Debbie Yost, mom of three daughters, including one with Down's Syndrome, started a great tradition on her blog Three Weddings: Ability Tuesday. On the first Tuesday of each month, she writes about her daughter's ABILITIES, rather than her challenges. What a beautiful idea, I thought.

So, of course, I'm going to steal it. No, not steal it ... pay homage by copying the idea blatantly.

Today is Tuesday and here are 10 things Billy can do much better than I can:

1. Sing. His voice is beautiful, and he adds a soundtrack to everything. His voice is pitch-perfect and he gives equal airtime to music composed by Dvorak (a current favorite) and Elmo (eternal).

2. Keep rhythm. Ask his Kindermusik teacher, Mrs. Jaci: His sense of rhythm is freaky-good. Insanely, we bought him a drum set for Christmas, though he will happily drum away on anything: table, chairs, microwave door, windows!

3. Remember people. It's not names he zeroes in on; it's usually some detail of his first encounter with someone, a detail that they might not even remember themselves. If you had a dog with you the first time he met you, even if it was six months ago and you were just dogsitting, you better be prepared to explain the absence of said canine on each subsequent encounter with the Billster.

4. Remember ANYTHING. Song lyrics, movie dialogue, the complete text of books he's only heard a couple of times. He has a media library in his head that I often wish I could tap into, particularly when someone is boring me (see #8).

5. Get his way with my mother. Where was this push-over when I was growing up?

6. Climbing. He's half mountain goat, half squirrel.

7. Dance with his heart and soul in it. Let me tell ya: The boy puts the “bust” in “bust a move.”

8. Entertain himself when people around him are boring. I wish I had the guts to just completely check out the moment someone starts boring me. And start singing my favorite song loudly in their faces. Or dancing with abandon for no apparent reason. Or pull their cell phone out of their purse and start screaming for them to show me the “Angry Birds game!” Kids are awesome and they don't even know it.

9. Escape from his clothing. Oy vey! Can I say that even though I'm not Jewish? Because the situation warrants it. If you don't believe me, click here for our trials and tribulations with our young Houdini.

10. Make Willow laugh. They have their own language. He only needs to look at her in some inscrutable way and she just falls over in hysterical giggles. She adores him and he can't make a step without her at his heels, just waiting for the next hilarious and fascinating thing her brother will do for her.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away." -- Henry David Thoreau

I teach Sunday school every other Sunday morning at Good Samaritan United Methodist Church. The kids in my class can range in age from 5 to 10 years old. And they are awesome.

The first and last time Hello Kitty will show up on my blog.

Occasionally, I have to leave Sunday school and go repent of a few thoughts I've had over the past hour, but I always leave with a fresh perspective on religion, spirituality, life, and sometimes, variations on a few songs I thought I knew.

Usually, the class is pretty evenly divided between girls and boys, but today I had a class of eight girls. All girls.

Girls and boys are different, obviously. The boys will punch one another in the shoulders, make up violent lyrics to children's songs, stick the craft pipe cleaners up their noses, one-up one another and get increasingly loud until I have to shout to hear myself think sometimes.

The girls always raise their hands before talking. Their comments aren't always on point, per se, but they do politely wait their turn.

This morning:

Hand goes up in the middle of our story about an angel breaking the apostle Peter out of jail.

"Yes?" I ask.

"Look what I have!" and an energetic five-year-old jumps out of her chair and pulls a circular plastic lip gloss out of the pocket of her dress. "IT'S HELLO KITTY!!!" she's practically screams. Several necks crane to look.

"That's awesome," I say in what I hope is an adequately admiring tone. "Now let's put it back in your pocket until church is over, OK?"

Ever polite, satisfied and happy that she has now shared this with everyone, she complies and I go back to the story.

Another hand goes up. It's reaching and reaching and reaching, so eager to share.

"Yes?" I ask this new participator.

"I have lip gloss too!" And she pulls it out of her lavendar sparkly purse. An appreciative sigh goes throughout the group about this remarkable coincidence, which prompts a general dumping of purses in the middle of the table as everyone examines the contents of everyone else's purse in the search for yet more lip gloss.

"Ok! Ok!" I tell them. "Purses away. We're at church. And you all look beautiful. But today we're focusing on how we make ourselves beautiful on the INside." I get kudos for bringing this back around to a life lesson, huh?

Another hand goes up.

"Does your comment have anything to do with Peter and the angel?" I ask her.

She carefully considers this for several seconds. And slowly nods her her gorgeously curly head.

"OK," I say. "Let's hear it."

"I'm stronger than my dad."

We all mull this over a bit before several enthusiastic voices pipe up with "Me too! Me! Me!" and "I'm stronger than my dad too!"

After the lesson we went into a bigger room outside the class to play a game. It was a kind of "Tag" game with some kids playing angels and some playing guards and some playing prisoners. At first, they all wanted to be angels, until they realized that the guards had the most fun. One of the “prisoners” nearly got to the point of tears, so fearful was she that she wouldn't be "rescued."

Billy's class, the class below the girls in age, was in the big room too. Their class is less structured. They mainly play with toys, listen to music and have a snack.

The “tag” game with prisoners and angels totally enthralled Billy. He was so excited watching the girls play that he started jumping up and down and running in and out of the players, tagging people randomly.

He approached one of the girls – she's two years older than him but about the same height – and got very close to her. A bit too close for normal social comfort, probably.

But he had a big smile on his face and I could tell that he wanted to say hello. So I got down on my knees next to him and led him through the process of saying, “Hi, my name is Billy!” which he handled pretty well with prompting.

The beautiful big-eyed girl smiled back at Billy and told him her name.

Back in our classroom, I talked to the girls about Billy, about autism, and about how much I appreciate their kindness and patience with him as he learns things like how to introduce himself and how to share – still not his strong suit. They listened and took it all in matter-of-factly.

Later, as I was coming out of the nursery where I was picking up Willow, I saw a table of “my” girls playing with various games. Billy had plonked himself right down in the middle of them, reaching for the games and poking at the parts and pieces. And the girls weren't laughing at him or getting impatient or angry.

On the contrary. They were showing him how the games worked, which parts moved, how to make them turn. One little girl gently took Billy's hand and used it to make the spinner spin. His eyes lit up and a big smile spread across his face. He looked directly into her eyes and she smiled back.

I learned everything I need to know about angels today.

Are you tired of me yet? Probably. I'm in danger of becoming as over-exposed as Miley Cyrus this week.

But seriously, I am super-excited to be guest-blogging in two different places this week, because both places are among my favorite online reads:

SouthernMOMentum.com
This great site is written by several Southern moms for Southern moms. Their witty take on all things motherhood will have you laughing, occasionally sniffling, and always apprised of unique shopping opportunities. I've written a piece for them, "Can we really have it all?", because the choreography involved in juggling full-time motherhood and (theoretically) part-time working has been on the challenging side this month.

36x37
Maura Bowen is an excellent writer who has given herself 365 days to do 36 things she's never done. I love the concept and I adore her honesty and beautiful writing style. She blogs about her journeys and occasionally features writers she likes. I was honored that she chose one of my posts about Billy, "Dream a Little Dream," to use on her site.

If you get a chance, check out these awesome sites this week. I guarantee you'll be reading them long after my posts have disappeared :-)

I was staring into my medicine cabinet a couple of days ago, desperately searching for something for a headache that didn't have the letters “PM” in it. Apparently, there was a time in my life that I had trouble falling asleep, and I've been carrying around a couple of bottles of Tylenol PM ever since then. (FYI, I'm usually so tired these days that I could fall asleep while someone was punching me repeatedly in the head, so this was a very old bottle.)

We were having one of those days. And I had a headache throughout it.

In hindsight, cutting out my caffeine intake on the same day that I was asking Billy to cut down on his TV watching probably was a mistake. It created a perfect storm of tantrumming and questionable parenting.

I took a couple of old-fashioned aspirins and started wondering if there was a drug for patience. Maybe there was some magical pill out there that would ensure I would never yell at my son and experience the kind of shame I felt when he looked back at me, his big blue eyes welling with tears.

Man, I felt like a heel.

Why shouldn't there be a drug for patience? There's a drug for everything else. And if you don't mind risking stroke, heart palpitations or sleep-eating (I'm not kidding; that totally exists), your nails can be clear of fungus, you'll never feel anxiety at parties and your legs will no longer be restless.

Just as a side note: How bad does nail fungus have to be before you're willing to risk stroke? Can't you just wear closed-toed shoes? And be alive?

So here's what happened: The night before I had created this detailed “lesson plan” for the day, outlining the book we would read in the morning, the craft we would create together, the songs we would sing, and everything had the same wonderful child-friendly theme: animals.

My children adopted the theme whole-heartedly by behaving like animals throughout most of the day.

Billy started the morning off by shouting, “Please stop singing!” at me every time I opened my mouth – whether to sing or to read. He pitched an almighty tantrum at any mention of the bathroom. Then while I was retrieving a crayon from Willow's mouth, he shredded up the paper I had intended us to use on the craft. When I tried to act out a little play with a monkey puppet, he pulled it off my hand and threw it across the room. “Throw it in the garbage!” he screamed.

“Stop it!” I yelled back at him, really loudly. “Just sit down! I've had it!

He dropped to the floor and started bawling. And I wanted to crawl into a hole.

My head was pounding by the time they went down for a nap and I was feeling like world's worst mother.

Whenever I get really down or Billy has a particularly challenging day, I start hearing these little voices in my head. The drug voices. Don't worry: They aren't voices urging me to do drugs. They're the voices of the doctors who have suggested drugs for my son. For his autism.

He was two when we first visited a neurologist who suggested we try MAO inhibitors. Less than a year later, a neuropsychologist (I don't even know exactly what that is) brought it up again. Of course, she also had a clock in her office sporting the logo for Zoloft, so I took her opinion with a grain of salt.

In both cases, we had no interest in drug therapy. Actually ... I shouldn't say that. Instead, I'll say that we didn't think it was the right choice at the time. After all, he was two.

That being said, I hear their voices in my head sometimes saying, “Why don't you just try it? See if it eases his anxiety. He can't learn if he's anxious or overwhelmed and won't make a kitty cat craft ...”

Ok, that last bit I kind of made up. But I start to worry that I'm missing out on crucial learning years. That he'll be so anxious at school that he'll miss his window and never learn something important like his right from his left or how to multiply things times 2 or where north is. And someone will say, “Clearly if you had given him anti-depressants when he was three years old, he wouldn't be walking around in circles right now.”

But we've always felt strongly that as long as he was making real progress, we wouldn't resort to drugs. We're afraid that we won't really know where he stands developmentally is he's drugged – particularly while he still has communication delays. It may be different when he's older, when he can talk to us about how he's feeling but ... it just doesn't feel right.

Billy slept for a long time during that nap. I had a lot of time to obsess and worry and wonder. After almost three hours, he woke up – and he had a big smile on his face. “Good morning!” he announced with a big smile on his face when I came in his room. It was almost 3 o'clock.

He didn't cry when I took him to the bathroom. And when we got downstairs, the carnage from the abandoned kitty cat craft was still all over the floor. We both sort of stared at it.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you,” I said to him.

“I'm sorry,” he repeated back to me. Good enough.

Taking a big breath, I asked him, “What does Billy want to do?”

He started blinking rapidly, something he's doing currently when he's trying really hard to think about how to say something. He raised his cupped hand up to his eyebrow level and gestured with it, in a move we call “the fin.”

“B-b-Billy ... I want ... to go outside,” he told me.

No wonder he didn't want to do a kitty cat craft or sing a stupid song about a monkey. So we went outside.

As a prescription, a nap and a run-around worked wonders. The only side effects were a few bug bites and a pair of muddy shoes. My headache disappeared and my patience returned ... mostly.

I could still probably use that drug for patience. Until they invent that, I've gone back on the caffeine.

I can still remember learning to read. It was a very exciting time. I was in first grade, and we were taught phonics with the Open Court system.

If you're around my age, you'll remember the wall cards with the letters and pictures on them, and the chant that we stood and recited every morning: “Block A, Block A ...ay, ay, ay! Beating heart, beating heart ... buh, buh, buh!” And so on.

There was a story behind the pictures associated with each sound. We started with the letter “M,” which we learned made the sound “mmmm...” The picture on the card was a girl enjoying an ice cream cone, and she was the star of the story. I can remember each picture on every card, because it made sense and had relevance to the story.

As we learned another letter, another bit of the girl's story was revealed: At one point she saw a motorboat on the water, which made an “nnnnn....” sound. And at another plot point, she encountered an angry cat, teaching us “fffff...” sound. At various points in the story, she cracked some nuts(C- and K-), knocked on a door (D-), got out of breath (H-), made some coffee (Qu-), and encountered a frog (G-), baby birds (Y-), an angry lion (R-) and apparently, a ghost (Oo-).

I have a couple of points. First of all, the story was exciting. There were ghosts! And lions! And motorboats! And ice cream!

Secondly, I was six years old. My mom had taught me how to read quite a few words before then, but the school didn't actually attempt to teach me to read until I was six.

Billy started pre-K when he had just turned three. Almost immediately, his class began with sight words.

The first word I was taught in school was “ME.” It had obvious significance for me, and I knew how to sound it out because I had been taught the “ice cream sound” (M-) and “Block E” (long E-).

Billy's first word : “the.” How do you teach a 3-year-old the significance of “the.” WHY do you teach a three-year-old the significance of “the?”

In my first grade class, after learning “me,” Mrs. Peel taught us the “knock on door” consonant (D-) and “the angry lion” (R-) and I sounded out the word “deer.” My first book: We Feed A Deer. A little light on plot, sure, but it was followed by Fire! Fire! (long I-) and one about a jewel heist on a boat (long O-) that I remember to this day.

Billy's books are called “pre-decodables” and they are the most boring stories on the planet. In fact, calling them “stories” is a little misleading. They are more like word collections.

Some of the titles are A Table, The Pond and The Cows, and they make We Feed a Deer read like an episode of “CSI: Miami.” I mean, come on, who ever heard of a children's book in which the protagonist was a TABLE?

Here is the actual entire text of The Pond:
"The pond.
He and I are by the pond.
The frog is by the pond.
The pond."

Billy's going to start his second year of pre-K next month, and he will very likely be getting the same material again. The only thing worse than studying The Pond for a week is a re-run of The Pond. I've tried getting these books back out to re-familiarize him with the sight words, but the last time I pulled one out, he just laid his head down on the table and started to weep softly.

His favorite books at the moment are Madeline, which involves crying and emergency surgery and a man with a “hurchy foot” and scars and presents and balloons (these plot twists are listed in the order of their importance to Billy), and Finding Nemo, which has sharks and a blowfish and water and a seahorse and hugs and lots of shouting.

The Pond can't compete. I'm glad he's learning to read at school. I just hope the plotless reading material doesn't cause him to develop an aversion to it.

Books are competing with more stuff than ever for kids' attention. It's never been more important to make their reading material exciting and challenging – even if they are three. Especially if they're three. Have you seen an episode of the "Wonder Pets?" Those animals get around.

For the time being, I'm spicing up The Pond with a few plot twists of my own. I hope it doesn't raise too many eyebrows in the fall if Billy explains how the giant frog at the pond ate the boy who then cried and cried until his friends, the magical fish who were cousins of Nemo, sang the theme to the “Wonder Pets” and saved the day.

Now that's a story about a pond.

Today Billy staged a race between a small plastic pig from his toy farm and a tractor. It went on for quite some time. During this race, which went around and around the dining room table, he hummed the "William Tell Overture" (the Lone Ranger song). The pig won -- which might have had something to do with the fact that the tractor was pulling a trailer carrying an astronaut and Linny from the Wonder Pets -- but that's not the point of the story.

Billy is really starting to explore his imagination. He's starting to make up his own games and tell stories with new endings -- in his own way.

Many of you have been on this journey with us since I started this blog -- and some before that. You know already that we're practicing Floortime therapy, which encourages us to follow the joy of our child. Imaginary play is highly encouraged by this philosophy of autism therapy, because it encourages not only communication, but also problem-solving and thinking more abstractly.

Billy is getting it. He's making progress.

He's still a pretty concrete thinker. He can memorize anything – and I mean anything – that has a name or a number or a specific concrete label. He's not yet four and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of road machinery.

So tell me how a kid who can identify a “steel wheel soil compacter” at 50 yards is incapable of knowing when he needs the bathroom. He's messing with me. I'm telling you that he could use the potty if he wanted to, if it didn't amuse him so much to see me unravel at the seams.

But I guess knowing when he needs to go to the potty – or telling you what color a carrot is, if there's not a carrot in front of him – is still hard. Telling you what he did earlier in the day or yesterday, understanding those vague concepts of time, is next to impossible ... for now.

It's like he lives absolutely in the moment, completely immersed in whatever or whoever he's with. He's not worried about what's going to happen tomorrow, and he's not bothered by what happened yesterday. He is totally with that pig as he crosses the finish line.

I could learn a lot from him.

We took the kids to see Toy Story 3 today. Awesome. Really, it was one of the best films I've seen in a

long time, and Dave and I both wept at the end. (Looking at me curiously, Billy said, "Mama has a hurchy eye.")

My problem is with the pre-show. We are a well-oiled machine, with a meticulously timed schedule. I don't waste one minute more than I have to on the pre-movie countdown, because I have only a certain amount of hidden snacks and juice in the diaper bag, and they have to keep the kids happy for the whole film.

Once the lights went down and the trailers started, I was pulling out raisins and graham crackers and goldfish and thermoses as quietly as I could when Billy announced loudly, "We're having a picnic!" Hey, it's not my fault my kid is a picky eater and would rather eat crayons than popcorn. When they start stocking graham crackers at the snack counter, I'll start paying the $7.50 to buy it from them ... maybe.

Anyway, half an hour later, we had been sitting through previews for some of the most abysmal looking child entertainment I could imagine when Billy turned to me and said, "I want to go home."

Yeah, I don't blame you.

There really should be tighter controls on how many commercials they can run at the beginning of kids' films. I used to look forward to trailers. Now I'm so exhausted by the end of them that I can rarely remember what movie we were going to see.

Luckily for us, Toy Story 3 started right about the time Billy's patience ran out, and he loved it so much that as soon as the lights came up at the end, he shouted, "More Buzz Lightning! Fast-forward please!" (what he tells us at home when commercials come on during our DVR-ed copies of TS 1 & 2).

Toys Story 3 was great. But here's a warning: If the previews of upcoming films are anything to go by, we parents are in for a rough few months this fall.

This is a question that's been on my mind a lot lately: Can we really have it all?

A couple of generations ago, most women were stay-at-home moms. If the men they married respected them as partners, then they were lucky. With their girlfriends, they drank iced tea and discussed men. (I get all my information about this from episodes of Mad Men and all those Rebecca Wells novels about ya-yas, so I'm not swearing to its accuracy.)

And then all the bra-burning happened and women could go to work and leave their kids in daycare. I spent time in daycare, as did most of my friends. Of course, my mom was from the South; she wore a bra .. and a slip ... and hose. But she went to work.

Ours is the first generation of moms to try to truly do everything. Some of us have decided we're gonna be full-time moms with our own home businesses. We're mommy bloggers and Pampered Chef hosts and consultants and public speakers. I know a candle maker, a personal shopper, several journalists and a physical trainer who are also full-time moms.

We also insist on being married to our best friend while maintaining fierce Sex-in-the-City-type girlfriendships so that we can go out, glammed up and sip martinis at least once a week. And thanks to friggin' technology and Kate Hudson movies, we're led to believe it's all going to be one hilarious romantic comedy from beginning to end.

Our mothers raise their eyebrows (and our grandmothers, if they're around, are just confused), while we try not to look as exhausted as we feel.

I was discussing this with friends both online and in the “real” world recently, because I've been doing a lot of soul-searching lately. I heard Ayelet Waldman, the author of the memoir Bad Mother, interviewed on this very subject on National Public Radio.

Waldman had a mom who was apparently a devout feminist. And the author said that after she had her children and realized how hard it was to juggle everything, she felt like her mom – and the entire generation – had lied to her. To all their daughters.

Not on purpose. She suggested that they were, perhaps, naïve, believing that if women just had the same opportunities as men, everything else would just work itself out.

I don't feel like my mom lied to me or pushed me towards trying to juggle multiple writing jobs and full-time motherhood, including all the ins and outs of parenting an autistic preschooler. I feel like most of the time, my mom thinks I'm slightly crazy for trying to do all the crap I do.

And I think she's kinda right. After being a mother for almost four years now, I'm still trying to define myself. I passionately love being a wife and mother. And I passionately love writing ... though not as much as being a wife and mom.

This summer has been harder in some ways than I expected. There have been speedbumps that I hadn't prepared for: Hand-Foot-Mouth virus followed by family-wide pink-eye. Keeping Willow happy while I try to give Billy a handwriting lesson has been harder than expected. And by the end of the day, when I'm supposed to turn the kids over to Dave and start my work, all I want to do is collapse on my bed, play online Boggle or catch up on The Good Wife.

I may have to scale the writing back – at least through the summer. I'll still be here, just less often. And probably slightly less coherently. The most important right now is that I save what few brain cells I have left for the kids.

So I find myself somewhere between Mad Men and Sex and the City – with none of the fashion sense and less of the sex (it's hard to feel sexy with pink eye). I wear pajamas until the afternoon way too often, and if I manage to brush both my hair and my teeth on the same day, I consider myself a success. The kids are another story.

I rarely get it all done – or even get close. I'm constantly “spinning plates” and desperately trying not to drop anything. Can we have it all? I don't know. But I'm gonna try.

(Look for this post on Southern MOMentum on July 14 when I'll be guest blogger!)

We try to limit TV in our house. We really do. I know all the statistics: how too much TV has been linked to obesity and attention problems -- particularly in autistic kids -- and violence in children in general. One of the biggest challenges with autistic kids is getting them out of their own worlds and interacting with people; clearly TV can be an obstacle to that.

We never have adult TV on while the kids are awake. And by "adult TV," I don't mean porn (though you can safely assume that we aren't watching porn with the kids in the room). I'm talking about anything that isn't on Nick Jr. or Disney or PBS Kids. We don't even watch the news with the kids, because with all the news tickers and quick cuts and crazy graphics and split screens, it starts to give me ADD after about 15 minutes.

So, on the advice of our occupational therapist, we try to limit the kids' TV to about 30 minutes a day. The exception is when they're sick and feverish. When Billy feels so rotten that he just wants to watch cartoons, I don't have the heart to tell him no.

He's been sick for almost a month, off and on, and we've watched “Finding Nemo” so many times that it has become an alternative language for us. You can find a line of dialogue in Nemo to fit almost any situation, as it turns out. We had an unsettling couple of days when Billy spoke almost exclusively in “whale,” but luckily, that phased out quickly.

We also now tell time in “Nemos:” a “full Nemo” is a 90-minute block, a “half-Nemo” is 45 minutes, and so on. It takes about a “quarter-Nemo” to get both kids dressed with shoes on.

Now that Billy's feeling better, I have written a script of my own: It's called “Losing Nemo” and it lasts for the rest of our lives.

So we're going to start this week newly healthy and going cold turkey on the TV-watching. Only educational TV and only for 30 minutes a day.

I will say this about TV, though: Billy can learn stuff he sees on a screen about 10 times faster than something he has to hear some other way. He pays attention when it's on a TV or computer screen.

I'm not just talking about memorizing dialog – though he does have a catalog of cartoons in his head that could rival the Netflix kids' section.

I'm talking about learning skills, even motor skills, by watching someone else complete the task: handwriting, bike riding, dancing, etc.

We've been working with a couple of handwriting programs this summer (not too consistently, because of the illness): TV Teacher and Handwriting Without Tears.

The TV Teacher program is based on the idea that certain autistic kids learn very well from video. The host of the program is an occupational therapist, and she noticed that one of her clients, a young boy, improved a lot after his sessions were videotaped and played back. He would watch them over and over. And they taught him shapes and letters this way before creating the DVD series and selling it to other parents.

It's been a big hit with Billy. We've mainly focused on shapes over the past month. As she teaches each shape, “Ms. Marnie” will show how the child can use the shape to draw something fun: a circle becomes a balloon, a triangle becomes a pizza, and a heart becomes a valentine.

A couple of days ago, Billy and I were drawing with crayons on his easel. He asked, “Draw a heart! Draw a heart!,” so I did. Then I walked away, talking to my parents about something.

Then my dad got a funny look on his face, staring at something just over my shoulder. I turned around and saw that Billy had written “Mom” in the center of the heart. It was slightly wonky but completely legible.

My jaw dropped. No one had asked him to write anything. He had never written “mom” before anywhere.

I picked up the paper from the easel and held it out to him, asking, “Billy what does this say?”

He smiled and pointed at each letter: “M-O-M ... MOM!”

I couldn't believe it. I know that he saw it on TV, but it has been almost a month of non-stop Nemo-thon since he's seen that program. And no one prompted him to write anything. I didn't even know he could spell “mom,” much less write it.

So don't tell me that TV is all bad for children. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think video can be a great way for some autistic kids to learn; I don't understand the science behind it, but I think there's something there. The key is picking the right programs and using this tool strategically.

I'd love to hear any of your suggestions about really good educational programming, either online or on TV/DVD. Or do you think exposing kids to any TV is a bad idea? How do you choose the stuff you'll let your kids watch? I'd love to hear opinions!

We're still sick. And I say "we," because when one of us is sick, we all suffer. Our family is a strategically balanced machine, and when one cog isn't functioning, the whole works grinds to a halt.

I used to hate it when books like this turned up at story time.

I was reticent to share our latest round of illness for fear that people would start thinking I had that Baron Munchausen disease or whatever its called. You know, that psycho disease that you see on episodes of Medium or Law and Order or all those Lifetime movies where the moms keep making their kids sick so that they can take them to the hospital for ... some reason. Maybe they like old magazines or mechanical beds.

Then I realized that anyone who'd laid eyes on me recently would be well aware that I wasn't enjoying myself in the slightest and considering I haven't washed my hair or slept in a week, I'm clearly avoiding drawing attention to myself.

So yep, we're still sick. The third virus.

This one is apparently called “Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease.” I seriously thought that was something that happened to cattle. So after a month of battling respiratory flu and stomach flu, my kids have now apparently got a livestock plague.

But no: It turns out there's no relation to “Hoof and Mouth Disease,” the one cows get. So I guess they could still catch that one.

Hand-Foot-Mouth is a highly contagious (but not dangerous) virus that shows up first, usually, as an unexplained fever. Then it's followed by a rash on the – you guessed it – hands, feet and in the mouth. The whole life of the virus can last two or three weeks apparently. It occurs most commonly in children and also is spread most often in the summer months. Most adults have antibodies to fight it off.

The doctor says that it requires physical human-to-human contact, so most of our friends are in luck. Billy isn't big on going around touching people, so it's unlikely that he's rubbed the cow rash on your children.
I'd never heard of Hand-Foot-Mouth before now (though it's apparently pretty common), so I wanted to get the word out about what to look for: strange, unexplained fever, rash appearing on the feet, hands or mouth and a lack of desire for food.

As soon as we're past this round of illness, I'm going to see a local nutritionist to see if there's anything we can do to boost Billy's immunity. Maybe I'm just paranoid and he's ill no more often than other kids who start school, but it seems as though we've spent the past year doing little more than wiping noses and butts and finding new ways to hide Children's Tylenol in beverages.

We've gone through so much kids' flu meds in the past year that we're thinking of hosting tastings. We can tell you all about the best pairings: Generic ibuprofen and V-8 Fusion, for instance, has a very nice finish. But you don't wanna chase a shot of acetaminophen with rice milk. Recipe for disaster. Children's amoxycillin, however, dissolves nicely in milk.

Anyone have any ideas about boosting immunity? Both kids get a daily multi-vitamin. Our house is not over-run with vermin, and it stays reasonably disinfected, thanks to our long-suffering cleaner.

I've heard something about probiotics helping with immunity, but I have no idea what that is. In fact, when I first heard the term, I thought they were talking about robots.

I could use a robot. Particularly one who could be trained to mix up a V-8/ibuprofen cocktail at 4 a.m. so that I could stay asleep. It would be awesome if it were one of those Tranformers that could also turn into a Hummer and drive us around town and fight crime and stuff.

Sigh. But a robot probably wouldn't be very good at “cuckles” (Willow's word for “cuddles”), and I doubt the Probot5000 would know what to make of Billy's midnight recitation of “It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

So until the technology improves, they're stuck with me and Dave.