ace’s blog

Bad attitude Aaron is 95% gone and the old Aaron is back. He hasn’t had casein in his diet since Friday (4/18/08) morning and his attitude has improved greatly. The only thing I still see missing is his attention span. He used to be able to do the 100 piece puzzles with me with no problem at all. Now, he is having issues paying attention for more than about five minutes.

We bought a new car! A mini-van actually; it is a slate metallic green Honda Odyssey. I heard a radio ad about “up to 30% off on clearance vehicles from a chain of local car dealerships and when I got home, I checked out the prices. I noted a Honda Pilot and the Odyssey. They had both listed for a very low price. I called, expecting they would be out-of-stock and sure enough, they were. I asked how much a base-line model of each vehicle would be and was told about $5,500 less than the MSRP on both vehicles. We went up there Saturday to look at both the Pilot and the Odyssey side-by-side and based on functionality (why did Honda shove an non-functional third row of seats into the Pilot?!), we bought the mini-van. I didn’t think we’d ever own one since Meri has been 100% against buying one since it would be her vehicle.

The Odyssey has the same gas-mileage rating as our old Jeep Liberty so there wasn’t a savings there. I feel like the Honda will be a longer-lasting vehicle (than the Jeep) and much safer for Meri and our boys. Plus, we now have even more room for more kids (hello Cadence – daddy’s little girl, someday I hope).

Aaron has been on a tear lately, since Monday (4/14/08) of this week. As of yesterday, 4/17/08, I have come home 3 of the last 4 days to him screaming at my wife. If you heard his screaming from out on the street (and you probably could), you would think this kid was completely out of control and he must have terrible parents. This is absolutely not the case. 95% of the time, Aaron is you typical happy child. He’s very fun to be around when he’s like this. He shows how smart he really is and how funny he can be. Sometimes though, seemingly from nowhere, his temper shows itself
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This past week has been about 100 times worse than it has ever been. Now, when he gets upset, his anger would be better described as a rage. He is out of control. Monday, Meri went grocery shopping with him and Eli. They walked by an area where Meri bought him some colored sand the last time they were shopping but this time, there wasn’t any sand there. Aaron flipped out!! He started yelling and screaming about the sand and how he wanted it and where was it and why wasn’t it there. Typically, when Aaron starts acting like that, I would say that he was over-tired and desperately needs to get home to either take a nap or just sit on the couch and relax to some Noggin. This shopping trip ended with Aaron screaming and yelling at Meri, pulling her hair, punching her, slapping her, and for the first time ever, biting her! He bit her three times – once on her cheek and that left a mark for about a day. When they got home, he decided that he would flip over Eli’s car seat – with Eli in it.

When they got in the car, Meri called me at work and asked me to come home. On my end of the phone, I hear my wife crying, asking me to come home, Aaron screaming/raging in the background and Eli was crying. So I picked up all my shit, told my team lead I had to leave and booked it out of here. It took me about 30 or 40 minutes to get home. I finally got there and, to my surprise, Aaron was STILL raging. This episode has been going on for over 90 minutes at this point.

This was been the single worst day with Aaron, ever. I hope that it remains the worst day in his childhood, forever. Since Monday, I’ve come home to Aaron screaming and raging at my wife two other times, every time with her and Eli being hit.

I worked from home the rest of Monday and Tuesday is my weekly work from home day. Meri and I talked about what we should do and how we should handle it and neither of us has a clue. Something has changed Aaron’s behaving dramatically in the past week. On Tuesday, I made an appointment to see a child psychiatrist! We are supposed to go next Wednesday, 4/23.

Meri and I have been thinking about what could cause such a degradation in Aaron’s attitude. The only thing that we can think of is the major increase in cow’s milk and casein in Aaron’s diet. Since we’ve discovered that Aaron is no longer allergic to milk and egg, we’ve been letting him try any- and everything he wants that he could never have before. He’s loved it. When he eats something that he could not eat before, he says “I’m not allergic anymore so I can have this”. It has been wonderful to let Aaron eat things that he couldn’t have before. He really seemed to love it. But now, we have decided to take out most of the milk from his diet. Our reason for this line of thinking revolves around the autism-diet.

Autistic kids should be on a very strict gluten- and casein-free diet. Casein is a protein found in milk and products containing milk, such as cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream, whey and even some brands of margarine. It also may be added to non-milk products such as soy cheese and hot dogs in the form of caseinate. When the diet is followed correctly, an article that I just found says:

Some parents, doctors and researchers say that children have shown mild to dramatic improvements in speech and/or behavior after these substances were removed from their diet.

We are firm believers in how a child’s diet effects their attitude and behavior. We’re taking all of the casein out of his diet again and let his body “detox” for a while. We’ll re-introduce the casein at a very gradual pace this time. I don’t know if we’ll keep the appointment or not.

From the first moment we talked, after we hung out for the first time that night in my dorm room and after I realized she wasn’t some Amazonianly-tall girl like the picture she sent me led me to believe, I was finally proven right after so many years of half-hearted joking.

I would sometimes say to her “you always loved me” when she would reminisce about how much of a pain-in-the-ass I was when we were dating in college. On again, off again, on again…you get the picture. All of that drama caused because I was impatient and not ready to succumb to the fact that deep down, I knew that she would be my future wife and I just wasn’t ready to for that yet. We’ve been together for over 8 years and married for over 4, 5 in November.

Last night, she told me that she realized I was actually right in saying that “you always loved me”. She remembered telling one of her old boyfriends that she that she was going to marry me one day. That was after we had only hung out a few times. We talked so much more than that. Old

Somehow, even way back then, we both knew that we would be married one day. We now have each other and our two little boys now. Who knows if she will actually let me try to have that little girl that I want so badly (not just me, you know how that works)? With Meri, Aaron and Eli, I’m feel very happy with my family and where we are at this point in our lives.

Who would have thought that by just talking to someone one day, it would turn into a full-blown family one day?!

Holy sheep shit! I just fixed a known (to me) bug in the vox-crossposter WP plugin I wrote a LONG time ago.

All I changed was the character encoding from

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1'."\r\n";

to

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'."\r\n";

If you look at the second “known bugs” list at http://www.acedanger.com/vox-crossposter, you will see exactly what I changed. Now I need to get home so I can update the download link and the download from the WordPress Plugin site.

Edit: I updated the source that the download link points to.

Aaron starts soccer practice tonight. This time, he’s on a team that we thought was really badass the last time he was in the league. This team was great last year in that most of the parents wore shirts that matched the kids’ jerserys at each game. There was enough kids on the team last season that some were able to sit and rest and didn’t have to run the entire game.

This soccer season is sort of weird though, we have our first practice tonight and our first game on Saturday! I know there will be some kids that won’t be ready to play a game after only one practice so it will be interesting.

Meri got her truck back after 13 days in the shop! Hooray for the shop not having anything else to do so they could have 4 people working on the Jeep and being 16 days ahead of schedule!