Thursday, February 26, 2015

Courtney and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day


Sounds familiar? Have you seen the movie? We have, it was great. It's so much easier to watch a family have a comically bad day than to have one yourself. Well, yesterday it was our turn, and trust me when I say, I'm not laughing.

Here's what went down. Get onto my laptop to check out the Legion and my email. Ya know, the one with the smashed screen that I can only use hooked into a monitor? Anyway, I get one to find an amazingly, exciting reply from an Autism magazine about the article they asked me to write. They loved it, and wanted it in a word document. Cool, right? Well here's where the day started to go down hill.

Windows 8 no longer offers Microsoft word for free. So, I went on to try and find a download. Viruses started to pour in. My antivirus was going off every ten seconds. So I closed it all out. Then chrome started repeatedly shutting down for no reason. Well shit! So I close everything out, and run the virus scan. All seems clear. So I then move onto doing a systemrestore and the entire computer just poof! Died!

The worst part? We bought Liam computer Minecraft for Christmas. He has been playing it every day! Now he can't. I was livid! I may or may not have throw the mouse
at the computer. Okay, let's be honest. I totally threw the mouse at it! I held back tears as my son came to comfort me. I put the laptop down, because I had to get away from it. Otherwise, it may have ended up going through a wall.

I composed myself, and Liam was more than eager to change the subject, so we decided to start his lessons for the day. I logged onto his school lap top. We started lessons, and he was doing great. My anger was gone. About 30 minutes in, the school web site crashed. I spent another 15 minutes trying to log back in. Restarting Liam's computer, and nothing. Seriously, I felt as though this day couldn't get any worse.

I was wrong, by the way!

We finished up what work sheets we could. I then had enough time to cram some food into my eating hole, wash up the dishes, and get ready for Liam's speech therapy, and child psychiatrist appointment. During this time, Liam was going to play some XBox. NOPE! NOT GONNA HAPPEN! His favorite XBox game is caput! It will no longer play. So now, Liam can't play Minecraft on my computer, OR his favorite game on his XBox. This was it for Liam. A meltdown ensued. He screamed for about 15-20 minutes, then calmed to crying for about 15 more. He was refusing to go to his appointments. I waited until he calmed some and explained that we all need to do things we don't want to do from
time to time, but we have to do them anyway.

With heavy hearts we all trudged out into the cold for Liam's appointments.We decided to reschedule his child psych appointment until next week. Liam was still feeling the
effects of our awful day and I didn't want to risk pushing him too much. After a 20 minute drive into
town, we pulled into the library, with just 5 minutes until his appointment. At a quarter after 4, Pita asks if today was speech day.

" I think I remember her saying she couldn't do Wednesday this week,
so we made it for Thursday," said Pita.

"SHIT! I think you're right." (of course that was my reply.)

So Liam checked the calendar on my phone. Thursday at 4.

Seriously????? Just one more thing to make this day crappier! To say
that neither of the men were pleased with my absent mindedness would be an understatement. Thankfully they both let it go quickly. We then managed to make it through it the grocery store, with no issues. All except, I of course, forgot the one damn thing I went in there for.

Murphy's Law and all that.

So as you can see, yesterday sucked. Majorly. Shitastically! We all know how our autistic loved ones are when it comes to their current perseverations. So when something happens that disrupts that, all hell breaks loose in our worlds. But here we are.

 Today is a new day, and so far, (knock on wood) it's going well. Which reminds me of my favorite part of the Alexander movie. A great reminder for all of us, when life knocks the wind from our sails........