JUST WRITE!
Stubborn, thy name is Stephanie
By Tracey Coveart/The Scugog Standard

I thought I was stubborn. Certainly I’ve worn down my fair share of loved ones with sheer relentlessness. But I’ve got nothing on my daughter.
_For the last two weeks Stephanie has been giving us a clinic on perspicacity. Being a Taurus I’ve got astrology on my side, but the stars don’t hold a candle to autism.
_Stephie perseverates. She fixates on one thing and a nuclear holocaust won’t deflect her. You can try to steer her in another direction, but she always comes back. It’s like throwing a boomerang.
_We’re well accustomed to Stephie’s fixations. When she was little, she would choose one food and eat only that. For months it was oatmeal. Then Chicken McNuggets. Then Ritz crackers. When we bought her a colouring book, she would go through the entire thing, page by page, crayoning just the eyes.
_And of course, there’s her movies. The Lion King, Lady and The Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, The Fox and The Hound, Bambi, Balto and horse jumping DVDs. We’ve seen them all thousands of times, the flavour of the month being played over and over and over again.
_Same thing with music. Same artist. Same CD. Same songs. Same order. No random play for Taylor Swift, David Cook, Carrie Underwood, Lady Antebellum.
_And with YouTube videos: Warrior Cats and Watership Down, set to pop songs. Repeatedly. Endlessly if we let her. I’m sure she’s sick to death of our lectures about limited bandwidth and the curse of streaming video content.
_But for heaven’s sake, don’t suggest an eBay or Kijiji search. That’s how she got started on her Limonosov porcelain animal collection; her antique wind-up toy animal collection; her reptile collection.
_The latter started with Taka, our ball python. Stephie (and I) had always wanted a snake, but her biological father was terrified of them. Even garden variety garter snakes filled him with dread.
_About a year ago, at Nova’s Ark in Brooklin where Stephie spent much of her summer, we were delighted to discover that Rob is - if not a reptile lover - at least a reptile fan. He was fascinated by Mary-Ann’s snakes and lizards.
_As far as Stephie and I are concerned, anything other than outright revulsion is an endorsement, so we hopped on Kijiji and found Bob, a ball python breeder in Pickering. It took a little persuading (some might call it knock-down drag-out fighting), but we finally convinced Rob to go and see one of Bob’s 2011 hatchlings. When we watched the five-week old, 121 gram snake constrict and then eat a baby rat, backwards, even Rob was hooked. Taka came home with us two days later and instantly became a beloved addition to our household - a puppy with no legs.
_Taka triggered a new appetite in Stephie; a cold-blooded one that requires regular feeding.
_For Christmas, we gave Rob his very own six-month old veiled chameleon, Hunter S. Thompson. Like Taka, Hunter is extraordinarily companionable. Being arboreal, he loves to be ‘up,’ and waves his strange little zygodactylous hands around in the air until he latches onto Rob’s face and hoists himself to the top of his bald head, where he promptly falls asleep. On feeding night, we all huddle around the terrarium watching Hunter TV, as our pet’s sticky pink tongue, twice the length of his four-inch body, darts out to snag an unsuspecting cricket.
_The problem is, reptiles are addictive and having to visit Reptilez on the Danforth at least once a week for rats and insects is charting dangerous waters. I now want a ‘mystic potion’ ball python morph, but not nearly as badly as Stephie wants a ghost leopard gecko that has been for sale at the shop since September. We call him Danny Phantom (after Stephie’s imaginary YTV boyfriend) and she is determined to make him hers, even going so far as to commit herself to daily household chores and regular animal husbandry.
_Currently, she and her dad are engaged in a herculean battle of tenacity, Stephie determined to augment our reptilian collection, Rob determined to cap it. I’m not sure who will win, but my money’s on the autistic kid.