Found this in google images. It’s very similar to a phone we had when I was a kid. Sometimes I wish phones were still like this. They were a lot more fun to dial.

We also had a phone that you pressed the buttons, but they made the same pulse-dial noises as a rotary phone like this. And another rotary phone that made a sort of loud repeated clicking sound instead of a ring.

Grandma's Choice

Choices in how we respond to things, and a wonderful story.

[Two shiny wood rectangular blocks, one green and one red. And a green tree-shaped block.]

These are a few odd blocks I found. The red and green shiny ones are part of a set I only wish I still had. The things were amazing. They were for building little towns with. And the edges were rounded. And they were smooth and glossy. And just perfect in every way. I wish I could get hold of a set but I don’t even know what they were called.

I remember that some of them were supposed to be the square parts of houses. They were like cubes almost, but with a notch cut out at the middle of the bottom that was supposed to represent a door. And I think there were separate blocks that were supposed to be roofs. I don’t remember anything else though. They would have been from the 1980s, because I got them for a birthday I think. And they seem to keep well over the years because they seem as shiny and new now as then.

I do not think the tree was in the same set but I could be wrong. This is based on the tree being as dirty and slightly rough as my 1970s pattern blocks, whereas the blocks I’m talking about are smooth and glossy and shiny and almost new-looking after nearly 30 years.

If anyone knows what I might mean, could they let me know?

[Toddler-me playing with a puzzle, while my mom sits next to me. My legs are splayed into a really weird position.]

I had to post this because of the legs. I know I’m hypermobile, but I literally cannot figure out what my legs were doing in this picture. It just doesn’t make sense the positions my feet were in. And then I’m twisted around in some way. I still do things like this and end up wondering why my body hurts when I’m twisted into some weird posture.

I have another picture taken shortly after this one somewhere. It showed my mom handing me something by holding it in her hands and looking only at her hands, not at my face. While I looked only at her hands, not at her face. That ended up going a long way to proving autism to CNN, because it’s been written that parents of autistic kids unconsciously learn to adopt that posture because there’s no eye contact or confrontation involved, unlike the usual more direct way of handing things to someone. My mom tells me she started getting in trouble at work because she’d learned from me not to make eye contact with anyone, and it affected her performance reviews as a respiratory therapist until she figured out what was happening and became more selective about it. It looks like this picture she has the puzzle piece she is handing to me, and she’s about to do that posture I described.

[Four pictures. One of baby-me walking behind a calico cat in a redwood forest. One of my dad and baby-me on a yellow porch, him holding me. And two of my dad holding me in a redwood forest. Captions handwritten by my mother read “…and chased her cat called Mouse. There was a big yellow balcony to sit on with daddy and a terrace of redwoods to explore…”]

This is stuff (besides the cat) that I like mostly because of the background, which are various parts of the redwood forest I was born in. I also like that they have my dad in them. He was never distant or freaked out by gender roles, he always loved me and did all kinds of stuff with me. One of his favorite things to do there with me was listen for owls. I remember nothing visually but I remember the owls hooting. He said my eyes always got really big when I heard them.

[Baby-me sitting down reading a book. Around it are gold circles cut into the phases of the moon. Some sort of purple and pink stuff that looks almost like curtains the way it’s cut, and has obvious text showing through the other side of it. And the caption, handwritten by my mother, “Quiet as a butterfly, quiet as a sunset, quiet as a book, quiet as Mandy’s thoughts.”]

Hyperlexia anyone? Geez. Also, more apparent commentary on the “who’s in there?” thing. I remember my mom used to tell stories of all the stuff my brothers did as babies, and I’d ask what I did, and she’d pause for a second and say “You… umm… you were quiet.” Which I found boring and unsatisfying at the time. I also remember being thinking about nothing in particular and my mom then randomly saying the word “thoughtful” to someone about me, before I knew what the word meant. That happened a lot. (If I had known what it meant, it would confuse me, because it usually happened when I was spacing out or staring at stuff without the slightest thought in my head. It’s weird all the textures words have before you know what they mean.)

I also remember being older than that and having this huge pile of books that I’d take to my crib (I was in a crib up to the age of four or so, I think — they changed it so I could climb in and out myself), and later to bed, with me. Which hasn’t changed. Not even a little. I’ve got a huge amount of them hanging off the side of my bed in a blanket where I can reach them if I want them but they don’t actually touch the bed itself.

[Toddler-me sitting naked in a bowl. With various decorations around it and the caption, handwritten by my mother, “Fitting into Mandy’s world is as easy as sitting in a bowl.”]

I can’t help but think that was some kind of commentary. (My parents tell me they often wondered what I was thinking when I was little.) This is a good example of what a page of this book looked like.

[Two pictures. Infant-me sitting playing with a stick and a paper bag, with a calico cat crouching next to me. Wearing some sort of pink fuzzy clothing. Infant-me walking behind the same calico cat over the floor of a redwood forest. Wearing a blue dress and matching blue bonnet.]

This was Mouse. The cat my parents made no effort to find when we moved and she ran away, even though they told me exactly where they thought she was running to. I think she was one of two cats who slept with me in my crib, and by her postures here she seemed like she may have been fairly protective of me as an infant, something about it reminds me of me and Fey. Which is kind of funny because her two litters of cat kittens didn’t fare so well in terms of her maternal instincts, she’d leave them places and we’d have to go get them and bring them to her.

These pictures were the other reason I scanned the entire album/scrapbook thing. (I scanned the whole thing in case I saw stuff I wanted later.)

[Me as an infant in a blue dress and bonnet, standing in front of a stool on the floor of a redwood forest.]

I actually scanned most of these pictures for the backgrounds rather than the foregrounds. This one is a good example. I’m standing on a forest floor covered with redwood needles, and that is cool. I have very strong memories of the forest floor, some visual-ish, some not. (My very earliest visual memories are of textured things like forest floors, not “foreground” objects.)

I also like it because it shows one of my earliest stims, the finger wiggle.