Peace

BB has camp this week. Not his brother's Special Needs camp that he will also be attending, but his own, nippical, ordinary Bible Camp. It seems odd that we're sending him to a Baptist camp, since we haven't been Baptists in years, but if our denomination has something similar, I haven't heard about it. MB took him to camp. They left yesterday morning, planning to visit family friend Mrs. C, who lives in the area, for the weekend, then MB will drop BB off at camp and return home Monday.

GL is much calmer and quieter without his brother around. We've said several times it would take much less than half the effort to raise one of these boys without the other, and it wouldn't matter which one. After this weekend, I'm inclined to say if we had only one, GL would be the easier. Things have stabilized; his meds are keeping him calm without making him dopey, but he's also much more pleasant without BB setting him off all the time.

I had big plans for the weekend. I knew as long as GL had DVDs, PBJ, and Mac & Cheese, he would be content and not require much attention. I'm a bit like him. Social interaction seems to take more effort than it does for other people, and we don't get as much out of it. Twice the effort for half the pleasure. And I enjoy my own company. I pity anyone who doesn't. Even in a crowd, you can never get completely away from yourself, so why not make friends? I know some people who are so dependent on their acquaintances, so shaped by them, that I suspect when they are alone, they cease to exist.

With no one to interfere, GL and I can enjoy sharing a space without needing to share an activity. Being alone with him is almost as good as being alone, and that's high praise in my book. I had a long accumulation of to-do lists full of items I haven't yet got to-do. What did I accomplish? I took a shower. Actually, two, one Saturday, one Sunday. I loaded and ran the dishwasher. Twice. Oh, and I caught up on my blogs. It took all weekend, but Google Reader now shows No Unread Items! They had been piling up for a while, partly because things have been a little busy around here, and partly because I have a habit of subscribing to more blogs than I can possibly read. While I was at it, I thinned my subscriptions. I started with the blogs with the most unread posts. If one to two months' backlog didn't contain anything I'd miss, out it went. I am now down to 92 subscriptions. I can't remember the last time I was below a hundred, and at times, it's been considerably more than that. Of course, in catching up on my blogs, I inevitably found posts in which they linked other blogs, and I had to resist the temptation to subscribe to those. I didn't add any new blogs! OK, maybe one or two. Now maybe I'll have time to post more to my blog, and fill in some of the many happenings over the last couple of months.

About 5 p.m. today, when it became clear that I really was going to make it to the end of my backlog, I noticed GL wandering around, looking like he wanted something. I had spent most the weekend ignoring him. He didn't mind, but maybe he would like a little father-son time. I tried to think of something we could do together, something that he would enjoy and I wouldn't mind doing. I know how much he likes Chutes and Ladders, so I asked, "Would you like to play a game?"

"Yes." he answered, "Clue Finders." So for the next hour and a half, he played a computer game, and I wandered around looking for something to do while I waited to get back on the computer and finish my blogs.