Define "normal."

My kid is weird.

I am aware that I sound like One Of Those Annoying Parents, who thinks her kid is Unusual. I do wonder if something is wrong with her sometimes. She never answers questions. Never. "Sascha, you want some tomatoes?" Her answer is "tomatoes!" mixed in with some gibberish. Never yes or no. I don't worry about her being autistic; my cousin is an autistic specialist. She asked me some key questions, to which I apparently gave the right answers. But is there a gray area between autistic and just weird?

She only misbehaves when Nick and I are around, which is normal. However, I am wondering about the amount of normal misbehavior. How many tantrums are too many? She spent almost two hours having a tantrum this morning. She will throw herself on the floor and start screaming with no provocation whatsoever. My sister has noticed that Sascha doesn't acknowledge you when you speak to her; not even a glance. (There are no hearing issues.) She and my mom want me to call a doctor for a psych eval. Nick disagrees, but I know they're right. This just makes me sad, more than anything. I don't have a normal kid.

In ways, it's cool. We have this book, and the other night Sascha picked it up and recited every word of it from cover to cover. I looked at Nick: have you been reading this to her a lot? Him: No, only a few times. Me: Me too. Her babysitter doesn't have that book. My mom doesn't have that book. She has memorized the whole thing from maybe 5-6 readings. She'll do that with Sesame Street skits, too. She'll go around the house reciting entire blocks of dialogue-- and she doesn't even watch that much TV anymore. It's freakish. Someday she'll find the cure for cancer, then promptly begin shooting people from a clock tower in a tinfoil hat.

Enough about Rain Man. In a related story, we've decided to wait another month before we start trying again for #2 (it was going to be April). I can give all the weak excuses about timing and the school year and maternity leave and whatever, but the truth is, Sascha is quickly eroding our desire and energy for a second. One of the reasons I am wanting a second is so that I can throw the dice on maybe getting a normal baby. One that won't hate me. At least not until it's a teenager, when it's supposed to.

I've also decided to take a break on the weight loss. I've lost 10 lbs and I'm officially down to my pre-pregnancy weight. It feels fantastic. I'm not gonna lie. I feel so, so great. I would still like to lose a few more before summer. I was just starting to feel punished all the time with the I-can't-eat-that and I-have-to-go-running. I knew it was time to give it a rest last week when I was supposed to work out one day after school, and I was so down about it. I was really bummed out, and burned out. I decided to rebel and said screw it! And my mood skyrocketed. I popped open some wine, broke out "Songs in the Key of Life" and danced around my kitchen. So I'm going to give it two weeks or so off, and then one last big push of 2-3 more weeks on.

More things to file under White People's Problems: money. Things were looking so awesome recently. We were just a couple months away from being completely out of credit card debt and ready to start saving, something we've never done. And we've never done it because something always comes up. So naturally, today, our furnace died. We woke up this morning going "hmm, it feels kinda cold..." and sure enough. The worst part of it, to me, is that we don't know what the problem is (although we do know our furnace is old and we've had problems with it before). We could either get a new one, and have it turn out to be a $50 problem, or we could pay out the nose for a plumber to come to the house, only to tell us we have to replace it, thus paying out the nose twice. We want to try to get by on space heaters since we're so close to spring (New England hasn't gotten the memo from the calendar that it IS in fact spring, and said memo won't arrive for another month or so), but tomorrow's high is supposed to be thirty-one fucking degrees. 31. I'm not sure a space heater can compete with that, but I also know that a new furnace isn't going to materialize in 24 hours, so we don't have much of a choice. Good times.

The selfish child (or, I'll admit, selfish yuppie) in me is disappointed that I may have to put off my garden for another year. The startup costs are too high. I can't do it without a fence-- I know what it feels like to lose everything to groundhogs. Even though I will be putting in a cheap fence myself, it's still a good chunk of money. And my neighbor just told me that we have about six inches of soil in our neighborhood, then it's all rocks and boulders under that. I wasn't planning on doing raised beds (although I'd love them), but it looks like that may be my only choice. And they aren't cheap. So... that is hugely disappointing. I don't know. We'll see. I might have to do it on credit simply because of the time constraints; I can't start a garden in October when I do have the money. But damn. We were so close to being in the black.

Nick just called me into the other room to show me that the picture on our 3-year-old TV is almost gone. That too. Lovely. Good thing we don't need a TV to keep us warm.