Holy cow some stuff is hard. Opening anything with my teeth, for example. Carrie either files her teeth to a razor’s edge or has multiple rows of them like a shark, because she can’t be stopped when she puts her teeth to it. Bag of chips? Rrrrip -> open. Indestructible plastic wire thing that holds tags on clothes? Chomp -> detagged. Metal chain? Clank -> not yet tried but I wouldn’t put it past her.

The reverse also applies to her, too. Her dad can put his fingers in his mouth and whistle so loud that it affects weather patterns. When Carrie does it, she sounds like a tire losing air, a tire that is filled with spit. You want to be off to the side when she tries it, believe me.

It’s the same way with Isabella, except she has trouble with different activities. It doesn’t matter whether other people can do it easily or not. Just because I watch Carrie bite a phone book or a leather boot in half doesn’t mean I can do the same with a clothing tag, and just because we show Isabella how to get herself dressed doesn’t mean that she’ll automatically “get it” after a few times. Like I said before, some people don’t understand that.

Watching her struggle makes me appreciate how amazing we really are as humans. We do unbelievably complex activities or mental calculations with hardly a thought. As babies, our brains constantly developed, despite the best efforts of some TV producers. The activities that we can do with ease today are a result of daily practice, practically from birth. How many of you have to look at your underwear for more than a second before you realize which way is up and which way should point to the front? Seems simple but it’s not for Isabella. Likewise, doing a double back handspring on a gymnastics beam is easy for Madeline, but not for me. It might take me ten years of practice to do that, assuming that I ever got it at all and that I didn’t snap the beam in half with my skull (two big assumptions).

And I’m just talking about physical activities here. Social activities are a thousand times worse because there’s another person involved. And people are unpredictable -- especially to kids who have trouble realizing that other people don’t think the same way they do. They might not want to watch Wow Wow Wubbzy a hundred times in a row.

Hey, I thought I said I wasn’t talking about social issues. You’re getting ahead of me. I’ll catch that one some other time. As for now, I need to go find some scissors so I can get into my pretzels....