Haven’t been washed away…yet.

I keep telling myself that our well will be full all summer, that will make up for a winter of not being able to stand being outside…at all. As I mentioned, we had about 85 inches of snow, and now we keep getting hammered with multiple inches of rainfall. Just last night was the latest, and our tiny little backyard creek is just about to burst its banks. The weather got mild as well, and melted roughly half the snow left. I have not ventured into the basement yet…. If I don’t see flooding, it’s not there, right?

Saturday was sunny, though, so I dragged the kids out to walk around an outdoor mall for a while, and my mom met up with us there. It was one of those days that felt a bit strange all day long – we’d left my husband to rest and try to get his sleep schedule back on track, after I told him that his insomnia was really starting to make me feel like we weren’t having any “us” time anymore. I guess if you want a guy to address a problem you have to remind him of what he’s missing out on, wink, wink.

We went to Johnny Rockets while we were out, and in the course of ordering, and then chatting, we lost track of time, until suddenly our server showed up, apologizing and letting us know that several orders had been lost, including ours. And then the shift manager was telling us that she was going to give us half off our bill “for our trouble” – that’s one of those moments where I was biting my tongue to keep from saying something like that we hadn’t really noticed how long it was taking. Well, not until they told us, anyway, and then it seemed to take forever. But at least they were willing to offer some ACTUAL service when something went wrong.

It’s more than I can say for stinking LG, a company which has totally refused to help us in any way, shape, or form after our less than four year-old washing machine totally pooped the bed. After investigating the symptoms, I feel pretty certain that it’s a sealed bearing gone bad; this seems to be a common problem amongst LG’s front loaders. So, we have an eight hundred dollar investment that is worth zilch right now, because LG wants US to pay for something that is clearly a problem with THEIR design. I’ve always used HE detergent, and no other additives. They can bite me…we’re planning on getting a service manual, fixing it ourselves, and when we can afford to, we’ll get one that’s a top loader, and it WILL NOT be LG. Makes me want to get rid of my phone, and our air conditioners.

When crap like this comes down on us, I really wish I could tap back into the old Marine me…I have gotten out of touch with that side of myself. My old sgt. instructor from ocs got in touch with me via facebook last week, and I mentioned this to her – she think it’s still there, but man, it takes some energy and what, bile, aggro, I dunno, to get back into that place. Energy being number one…. I wouldn’t mind being able to get a refresher course in all of that. Just give me a couple weeks of ocs environment, maybe. Maybe not. Criminy.

Another thing I have to bear down on is considering our older son’s next academic year. There’s a recommendation afloat to retain him, for various reasons, but the pros and cons are many. For one thing, he is already a tiny bit older than all his peers with his February birthday. For another, he’s nearing five feet tall at the age of nine…he’s going to feel like a fricking giant next year in with kids who, as I have seen them, are on average the height of my 5 year-old. I swear! Really! It’s a little crazy.

Now I’ve got to shake off last night’s poor sleep for me, and get in a workout…PT, as the recently retired Master Sgt. would say. She’d also say the LG situation is goatrope. I don’t know if she’d call them jackwagons or not…that’s more a Gunny Ermey-ism. Summon up the scowl…and take this jacked up situation on, maybe I can get the veins in my head to pop out….

Saturday morning (almost) silence

Except for our older kid, who, on schedule, was up at 6:30. And then he started whining in the way he always has, “eeeee, hee-eeeeeeeeee.” And I knew it was time to get up. We’ve decided to cut him off of the computer for a bit again, so he has limited technology at his disposal. The wii decided inexplicably to stop working the netflix correctly , so he’s either got regular tv, dvd, or wii games to work with. This lack of choice obviously gets his tiger blood boiling.

My husband has been having some issues with insomnia, so he’s finally asleep now…I think. He’s been waking up in the middle of the night, and going downstairs to watch tv, rather than lie still and let his mind race. Well, fine, but then I keep waking up wondering where he is. It’s not doing much for our evenings, either, I’ll tell you that.

And oddly, the younger kid is still just woke up. I was about to say he was sleeping, but then he came exploding out his door in the usual manner. But this is a bit late for him, perhaps because his father decided that a bedtime lullaby would come best in the form of Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers, and they had their own long-distance ceilidh. Or is it digital? Either way, I guess I need to find tickets to either group, or to something similar for the summer months.

And what our day will bring, I can’t predict yet. Sometimes we’re all stir-crazy and drive each other nuts. Sometimes we’re productive and…no wait, that’s just the adults…the kids still are driving each other nuts. My husband said last night that he wanted to take them sledding, but we’ll see  how that goes with him having been awake from 12:30am until 4:30…. I have my car loaded up with stuff for the consignment shop, stuff I have been meaning to take there for about a year. Fingers crossed that we all get through the day with no meltdowns…and that the kids are in a good mood too!

The long winter

Perhaps it’d sound better as “l’hiver eternale” – mind you, that’s my amateur attempt at francais. I did spanish and latin for languages, to include a college semester of translating the Aeneid and only the Aeneid.

Every season we pass through, inevitably, we near the end of it, and begin to moan and wail that it will never end. I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut and live with it. In particular because, as bad as this sounds, I never have to worry about our autistic child leaving the house on his own during the winter. It’s too cold out, and he only enjoys sledding in the backyard.

Come summer, I’ll be on edge again, but this year, I’m one up on him. I bought 16 mile range walkie talkies. Now, when I venture into our basement, which requires me to walk all the way outside and down three stories of stairs, I can leave one up there, and check on the kids with the other one. Before this acquisition, I was running down there, moving everything as quickly as humanly possible, and running back up the stairs just as quickly. Yes, good for keeping in shape, but please.

During the warm months, our concern expands to him trying to walk to the lake 4 miles away. Well, that’s not possible, someone unacquainted with autism might say. Good lord, it most certainly is, and he’s set out trying to do it a few times. On our side are observant neighbors who call me right away if they see him trying to escape, but I can’t rely on them. We’ve trained our 5 year old on the walkie system – actually, my husband was trying to train him in the way that the marine corps uses commo, to include call for fire, but I can’t quite see the point of that. Yet. So the little turkey can radio me that his brother is on the lam. Next is training the big brother to respond when I call for him. I doubt it will be too hard – he picked up the wii and computer use with no help at all.

As I reflect, though, on what the winter has brought, aside from 85 inches of snow, school cancellations, and my garden turned into a heap of twisted fence, I realize that the kids have done pretty well. I’m a little bummed that they won’t sleep in late anymore, what with the mornings getting brighter earlier and all. But we haven’t been diseased, and I knock wood as I say this, but I feel so happy to have had them healthy. We’ve tweaked their sleep schedules, added in some vitamins, and had a vat of hand gel in the bathroom. The pure alcohol kind, not the stuff that has soylent green in it or whatever. You know it’s working because you’re screaming and so are the kids; it stings like hell!

We’ve got a kid who went from still limited foods at the beginning of the school year, to ready to phase out of a food program, because he’s eating steak and all sorts of stuff. He also is learning multiplication, which, to be honest, I know I didn’t do until 5th grade – I distinctly remember the reward system my teacher had that year to get us to memorize our times tables the fastest.

There are many decisions and milestones yet to hit, but I’m feeling pretty positive about where we’re headed.

The everyday kinda life

Don’t know about anyone else, but that’s what we live.

Sometimes you’re swimming along with your head above water, sometimes you’re holding your breath, doing those hypoxic laps. Eventually, you’ll get stronger, better able to make it underwater for longer lengths of time, but it’s exhausting work.

Every day is every day for the most part. You go along, getting up in the morning, get your kids ready for their day, you ready for yours. My husband goes off on his hourlong commute, trying not to grumble about it too much. I’m at home with the kids, trying to keep my mind in the moment, and a schedule at least casually stuck to. It takes a month or so after the start of every school year to iron out this schedule, so that our older son is up, moving, dressed, and fed before we progress downstairs to our empty apartment to wait for the bus. I try to be there 15 minutes ahead of it, so that he can have a few moments to relax, and I get his snack, and write in his daily communication book.

This is a nice feat - since he’s autistic, and still only moderately verbal, he often drifts off into his own plans. This morning, he wanted to mess around on the computer. Then he took upon himself to get dressed, in shorts, his favorite red basketball shorts. If we lived in Hawaii, this would be no problem right now, but sadly, we’re in New England, where the high today is in the low 30′s with some wind blowing as well. Sooooo, yeah, we had to change. Every time he gets gently (or not so gently) redirected, we get either passivity (as in, a giant dolly allowing us to guide him) or what the Brits call “aggro”. I got the latter this morning, but only a little, because he actually listened to me when I reminded him how stinking cold it is out right now. He stopped whining and fake crying pretty quickly for once.

Once he’s shipped off in his bus, focus shifts to his younger brother, who often does not wait patiently for my return. This morning, after I had to remind him (only a little crankily) that I can’t do a lot for him until after his brother gets on the bus, he settled down and scanned his favorite Thomas the Tank Engine checklist to see (for the 457th time) what engines he still does not have in his hoard (fewer than ten). At this point, I have to admit that I’m wary of thinking that the morning is going well. I know only too well that it can all go down in flames, with the two of us going at it, hammer and tongs.

We’ve been checking his blood sugar for the past two days, a practice that his pediatrician would apparently like us to do for several weeks. It’s not fun or easy trying to get a droplet of blood big enough for the meter out of a squirming, unhappy kid. I’m almost getting the hang of it, especially since he won’t let me do his fingers (well, he is an artist after all, so I don’t want to damage the goods…), so we get his arm every time. His skinny little chicken wings don’t have a ton of flesh, so I have to mush a bit of it up together with my hand, and push the lancet device down into it, like a skin donut. It was 79 this morning. Not terrible, apparently, but who knows…. We’re doing this because he’s been hypoglycemic, and has moments of primal rage that end only when I can shove something, preferably sweet, into his screaming maw.

He doesn’t get on his bus until 11:15, so I have to do my best to get something substantive in him for breakfast. With this hypoglycemia thing, though, it’s sounding like we need to get him on a Hobbity eating schedule. First Breakfast, Second Breakfast, Elevenses, Lunch, Tea, Dinner, Supper…. You know, like a teenager eats.

Since I got freecycled a pretty nice recumbent stationary bike, we’ve been going downstairs well in advance of the bus, and I bike while he plays with his train table. It’s been a calming setup for both of us, because he’s tv-free, and I’m exercising.

Once he’s on the bus, I finish my workout, get cleaned up, or eat, and then move on to my tasks for the day. Last week, it was all about getting photos of every 5th grader at my older son’s school, for their memory book. This week, it’ll probably be mostly continuing the slow and gradual purge that I’m trying to do, even though for my husband, it’s agonizingly slow. He’s definitely one of those people who could and would live in the woods with next to nothing to his name. I am not. I don’t think I could, nor that I want to. Someday, if we ever get ourselves a farm, I hope I can give him that kind of sanctum sanctorum that he clearly needs. But I also hope that I can be allowed to have my comfortable clutter….

The afternoon is less organized during the winter months. I can only do so much with the freezing temperatures we’ve been handed this year, and 80+ inches of snow means no hiking in the woods, for instance. We got them a Wii for Christmas, perhaps presciently, with some active fitness games, while my husband sits, watching the floors vibrate in horror. He prefers Mariokart, even though they’ve beaten every single race in less than two months.

I always do my best to feed them both at around 5pm. Then we have that marathon stretch, where we try to keep everyone happy and not fighting for 2 and some hours, until our younger son goes to bed, usually muttering that he’s NOT TIRED, until his head hits the pillow.

His older brother stays up until around 9pm, because if we put him to bed any earlier, he’s awake at 5 am. It is just a matter of practicality…or sanity. We have, yes, a priority on sleep for all of us. If we put him to bed at that point, he sleeps all night, 99.99% of the time. I’ve said so many times that we are extremely fortunate that he responded to the interventions that I did when he was a not-so-sleepy toddler. It’s absolutely true. And I tell his younger brother all the time that his body needs sleep, and that we need sleep to be good mommy and daddy. He probably doesn’t completely buy it, but after a bumpy start to his short record of sleeping nights, he’s gotten to a point where he sleeps almost without fail as well. Some of it is a little bit of luck, but I believe a lot of it is just making it the huge important thing that it is in our house. It is, in my opinion, the linchpin to keeping everything else running, at all, much less well.

That’s our day, on average. Sometimes we get ourselves into that pattern of putting our shoulders to the Sysiphean stone, and pushing on autopilot, as I’m sure everyone does. But there’s magic in every single day, if you’re willing to pause, breathe, and look around for something to keep you going.

Looming madness

I’m sure every other parent is going through this right now: facing into the end of the school year.

I just finished hammering out a 5th grade memory book for the PTO (I’m the VP, and this was my only big contribution…). Now I have to start girding my loins for the next item, which is Mackie’s PPT, where I will put out my requests for the summer programming, as well as what I want to see on his IEP for next year. After having gone through that conference last month, and the time to think over all of what we took away from it, I now realize that I have to be a little tougher to please where his programming and planning go along. I’ve kinda had it with the pat on the head routine from the director of pupil services. I will lay out my plan of attack, as it were, to Mackie’s SpEd teacher, and to the paras, but that’s about it. Then I need to channel my inner Winston Churchill and never surrender….

In this midst of this, we have field day at Mackie’s school, 5th grade fun night (understanding that my kid is NOT in 5th grade – but again, I’m on the PTO and I gotta go, man), a reception for Braeden’s Pre-K, and somewhere in the midst of all of it, I need to figure out what the hell to have these kids DO OVER THE SUMMER!!!!

Sheesh.

“You’ve got no a-peel???” or, “Yes, we have no bananas.”

So, here’s the scenario that took place with one of my friends, about 2 weeks ago:

My friend has a high school girl who comes to watch her two little guys while she (my friend) plays rec soccer. This girl was recommended by my friend’s mom, who thinks she’s “sweet and innocent.”

Cut to my friend getting ready to take to the field, who is showing the girl what snacks got brought along for the boys. One of these items is a banana. The girl says, “Um, can you just show me how to…open this?” My friend, in her head, is saying, “Are you f-ing kidding me? What????” Aloud she says something kinda like, “Huh?” The girl, “Yeah, I don’t like bananas. I’ve never eaten them, so I don’t really know how to open them.”

As my friend is relating this story later on, she confesses that this incident has totally removed her confidence in this girl’s abilities to watch her children. I’m undecided (decidedly because it’s not my kids in this instance, and I have no idea how I’d have reacted) but agree that it is totally weird and off-putting. My friend’s mother still insists that the girl is capable of watching small children. My friend thinks NOT.

I wonder what anyone else thinks? Is this an offense that would completely write her off as a child minder? Or is it just that she has a very iffy idiosyncracy (and possibly a closet full of them?)?

It’s that time of year again….

When thoughts turn once more to autism, and the vaccine debate. The rest of the year, when April has passed, or not yet fallen, it quietly seethes. And then comes the magic media reminder that it’s Autism Awareness Month, World Autism Day…and kablooie, all the cracks split wide open, and the wretched innards come tumbling out.

This is a HOT button issue, in the parlance of those responsible for conflating the myth to begin with. I have said it before, and have thankfully heard a phrase which just about covers my thoughts on the vaccine thingy:

Correlation is not causation!!!

 (now I digress, but will return to the topic in time)

This was from Dr. Peter Gerhardt’s presentation at the convention presented by the Autism Society of Connecticut in Hartford this past Saturday. My husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to attend, and my parents got enough advance warning (like me calling my mom in a lather back in February about wanting to go) to be able to set aside the day to watch our kids.

Honestly, the lure for me, when I first saw the flier for the conference, was that Temple Grandin was set to be one of the speakers. Especially compelling was the dinner the night before, where we actually met Dr. Grandin. She spotted from across the room that I had two copies of her newly reprinted Thinking in Pictures, with Claire Danes on the cover, from the recent HBO movie about Temple’s life. She buzzed right over to our table, just as I had been wrestling with myself about how I really don’t like approaching people for things like this, and said, “I see you have my book!!!” Thank god one of us wasn’t shy…and she then proceeded to make them out, one for us, and one for my aunt and uncle (who are the parents of my 21-year-old cousin, who is also autistic). She stayed with us and chatted for about fifteen minutes, mostly about topics that are of great concern or interest to her (to be expected, right?). When she moved on, I had my husband poking me about my lack of talking…well, hello, I am excruciatingly shy at moments…has he really known me for 11 years and NOT picked up on this? Good grief. If I’d thought for a minute that she would bother with us at all, I would have scripted some moments, but as it was, I could only think of the question that I’d been pondering ever since the movie came out: What did she think of it, and the way Claire Danes had portrayed her?

This was eating at me a little, this question. I watched it, and it prompted us to make the committment to changing a few things in our daily lives, mostly to do with the television and the computer (limiting their usage times). And, I thought, Claire Danes did her usual thorough job, and inhabited a difficult role with more than just understanding, but also empathy. Temple’s response to my query was what I’d rather hoped it would be, “I thought she did a terrific job.” What better endorsement than that is there? Other critics of the movie had compared an “NT” actor portraying an autistic person to Alec Guinness playing an Asian person in the bad old days of Hollywood. I had chosen to disagree with the point; as a parent, I’d been hoping for a more dimensional and emotional look at an autistic individual – all there had been in the mainstream was Rain Man (yes, I know there are a couple others out there, but they’re no less troubling for me). Temple Grandin is a real person, who achieved some real things, some amazing things, because of the persistence of herself and her supporters.

So, back to the conference. The other presenter was this Dr. Gerhardt I mentioned earlier, president and chair of OAR. His presentation was all about adaptability: ours, our kids’, and of the world at large. He was so exceptional at putting all of his ideas in front of us…very funny, very rational, very on-target…we just sat there, laughing and learning more than we’ve learned in years. He brought to us a lot of topics to think about, a lot of ideas to try and implement…but mostly the crashing realization that our 8-year-old is only a hair’s breadth away from adolescence and puberty…and that if we don’t address a lot of things soon, we’ll be looking at trying to undo potential damage that could have been avoidable.

He started, however, with sharing his hope that parents would stop wasting time on so-called treatments that exist in the junk-science category, and that we should gut our kids’ IEPs of anything that has been there for longer than 8 weeks, replacing goals with more logical, practical goals. I have to admit it’s true: I only have one pair of shoes that I need to tie, why should I impose this as an IEP goal for my child? Why waste time with coin id, when I should be teaching real math, and getting my kid to the point where he can buy something at a store on his own; a task most of his peers can do at the age of 8?

I have stated my opinion regarding the vaccine debate previously…that for my husband and me, the link does not exist at all. That it’s a dangerous waste of time for our kids to have their parents lamenting and overreacting to a nonexistent link. Other than autism in our one son(which I saw the first signs of when Mackie was 6-7 MONTHS old), my kids are rarely ill, and both are at or above the 95 percentile for height and weight. This has always been my go-to point: would I rather run a risk that has no basis in science, or watch my child die, knowing that I could have prevented it? I also personally don’t believe in the spacing argument, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it has no discernible benefit, and only serves to make my kids paranoid about visits to the doctor (which they’re already verklempt about anyway!) Beyond that…I do think it’s irresponsible, self-indulgent, and foolish to forgo vaccinations, hide behind a “religious exception”, and I’m sick of listening to people who don’t have a clue. Yes, I was lucky enough to have a resource in my sister, who is a biologist at a small, independent research lab, but all she did was point me to research papers that are readily available through public libraries, and give me her take, and some opinions of her colleagues.  Anybody could do the same thing, IF one doesn’t let fear and bias get in the way.

Anyway…as usual, we’re just living the life, here, trying to do the best we can for our kids. If that makes me a bad person or whatever you might think/say, so be it.

 

 

 

peevish

Last week was a little bit of stress, with bad weather, potty incidents, kids being crabby, and lots of other things going just plain wrong. Top of my list of things that pissed me off last week, however, was witnessing the garbage guys tossing all of our painstakingly separated recycling out of the buckets and into the back of the regular old garbage truck. WTF, over?!?! Our town has single stream recycling, and I usually fill three or four of those green buckets that I paid the town 5 bucks a pop for. That’s right! Sadly, a lot of room is usually taken up by the collapsed water jugs that we have to buy, what with the undrinkable shallow well water we have.

I called the town, half in a lather, half not wanting to id myself so that the garbage guys would be pissed at me for tattling. But I figured, hey, I tip these dudes at Christmas, and offer them beverages all through the summer, if I can. Why should I not be blowing a whistle, especially since we ostensibly pay taxes to have this crap picked up, instead of having to take it ourselves to the transfer station? The woman who picked up at public works was, at least as far as I could read, as shocked as I was. She took the house number down (darn, was really hoping to skip that…I should have given one of the neighbors’ numbers…someone we don’t like, you know?), and promised to call the company.

Which brings me to the thing that really irritates me about our garbage and recycling pickup. When we first moved in here, we had Waste Management coming. They’re a pretty green company, and they are nuts about safety. My brother was actually working for them. Then, as far as any of us can tell, WM was muscled out, perhaps threatened, in the Sopranos sense, and another company bought the whole operation out. Since then, this not-to-be-named company has let safety standards slide, which I can see in how these guys go about their business. Our pickups have become erratic, sometimes with an entire day’s delay in one or the other being picked up. I can only assume that last week’s debacle was an attempt to prevent a next-day delay.

Then, my husband and I, even though we both believe strongly in recycling, tangled, largely because he thinks that a) the town wouldn’t inform us that they might be discontinuing recycling, b) that recycling costs the town, rather than the other way around, and that c) recycled goods cost more to produce than raw material goods (and that he thinks we don’t pay directly for recycling pickup in our taxes). I disagree with the bulk of what he says, although I have no idea about the cost-effectiveness of recycling. I think, I believe, I feel, because of the things I have read about and been taught for the last twenty years, that even though there is a raised-cost cachet for recycled boutique items, that the preponderance of items made with post-consumer waste are, in fact, cheaper to produce. Maybe someone out there can provide me with facts on either side of the issue, but please, don’t think that you might change my mind about being “green” or an environmentalist. I certainly wouldn’t try to do the opposite unless someone asked to have their mind changed.

So, yep, I was pissed about that. There is a lot of other stuff, but I won’t bother anyone with any more venting of my spleen here. I’m just going to sit here, waiting for the crappy rain to stop, so that I can go and de-flood the basement.

we are not for the faint of heart….

We usually note an uptick in “behaviors” with Mackie right before a breakthrough. Based on the last couple of weeks, I’m really hoping for something spectacular, because we’ve had some truly out of character moments with him.

Aside from a resurfacing of the chewing on EVERYTHING (to include: the rubber from a kids’ fork, any paper he can cadge, foam stickers, foam pads on the bottom of a keyboard, regular stickers, and the silicone caulk from the bathroom – and everyone at school is so surprised by it, why, I don’t know) – we’ve gotten to a place where he’s feeling confident enough to be defiant.

I don’t mind him asserting himself, especially now that he’s got enough verbal tools to eventually get his wishes across, but sometimes it gets a little out of hand. So we have to come down hard on the behavior, so that he knows he can’t do this stuff.

Last week, he was a little under the weather, so I had him home on Monday. The weather was nice, so we were outside, once he was feeling up to it, and then he expressed interest in going for a walk. We tend to let him choose the direction when we come to an intersection, and it has worked out really well, except for this instance, when he began choosing turns that were taking us away from roads that looped back to our house. Instead, I realized that, whatever his design, if we kept on his chosen path through town, it would be a four-hour walk by the time we got home. I had to redirect, which is, for us, typically an event that goes with only a little resistance. He’s flexible most of the time, because we (well, more of the me, than my husband) tend to be unscheduled, and we never have been very into routine for the sake of routine.

Now, as an aside, I know this goes against a lot of what gets taught, it goes against what the school folks have tried to encourage us to do: I just can’t live like that, aside from the general routines humans follow. We get up when we wake up, which is about 6:30, and we go from there, with school, afternoon activities, and bedtime. Sometimes I feel the wisdom in warning the kids ahead of time  something big is coming in their day, like about the doctor’s appointments they both have today…although maybe I won’t for that one. They both freak out about that, no matter when I tell them.

Back to our walk.
I had made my realization about needing to turn around, and so, I started trying to tell him that we needed to go a different way. Whatever it was that he thought he wanted down that direction, however, he was not being swayed so easily from it. He immediately descended into screaming, that kind of primal, anguished, angry scream that some kids perfect from an early stage…. I can deal with that. It’s the flailing, collapsing body weight to the ground (in this case, pavement, on which he was seemingly intending to smash his head), and me having to pick up his roughly 70 pound body, to keep us from getting hit by a car.

Now, I know some parents of kids on the spectrum out there would be saying, “What’s the big deal?” We just don’t usually have these sorts of issues with him. His behaviors pop up now and then, as I alluded to in the beginning of this piece, usually heralding something bigger on the horizon. I would say that a large part of it is his personality, in that he is so happy, so much of the time. The rest of it, I would argue that we, the family, can take credit for. We’ve taken him traveling since he was an infant, for instance. We tolerate no physical violence from him – ZERO. Sometimes that means being very forceful with our responses to him hitting or kicking – and it usually involves us being nose to nose with him. It’s hard to explain. It’s something I’d have to demonstrate, but let’s say it might be the equivalent of a drill instructor in the Marine Corps, getting in a recruit’s face over a transgression. There’s no physical harm, just a little startlement, a shock to the system that jolts him out of whatever plane he’s in, brings him back to us, and hopefully lets him see that we are not happy with the behavior.

It doesn’t work for everything…like his penchant for touching strangers. There was one guy that he literally patted on the bum before I could stop him. The only thing I can think of to say for that is, “We don’t touch people we don’t know.”

Beyond that, when some of the old habits resurface, and new issues bubble up, I just keep telling myself that something good is in the offing.

Right now, he’s loving his V-Tech VSmile, particularly the handheld version, but the games are interchangeable between the game deck and the Pocket, so it’s nice to have two, when the brothers don’t want to do the same thing, they don’t have to fight (don’t have to, but they will anyway, yes?). He is 8 now, and technically aged out of it, but I think we’ve all pretty much stopped examining the age-range print on toys or electronics. Mackie is adept at the games once he gets the hang of them, but when he tries to use a game on our Playstation, it’s too complex, he can’t understand the parameters, and gets upset by it. I’m much happier with V-Tech right now than Leap Frog, as both our Leap Pads are jacked up. One keeps telling us that it needs new batteries, regardless of whether they’re new or not. The other has alignment issues, so that you have to hunt and find the actual “GO” for each page, and then the pictures are all off, anyway. Not happy about that, and we had a meltdown over it, which is totally expected. I was ready to chuck them both out the window myself!

Experimental, or just mental?

When Mackie was little, I really didn’t let him watch much television, in spite of what my husband thinks. We usually spent our days listening to music, being outside, and he’d ride in the jogging stroller as I went on hour or more-long runs. I tried to only use the tv when I needed to do something and have him occupied.

Now, I’m the first to admit that we let it get out of hand after his little brother was born. Things got a lot harder, Braeden was colicky, and he’s still very high-attention demanding. But after watching the Temple Grandin movie on HBO a few weeks back, I decided that it’s time to go back to less. They get to watch a little in the morning before school, and then that thing stays off until 7 or 7:30 at night. It puts a lot on me to make sure that Mackie is not wandering around being completely upset or bored…we have to get out of the house, and listen, yes, to tons of the Wiggles music to make it. So far, this is the third week, I believe, and we’re making it…. Maybe. At least spring appears to be on the way and we’ll be able to be outside a lot more.

Mackie is also working on hot dogs now. With buns. They are saying that he’s having a little trouble with the bun, but I’m not clear what the problem is, because, as usual, communication between home and school is limited by the nature of the comm forms. I find that I have to just go in, sometimes unannounced, to get the feel for what’s always happening. Not that they’re doing anything wrong – I just like to catch them doing things right, I guess.

I have to get in there for a longer meeting, though, or try for a weekend talk with Mrs. P, because the next school year will see several kids from the lower school “stepping up” to the 2nd-5th school. What is stressing me is how totally chaotic and insane it got during Mackie’s last couple of years there. Of course, there was a lot of upheaval, and the SPED teacher was replaced about three times during Mackie’s time, but all the other kids had tons of behaviors and NOISE that Mackie was clearly having trouble coping with. He’s been thriving in his quiet little cubby this year, and I want to see that preserved as much as possible.

As to the Temple Grandin movie, objections were raised because she was portrayed by someone who is obviously not on the spectrum – but to that I say, maybe folks ought to have gone back and watched Claire Danes in her My So Called Life years. That’s why she’s suited – she’s exceptionally talented as an actress. It was a worthwhile film, it showed a lot about Temple’s life that should hopefully shed a little light into the autistic world for people who have never seen it before or who have conceptions of autism that are ignorant or harmful. Obviously not everyone is going to change an opinion if it’s totally rooted in hate or fear, but this is a far better portrayal than that awful caricature in Rain Man. I do encourage everyone to watch it.