Alex has the video Elmo Cooking. Despite my sometime desire that this be about shrill Elmo in an oven (ha ha), it is instead about Elmo learning to cook from various kitchen notables. One of them is Emeril, who cooks pizza with Elmo. “BAM!” Emeril says as he slaps on olives. “BAM!” echoes Elmo, adding peppers.

So it isn’t surprising that Alex likes to help with our homemade pizza. We made about a dozen of them for guests one Christmas, and Alex never left the kitchen, bamming pepperoni, peppers, mushrooms. A good shot, too.

Pizza

Last night he wanted to help with all steps, perhaps because he’d just come off ripping an “Erase the R Word” button off the bag I take to work, shoved a stack of newspapers off the dining room table, and in general misbehaved like what I termed “some alien life form” (I snuck out of work to see Star Trek yesterday afternoon…) Alex likes to help after being naughty. Much as I like to think it’s his way of apologizing, I think he hopes we’ll be so pleased we’ll just forget his bad behavior of a few moments before. Same thing, really.

Last night, he wanted to handle the dough. I should’ve let him, except I was in a hurry to get the pizza into the oven so Jill could get out the door to a meeting. “Not tonight, Alex. Sorry.”

“Dough! Dough!”

I got the stuff pressed down and he handed me the sauce jar. I spread it out, letting him handle the fork a little (only rookies use a spoon…). Then came his favorite part: cheese. I let him bam a little; he tends to drop it in one big mound in the center of the pie, so we worked on sprinkling.

“Alex, clear! I’m opening the oven!”

“Pepperoni?” he asked.

Someday I’ll report that he actually ate a slice of homemade pizza. (He used to eat the cheese off slices in pizzerias, leaving me to finish what amounted to a warm ketchup sandwich.) He did stick his finger on a drop of sauce on the counter and place his fingertip in his mouth. “Alex - sauce!”

A new food? A new era?? His lips twisted into a sour rectangle, and he ran back to the living room. Later he had his hot dogs. We must bam more.

***

The Autism Treatment Acceleration Act has hit the House and Senate.

I wasn’t feeling well yesterday (better today). I put together a very perfunctory dinner for Charlie—-vegetables, shrimp, and some rice—and sat beside him while he ate. Once done, he put all the dishes into the sink and then stood with one elbow bent, looking towards me.

I surmised (correctly, as it turned out) that he wanted more to eat. As I felt woozy, it seemed best to stay in my chair and, after finding out that Charlie did indeed want to eat more, I requested him to: get out some rice that was in the refrigerator, put it in the microwave, turn it on for a minute (he did 1.23 seconds), get a plate, get a spoon, get the rice out. .All of which he did, and fluidly, readily. And then he shut the door to the microwave and closed the cabinet doors and sat down at the table, and ate.

I felt well taken care of.

This is the year (and this is, in particular, the summer) that Charlie took a huge liking to ketchup. At home, the proportion of the red stuff on a plate is, at times, significantly less than that of the food it’s meant to accompany, and Charlie has watched patiently as I’ve done what I can to shake those last drops out. Down here at the beach, he’s mostly had ketchup in those little packets; he tends to eat them first (before the hot dog or burger and fries).  Given that there’s more ketchup than actual tomatoes consumed around here, I was interested to know that “the cheap, mass-produced processing tomato yields more concentrated nutrients than the fresh-market varieties that are picked green,” in a recent article on tomatoes in Smithsonian Magazine by Arthur Allen (better known in autism circles for writing about vaccines and the “autism epidemic”).

And Charlie has also enjoyed an occasional slice of a Jersey tomato, which truly have that taste of summer—sunshine warmth and juicy, sweetness and tang.

A friend had asked both Jim and me to speak to his Tuesday night class, on religion in America. We had planned that Charlie and I would meet Jim somewhere near where the college where our friend is teaching—up in Bergen County, not far from the George Washington Bridge—and first have dinner at a diner, then take turns walking and hanging with Charlie, and talking to the class.

Ah, how the best laid plans do go to waste.

After the long weekend, it was clear that Charlie needed a return to order: He didn’t have school on Friday or Monday; by Saturday afternoon, Charlie was asking for school (two days off and back to waiting for the yellow bus, right?). Usually he and I start the week with a trip to the grocery store; Tuesdays we go to the YMCA pool.

Today—a kind of Tuesday that was kind of like Monday—we did both. Charlie had a very happy day at school and a good cello lesson (though I felt a bit sad as he only has two more lessons and then he moves onto middle school and it’s not clear what might happen). He took his time getting off the bus and then was unsettled, going from smiling to crying and moaning in the space of less than a second. (And the weather—alternating sunny and humid and then rain falling down in buckets—matched his changing moods exactly.)

We did get to the pool where Charlie floated around with two multicolored beach balls and tried to go up the water slides (the water wasn’t turned on). I stood in the water in my flip flops and after forty minutes he asked for a towel. The weather still kept swinging between sunny and storms as we walked through the parking lot to get groceries. Charlie wanted brownies and I found some gluten-free mix and bought a dozen eggs, one being needed for the recipe (and none of us are egg eaters).

Once home, he quickly ate a pack of sushi and then took out the brownie mix. I turned on the oven and Charlie helped pour and stir and got out and put away some ingredients. I finished the mixing (Charlie’s mixing was 50% tasting the batter) and spooned it into a greased pan. Charlie licked the spoon and I wiped down the counters, told him to put grapes in his lunchbox, and did the dishes, carefully rubbing at the inside of a white melamine bowl that was a wedding present.

I used to bake and cook quite a bit. Cookies, the occasional pie, bread and pastry and lots of what you’d have to call “California/Asian cuisine,” heavy on the gorgeous vegetables. I still have all kinds of pans and utensils and cookbooks with sticky covers, but they mostly sit in their cabinets or boxes. I do make most of Charlie’s lunch but I rarely cook for the three of us. It wasn’t putting Charlie on the gluten-free casein-free diet at the age of 2 that changed things, but realities. I’ve worked full-time for most of Charlie’s life and hasty stir-fry and rice are the usual dinner option. And, until fairly recently, Jim worked up in the Bronx and had a daily, epic commute on trains and subways and afoot, and could never be home in time for dinner.

Tuesday night, Charlie sat on the kitchen table as we waited for the brownies to bake. He used to do that all the time when he was younger, his feet on a chair—-now they dangle just above the floor. He ate too many brownies, still hot from the oven; I tasted one too–gooey and sweet. Then it was brushing teeth, running around, bedtime wrapped tightly in a big fleece blanket. I cut straight lines through the rest of the brownies, now cooled off, and tore up sheets of waxed paper, and wrapped them up, small treats for tomorrow.

“Matt Buchanan shows blogs may be a young man’s game,” says the New York Times in an article entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.

Only a “young man’s game”?—-not if you follow blogs about autism (and, recently, one particular blogger on vaccines and science). Not only is it 24/7; you’ve got to have some sense of things scientific, medical, educational, legal, and (in the case of this blog) something about being a mom.

(Aren’t moms the original multitaskers, another mother asked me last week, a baby in one arm, a spoon to stir with in the other, phone on her shoulder and shutting a draw with her hip, and one foot kicking the garbage can out of the way?)