My 13 year old daughter has a bi-fold door for her bedroom closet and when it recently came off the track she picked it up and carried it to the hallway. This seemed a perfectly acceptable place for it, given that the additional space in her room is covered with piles of clothing. And, nailpolish. And, possibly a bag of chips.

It probably also seemed a perfectly acceptable place because it’s also where my husband and I put our footboard and side-rails after we got our new bed. A year ago. That’s right, we used our upstairs hallway as storage for over 12 months. Don’t judge me!

So there my daughter’s closet door stood, perilously rested against the edge of her doorjamb. Last night before I went to bed I thought, I need to move that door, because if she gets up in the middle of the night she’s going to run right into it. Then I edged past it and crept to her bed where I gently removed the text books piled up next to her as she slept.

Then I turned around and walked right into the closet door.

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Since my son was a baby, someone from the county has come out to work with us on his needs. As an infant, he got in-home occupational and physical therapy. When he got a little older, he attended a preschool for special needs children and when he neared school-age, we got OT and behavioral therapy ala carte while the county paid the bills.

Now that my boy attends a typical school and is functioning with mild delays, we don’t use the county funding much, but once a year his case manager still has to make an appearance at our house to go over his status. She visited us last week.

For the first 30 minutes she asked me questions about my son’s health and hospitalizations. Then she started asking him the questions.

She inquired about his age, what chores he does around the house and the extra-curricular activities in which he’s involved. She asked him if he can still dress himself, if he has a problem turning on the water when he showers and then…she asked him if he’s shaving yet.

This is a valid question.

Despite being 10 years old and only 48 pounds, my son is kind of hairy. You can see the faintest hint of a mustache above his upper lip and I admit to taming his unibrow. I blame our Lebanese genes.

Still,  I think his case manager was taken off-guard when he replied, “No, I don’t shave yet. But, do you want to see my hairy back?”

Unfortunately for us, the county draws the line at paying for wax jobs.

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Yesterday morning, our dog almost got run over.

My husband and my son were walking her when she suddenly darted away and into the path of a school bus which, in my husband’s words, “…was not going to stop.” My son witnessed the entire incident.

When they returned home, he was one shaken-up kid and insisted upon giving me a play-by-play.

And, I know it was an honest account of what happened, because after he went on and on about Daisy’s near-fatal mistake, he ended the story with, “It was so terrible! I was scared 3/4 to death!”

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It turns out that if your kid suffers from hearing loss and he’s playing Draw Something, he may turn to you and say, “Mom, I can’t draw this because it’s inappropriate.”

To which you might reply, “Why? What is it?”

And, you’ll be completely surprised when he says, “It’s Uggs. You know…like the boobs.”

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