There is more to them than we may comprehend

You made me cry again… What a wonderful story.

Robin

I can honestly say in all my years of helping children with LD the biggest handicap has been the misconception of what these wonderful children have to offer the world. They truly teach and give much more than they take.
My life as a parent and Intergration Aide has certainly been deeply touched and enriched by the honesty and innocents of all the children I have worked with to the point of happily volunteering my spare time to work at a special school for the intellectually disabled as well as my paid job. God bless these wonderful gifts we have the pleasure of sharing our lives with.

Autistic woman makes spider webs from T-shirts

EVAN GRAHAM
For the North County Times
ESCONDIDO –- Katherine Jimenez often has war on her mind. But it’s not the war most people would think of.

“When she talks about it, it sounds like she thinks Halloween and Christmas are in competition with each other,” said her mother Mary.

TED MASE / Staff Photographer

Katherine Jimenez, 26, stands in her new handmade costume behind one of the spider webs she made from an old T-shirt.
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“This is not a competition, this is war,” Jimenez, 26, said at her home last week of the contest between Halloween and Christmas. And in this fight she is squarely on the side of Halloween.

Jimenez, who is autistic, likes Halloween because she gets to make her own costumes as well as costumes for her siblings and friends. Not only that, Jimenez weaves elaborate spider webs out of T-shirt fabric to decorate her family’s Escondido home.

Jimenez said she works on them all year long, and has “over 100” in stock. She sells some to local businesses and government offices; others she donates. They range in price from $3 to $5, depending on their size.

Some are three to four feet long, others longer. “About the same length as your car, Mom,” she said, talking to Mary Jimenez. They come in all colors.

“It will take her maybe two to three hours to make one, depending on how big it is,” Mary Jimenez said. She asked her daughter how long she has been doing this.

“Seven long years,” Jimenez replied.

“She won’t even tell me how she does it,” Mary Jimenez said. “I was watching her one day and I thought I had figured out how it’s done, but no, no. I didn’t quite have it.”

To weave the filmy spider webs Jimenez takes regular cotton fabric, drapes it over her head, unravels it and weaves the thin strands into a web. “Look at all the tiny strands,” she said as she unraveled a small piece.

She is proud of her costumes too. “Look, these are French seams,” she boasted, as she pointed to the double hand-stitching on an unfinished costume. “You can wash them as many times as you want, and they won’t come undone.”

“She does them all by hand,” Mary Jimenez said. “She doesn’t use sewing machines.”

“I’m a Halloween person,” Jimenez said. “I love dressing up in costumes; I love going trick-or-treating.”

This year she’s going as a Lego robot toy her younger brothers and sisters play with.

“I don’t even like Christmas,” she said.

Jimenez also loves the animated movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which, as Jimenez describes it, is about “Halloween people who scare off the Christmas people with Halloween monsters.”

She likely got the idea of the Halloween-Christmas contest from the movie, her mother said. She saw it only once a few years ago, but remembers everything about it.

“Her memory is outstanding,” said Mary Jimenez, who is in her sixties. “Oftentimes I’ll forget some small detail about something and I’ll ask her what it was; and she can always tell me. She also knows a great deal about history.”

Jimenez hopes one day to forge a business out of her small-scale private enterprise. But she won’t start a business just anywhere; she wants to open her business in New York City.

“There are a lot of people there who like Halloween,” she explained.

“She has this thing for New York,” her mother said. “She even went to a costume show at the mall a few years ago as the Empire State Building. She made it out of Styrofoam and it was beautiful. It was just beautiful. And who did she see at the show but King Kong? They danced and had a great time.

“I told Katherine about the World Trade Center,” Mary Jimenez said, referring to the attacks in New York on Sept. 11, “but I don’t think it has registered with her yet.”

Mary Jimenez said Katherine came to her home as a foster child when she was about 10. “The people from the state said she would never talk, but I kept trying to get her to say her name. She kept silent.”

Then Mary Jimenez said one day she was walking down the street with Katherine and a few younger children she had taken in.

“(Katherine) saw a van and exclaimed, ‘Dirty Dodge van!’ We all started to cry, we were so happy,” Mary Jimenez said. She adopted Jimenez when she was 13 and now cares for eight “special children” given to her by the state.

“I enjoy doing it,” Mary Jimenez said. “And they all turn out OK when they’re with me.”

10/16/01

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