Evenings can be kind of stressful for me. There’s the getting dinner together (which sometimes starts right after lunch), getting Caitlyn home and doing the after-school routine, then eating and cleaning and prepping lunch for the next day, all before bedtime. I’m wearing down at this point and want nothing more than quiet and maybe a cup of tea; Caitlyn is getting increasingly crazy as the evening goes on, babbling and dancing and interrupting and fidgeting. She interprets things as narrowly as possible, so that telling her to stop sitting on the radiator also requires telling her to stop leaning on it, stop touching it, move away from it. It’s not a combination that’s inherently peaceful.

This evening, while in the making-tomorrow’s-lunch phase of the routine, Caitlyn, while standing on a stool, facing sideways and wiggling to whatever dance beat was in her head, placed her sandwich halves on top of the baggies, instead of inside them. Then she dismounted from the stool and gyrated her way to the towel on the fridge. This looked to me like forgetfulness and a lack of focus. (She said later that she wanted to wipe her hands on the towel since Ian had been telling her to stop wiping them on her pants.) And since I was in the “just get it done already” frame of mind and since we’d already told her several times to be less crazy, I asked her what she was doing and why were her sandwiches not in their bags and what was the matter with her pants that she kept grabbing at them?

She burst into tears, screamed “You don’t understand me at all!” and ran out of the room.

Frankly, I was hoping for another six or seven years before hearing that one. Does this mean the teen drama has started at age five? Or that, God willing, she’ll get it all out of her system before she’s twelve?