Amelia Bedelia a.k.a. Rachel

      Have you ever read the Amelia Bedelia book series? It's a fun series of books about a girl, named Amelia Bedelia, who is completely literal! The author is Herman Parish. When I read them with my 4 older daughters, we laughed and enjoyed them, thinking this "character" was charmingly naive.... When I started reading them to Rachel, she was as baffled as Amelia Bedelia, and did not get the word plays. I realized Rachel's thinking was quite similar & her interpretation (or lack thereof) of our language is quite different than most of ours.

      We now, lovingly, call some of her "interpretations" & ideas - Rachelisms. I occassionally, just phone one of her older sisters & tell them we have a new Rachelism. I procede to share with them her latest, new to us, way of looking at words, etc. that has prompted me to smiles & even laughter! I do wonder if the writer of Amelia Bedelia had someone close to him with Asperger's or a PDD of some sort. Their thinking is NOT wrong, but different. It's sometimes more accurate than what the "norm" is.

     For instance: In 2nd grade, the first day was filled with learning about their classmates, etc. They each made posters representing themselves. All the children wrote their eye color... blue, green, brown hazel, but Rachel wrote "wite". I questioned why she wrote that instead of blue. She simply pulled her lower eyelids down, to show me most of her eye is white, not blue.  True enough.

     I explained all of this to share her newest Rachelism. Yesterday, she was deep in thought about something when I picked her up from school. She said she had a note. My heart kind of dropped, not knowing what it might be. She said it was a good one. That "We are doing something FUN for our school. WE are having a race." I interpreted this to be a track meet or something similar. She said "I don't know what it is, it might be a race down the hall." I'm driving, trying to think what she could possibly be talking about, as she gets more & more frustrated with me. When we got home, she handed me the packet for her school's Fund Raiser", aka Rachel's Fun Racer. When I tried to explain it, she decided it was called a Fund Raiser because it is Fun. These things wear me out sometimes, but I can only imagine how confusing it is to her. I just nodded & told her maybe so. Some things are just too foreign to explain satisfactorally to her.