Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Brunch: It's not breakfast, it's not lunch, but you get what you need.

Monday, Jun. 26, 2006
6:46 p.m.
The beautiful weather could not last forever. Just as I noticed that the river was getting very low, revealing sand bars that I hadn't seen before, the heavens opened and gave us an all-day soaking.

Our friends from R0chester, D&S, are in town for a few days visiting her family, and they came by this morning with their two boys and we treated them to brunch at a family restaurant called Chez C0ra which specializes in that kind of menu. This is the Berg scholar with the autistic son, who is now 7, and is definitely a handful. He's really cute, but does not relate to the world the way the rest of us do. On the back of one hand, on the wrist and partway up the arm are welts from where he chews himself. His parents have provided him with a plastic toy that he is supposed to chew on instead, but it got left behind at our house and D had to make a trip back to retrieve it. S and I were trying to have a conversation about pedagogy (she's a pianist) in the music studio and he was constantly bothering her for attention, loudly. As his father explained, autistic people just relate to the world differently than the rest of us do. We can't make them fit into the mold. It's very frustrating, but they are amazing parents. Their younger son is normal and often feels put out because his older brother seems to get all the attention. This makes for an interesting family dynamic.

Brunch was enormous. I had the blueberry pancakes, which came with creme anglaise on the side (I apologize for leaving out accents, but the internet keeps messing around with them), as well as a small juice which was a blended mixture of orange, strawberry, banana and pineapple. That was delicious. Their latte wasn't bad either. Hubby and I were so full afterwards we fairly waddled out of the restaurant, but since we were just two doors down from Costco, we headed over there and loaded up on stuff: dill pickles, toilet paper, hummus, shampoo, dried berries, dishwasher detergent, etc. You know, stuff.

We had just got home and put things away when D rang the bell, looking for his son's chew thingie, so Hubby invited him in for a beer, and that's when our kids arrived home from their karate weekend, exhausted, dirty, and a black and a brown belt richer, respectively. They told us how their sensei had them running through the woods, how he woke them up at 3 a.m. so they could do tai chi and meditate in a meadow and then watch the sun rise, and how they had to break pieces of wood with their fists or elbows to qualify for their promotions.

I think I discovered what also might be contributing to the headaches. As we were watching the DVD last night, my eyes were incredibly itchy and I was rubbing them and they were watering and I just couldn't seem to get them to stop. When we came upstairs and I looked at myself in the mirror, they were so swollen and puffy that I looked like I had been crying non-stop for a week. An antihistamine and allergy drops later, they were starting to look normal, but all day today they have been feeling kind of "stiff". I'm wondering if the seasonal allergies might be a reason for my pain. Hmmm.

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