I grew up in a family that didn't have much. We kids were hounded to remember to preserve resources - Daddy constantly hollering at us to turn off the lights when we left a room, close the doors to outside to keep heat or cool inside where it belonged, don't stand there with the fridge door hanging open while we decided upon which snack to choose, don't leave water running and walk out of the room, etc.

VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM TYLENOL DOES NOT CAUSE AUTISM MY CHILD DOES NOT NEED TO BE "CURED" OF HIS AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER I seriously cannot believe these discussions are, well, up for discussion again. It's frustrating. It's infuriating. More importantly, it's dangerous to the mental health of the mothers of autistic people. It's frightfully dangerous to autistic people. For the love of all that is holy, can we please stop?

There was an interview the other day of a certain pastor of a Christian Nationalist church that's getting a lot of attention. There are a ton of sound bites. I won't give him a name or credit here. I refuse. I was infuriated on so many levels watching the interview/piece on this church and its growing following/community. To be honest, I was completely disgusted by essentially everything the lead pastor and his associates - all middle-aged white men, for the record - had to say.

We've had the Princess home this entire summer, minus a weekend here or there. She got home mid-May ish to work her legal internship and pour wine at a winery (strangely a life goal she's had for awhile haha). We have loved every minute of having her home, especially knowing we're unlikely to ever get time like this with her again.

Do you ever read a book and a line/paragraph will just smack you upside the head, make you inhale sharply in understanding or connection? I recently read "My Friends" by Fredrik Backman and this happened so many times during this particular reading experience. I have probably thirty page flags marking such lines....the book is 434 pages long. I literally hugged this book when I finished reading, it is just that good.

I have a complaint to file with the parenting public in general.....well, the parenting public a generation or two older than me and Spouse. Now, we have three adult children now. But my first complaint was this - no one told us how extremely difficult parenting teenagers is. Whew! We survived parenting teens by the skin of our teeth. It. Was.

I grew up in the Central Valley....a tiny town in the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley. We moved there when I was ten years old, going from a big city to this very small, very rural, barely-a-blip-on-the-map town. We had four elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school (plus the two rural K-8's and one Catholic K-8).

I started blogging in the fall of 2005. The Herd were very little and we were in the thick of all things young children. At the time, I was very involved in an online community for NICU parents. Blogging was a forum in the community. It gave me an outlet, a sounding board, a way to process all we'd been through in creating our little family, as well as gave me resources for all that would come throughout their growing up.

I hate to do this, and maybe I'm just being paranoid. I mean really, is someone in RFK Jr's government department going to search every blog to find autistic people? But in the name of all paranoid, protective momma's everywhere, Three's a Herd will be going dark for awhile....taken out of the publicly accessible realm. I cannot believe this is where we are in the year of our Lord 2025, but I will do whatever I must to protect my child. See ya on the flip side.

There are days I can nearly convince myself we never experienced hospital bedrest, premature birth, a NICU stay, and all the attendant fears, grief, loss, and trauma that comes with those things. We are, yes, so very far removed from those days. It feels a fever dream sometimes. I have two scars from those days - one in my left wrist from the IV line we think was the culprit for the staph infection that sent me into that final labor resulting in Big Man's birth at 26 weeks, and one on the inside of my right upper arm from the PICC line I had for the heavy antibiotics injected every 8 hours for four weeks to fight that staph infection.

Just before 1:00 a.m., the justices (aggressively) stepped back into the Alien Enemy Act litigation—in a decision suggesting that a majority understands that these are no longer normal circumstances.

It has become apparent this week that RFK Jr. hasn't before dealt with a triggered bunch of autism Mama Bears. He doesn't seem to have had the experience of dealing with mothers who've fought so long and hard for their children, otherwise he never would've made the comments he did the other day (was that just yesterday maybe?). Or maybe, as has been indicated, this is just another step in the journey of this current administration towards fascism and autocracy.

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