noise and people are going to crowd around you.

It's how I ended up, then, with two boys who once that group does crowd around you, and starts shoving one of you out of the way, and makes a big scene and confronts you with people who are two and three times your size and who are all strangers and are all talking, just want to get away and make sense of it all, and who might then not want to go finish checking out, and who might want to just sit in a corner with their face on a stool and hide from the people that were loud and scary and who had touched them.

And it's how I ended up, then, with two boys who might, in trying to make sense of what just happened in this world that they only exist partially in, might then try to figure out what just happened by doing it again, something I see them do over and over but which people who don't really see them would have no idea happens: The Babies! will do something, and then do it again to see if your reaction was a fluke, if the fact that the chair fell over or the water spilt or the cat meowed was a fluke, they don't understand cause and effect which maybe works differently in their world... and so they try it again, which is why Mr Bunches, when forced to sit up and still be in the library where there'd been a crash and a crowd and someone had pushed him aside, why he ran over and did it again, because he didn't understand what had happened the first time and didn't know why all that had happened.

Maybe it made him feel better that the same thing happened the second time as had happened the first. Maybe he was trying to make the wrong things from the first time go right this time. Maybe he just wanted to see what it was that had happened, period. I'm not sure. And maybe I should have expected it and been more on guard against it.

But when you really see what happened, when you really know the Babies!, I don't think it's so unbelievable at all, what happened that night.

It's just life with unicorns.