sleep journal entry and post-hosting

i had severe lower back and hip flexor discomfort just before going to bed and had to stretch for quite a while.

i woke up at 6.40am this morning, read stranger in a strange land for a while, then went back to sleep for another hour and a half.

now my back's hurting because mr smear decided he needed some "roughhousing" and i wasn't stretched and ready to chase him around the apartment :P

...

gd posted the following yesterday, based on our experience hosting mr smear's friend the other day:

Many will hate me for this, but IDGAF anymore. I'm starting to wonder about children going through actual clinical burn outs being diagnosed as autistic. I have to ponder this, but after a certain experience I had recently (with a non autistic child in a toxic environment), certain behaviours can very much be mistaken for autism. Burns outs are very real and they don't only affect grown ups.

someone responded with "just because you're autistic doesn't mean you can't also be an asshole."

indeed - but also, just because you're an asshole doesn't mean you can't also be hurting and flailing about, it's a vicious cycle. in this case in particular, i don't care what this child was diagnosed with officially, i think the root cause is a severe lack of boundaries.

and as a parent who took a hell of a long time to learn how to establish boundaries in a healthy way (i'm still learning), i'm not unsympathetic to how hard that can be, especially in a time like now with an overload of awful parenting advice and far too much media and social media influence.

a nice pause

mr smear was afraid last night, because of whatever the fuck creepy monster his little "friend" told him to look for images for, but for the first time i managed to get him to try a breathing / happy place exercise. he fell asleep before i was done reading, and tonight he was cool.

for a lot of reasons, i really feel like he's maturing fast lately.

we didn't go outside today. i spent most of the day doing not much, although a good chunk of it was spent going through a gamemaker tutotial with mr smear after giving up on unity tutorials (what an utterly shit experience). we had fun, and he stayed with me, and he's definitely getting the hang of this stuff ^_^

also, gd gave mr smear a haircut and we recorded it. apparently the recording needs some editing, but she actually Did The Thing and a lot of it was absolutely hilarious.

on the flip side, she seems to have come down with some kind of infection today, and she's really struggling. she can't even eat, and we've got a visit to the pain clinic tomorrow and she (is / was) supposed to return to the dental first aid on monday.

good grief.

and mr smear's got to stay the course with an antiviral, but we're no longer sure he needed it in the first place. who knows? maybe we just caught the damn thing in time.

*sigh*

between yesterday and today i managed to get some work done on a few of my personal projects for the first time in many weeks, and that's quite satisfying.

...

since posting what i posted yesterday, i've seen some similar things popping up in my feed. elica le bon states the case incredibly eloquently, and here's a clip of an activist clearly expressing their intentions. it feels like this information is suddenly spreading into the zeitgeist, and that gives us a fighting chance.