My Autism Insights

Mia Hysteria shares her inspirational, humorous and sometimes heart wrenching journey of raising 3 young children, one with special needs, while managing a life of chaos, in her blog: General Hysteria .  Mia has been blogging on General Hysteria since September 5, 2008 about her son, Ben (1), her daughter, Violet (2) and her oldest son, Alex (6).  Alex has cerebral palsy, autism, sensory processing disorder, developmental delays, epilepsy, and ADHD.  Mia is a mother, wife, blogger, and practicing writer.  Candid about her current and pre-insanity-brought-about-by-children life experiences, Mia’s writings will leave you shocked, laughing, and reminiscing. On a laptop, in a cul-de-sac, somewhere in Colorado, she is single-handedly attempting to share her stories, thoughts, frustrations and elations so that no person feels isolated, forgotten or unworthy of their own journey.

He is my first born.  I can still recall doing as many things as possible with him.  I would cut open yard size garbage bags, carefully taping them to the floor before inviting him to sling paint all around.  He wasn’t as interested.  Or placing him with me in the kitchen while I pureed his food rather than buying jar food, talking to him all the while – giving him words to all the crazy things his mom was doing, thinking that would all make me a better mom and him the best raised little man in the world.  I’m far from those ideas these days.

Though I gave up the pureeing of food, I have not wanted to stop the art projects, but those have been hard for us.  The projects that make you feel as though you’re showing your delicately developing child all that the world has to offer; giving your child things to feel, experiment with, explore.  For various reasons, they’ve never worked out for us.  An unfortunate admission from me is years after his diagnosis, and too many times of these best of intentioned projects ending in turmoil or not beginning at all, I threw up my hands and stepped away from showing him this world.  I was wrong.

Today, I am back to wanting to show my Angel more of his world through art projects.  Much of this has come from a better understanding of how his mind works, what his limits are, what he is capable of and what he likes.  Alex has cerebral palsy, autistic features, developmental delays, and more; fun activities can take some planning.  Alex doesn’t have a huge attention span, he can paint with assistance, and patience is a consideration.  This, along with a little sister who interjects herself wherever she deems she’s needed, is perfect:

You’ve all seen these, right?  If you haven’t, go check the dollar bin areas at your local Michael’s Craft Store.  This is Alex’s favorite project. The first hurdle we had to get over, which took just a few minutes…the plane is not in one piece.  We had to work through this one time and now he is versed on what to expect.   The fun begins.The way we work it is to take the pieces out of the bag and then choose our paints.  I encourage him to pick more than one shade of blue (his favorite) and if he’s feeling real good about the project, more colors will be chosen.  We distribute the pieces to the appropriate people (remember his sister is ‘helping’).  Alex always gets the wings.  We paint.

Why this works so great for him is that by the time we need to think about letting it dry so we can paint the reverse side, his attention has been caught by something else…or dinner is ready, or my one year old is pulling at my leg…we can leave the project for later.

Usually, we paint again the next day to its finish.  I glue it at night while he sleeps and in the morning, he’s greeted with a new present, yet another airplane, that he has pride in knowing he made (with his sister’s help).  It’s special for him.  It’s what he loves.  It’s blue.  I showed him another piece of this world.  And he molded this world to fit into his.

What about you?  Are you able to do project activities?  Are there projects that work for you?

Thankfully, the weather has cooperated and everyone is back in school today!  That means I can actually make my post at a reasonable time.  So this week, I am thankful:

• For only having one casualty of the school cancellation yesterday: our trampoline.  DH made the mistake of jumping on it with MM and the rest is history (so is the trampoline).  But it could have been worse.  There was a sort of chair sculpture, very reminiscent of the one in Poltergeist II, that could have been a real disaster.  Gus was feeling particularly creative, but oddly he was not the destroyer yesterday.
• For being able to go work with my prenatal yoga client today.  After 2 weeks of Holiday break followed by school delays and cancellations, I really needed to get away for some adult time.
• For Gus learning how to meet some of his own needs even if he can’t always express them.  This morning, MM got a bad splinter stuck deep in her finger.  As soon as Gus heard this, he started looking for hiding places, because he knew she was going to be crying at some point.  When he realized his first hiding spot wasn’t getting him far away enough, he went up to his room, closed the door, and got into another of his favorite hideaways.  He’s grown enough to be proactive about avoiding the things that disturb him instead of waiting until he’s at the edge of his rope!  Go Gus!

What are you thankful for today?

P.S. Opinions on the new header would be greatly appreciated.  I won’t be able to change the layout because Today.com is going to a universal layout for all bloggers, but I can at least have my own header.  What do you think?

Amazing how I’ve been up since 4:30, got up at 5 to make this post, and it’s almost 6 and I’m just starting.  I blame my new toy, Twitter.  Anyway, on to thankfulness:

I am thankful that Gus got dressed this morning without me having to ask more than three times.  No fuss, no drama - that’s the way I like to start the day!  Of course, now he’s pretending to be a rock star, Reggie Rockout, complete with green shades, blue striped hat, my clogs and acoustic guitar (he’s in disguise).  His first song will be entitled Rock it Out, and the first album will be The Best Rock Tunes Ever!  I may have to get some t-shirts and hats printed.  Is it possible I can get him out of his disguise before school time?  Can I at least get my shoes back?

I am thankful that my kids love music so much.  Even if one of them doesn’t have the most melodic voice in the world, she makes up for it with enthusiasm and incredible creativity.  Some of MM’s lyrics are pretty cool!  So at any given time, one of them is always bursting into song as long as they think no one is paying attention.  Yesterday, Gus’s song was What a Day for a Daydream. There’s a voice and acting school somewhere nearby, I think.  If things pick up economically, I may just sign these guys up.

Finally, I am thankful that I have an extremely patient husband because I think the vegetarian experiment is really wearing on him.  I won’t even discuss last night’s meal right now except to say that I did cave in and we had salmon.   It was maybe a step above the veggie meat(less) loaf.

Oh, and one of the reasons I joined Twitter was to take part in Autism Twitter Day on Tuesday, December 16th organized by Bonnie Sayer of Autism Family Adventures .  So if you’re on Twitter and connected to the autism community in some way, check it out!  And thank you, Bonnie, for such a great idea!!

Comment with your gratitude, please!

This morning, Gus - the second grader - woke up with a question on his mind: How many zeros in a billion?  How the heck was I supposed to know?  So we tried an experiment.  I had made the suggestion to his teacher that he might be able to focus a little better during independent work if he had a laptop to work on, and I said I’d try letting him do some work on his own at home.  This morning seemed to be as good a time as any.  So we logged on to the Internet, I wrote down the question for him and told him how to do a web search.  Our Kidzui search was fruitless, so I told him he could use the grownup Internet.  Very exciting.

Sure enough, we found a site with the answers - more answers than we could have possibly even thought to ask for.  It was like Christmas morning.  We talked about why anyone would need to use such big numbers, and even a little about how scientists  don’t bother writing all those zeros, but use a special way of writing how many there are (because you’re never too young to know about scientific notation).  And that’s not even the most interesting thing to me, that my second grader now knows how many zeros there are in a quintillion.

At school, his behavior was different.  He wasn’t bouncing off the walls, but instead was just zoning out in his own little world.  It was such a pronounced difference that his teacher wrote me a long note about it.  She seemed perplexed.

But I have a pretty good idea what he was thinking about.  I’d be my last dollar that he was envisioning all those zeros in a centillion.  Wouldn’t you?

Vitus Bering - the real discoverer of Alaska

A day off from school can be a very enlightening thing.  Gus was home yesterday, and although I always do homework with him after school, it was a different experience doing it earlier in the day.  He absolutely did not want to do the work when I wanted him to and there was a good deal of acting out: rolling on the floor, loud talking, purposely filling in incorrect answers…I was frustrated, he was annoyed - actually this sounds like a typical day, except for what happened next.

Gus was (has been for several days) fixating on geography: who discovered ____; what’s the capital of ___, that sort of thing.  So, instead of doing his reading assignment or his math problems, he was going on about that.  Finally, as he was rolling around on the floor asking about who discovered Alaska, I said, “Well, I think Admiral Perry started out with 3 ships and then 5 more ships followed along.  How many ships got to Alaska?”  Booyah!  Instant transformation!  We got through a sheet of 3 digit addition, 3 digit subtraction, the stupid reading assignment about how to meet a dog (he hates dogs) and then he asked for, DEMANDED, a third math sheet.  He did not want to stop working.  Amazing how such a small shift completely commanded his attention.  Each problem became a made up story about some exploration to some country.  By the way, I stink at geography and I was spouting more crap than a newborn, but he didn’t care - I was working with him on his terms and he loved it!

So this begs the question, “Why can’t his teachers do the same thing?”  First of all, why is what they want to teach more important, more significant than what he wants to learn?  Does he really need to know the proper way to greet a dog?  It’s totally irrelevant to him - he’d be running in the opposite direction.  However, Admiral Perry having to fight off a team of sled dogs because he approached them the wrong way is pretty darned entertaining.

I looked back at some of his assignments, and aside from their irrelevance to his life except for the fact that they were readings about animals and he likes animals (I like chocolate chip cookies, but too many and I will still get sick to my stomach), there was no context.  For example: there was a booklet of geometry questions.  Across the top, he had written, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”  That was a hint right there that he wasn’t interested in the assignment.  But I wonder, if the teacher had sat him down and said, “Pikachu is battling Paul’s Electabuzz and the only way to make his volt tackle work is if he can bounce off a tree at a right angle.  Find the right angles.”  I bet he would have found them all in a matter of seconds.

I’ve been told on a regular basis that my son can’t or won’t focus.  He’s not the problem here, I’m starting to think.  He can focus just fine - on the things that interest him.  Is it his job to shift his interest to what the educational system thinks is relevant and important, or is it their job to present the information to him in a way that will engage him?  I won’t even dignify that with an answer.

The point is that we have to stop laying blame against people who are just being who they are, and as caregivers (parents, teachers, administrators, therapists, physicians) we need to get over ourselves.  What we think is significant ain’t necessarily so.  If we are going to have any hope of helping individuals on the autism spectrum, or with ADHD, or any kids for that matter, we need to start allowing for some creativity and flexibility in thinking.  We’ve got to think out of the box a little and stop being so draconian - let’s at least meet them halfway.  Can it really be that hard?  I somehow don’t think it is.

P.S. Rear admiral Robert PEARY discovered the North Pole(this is disputed); Vitus Bering discovered Alaska; Henry Hudson did discover Manhattan, but Peter Stuyvesant did not discover New Jersey.  Pikachu did in fact kick Electabuzz’s butt.  Fat lot of good that traditional education did me.  I’m sure Gus will figure out the truth about all these guys, I doubt I’ve done irreparable harm.

Prompt by Mo over at Manic Monday !  Thanks, Mo!

The Mystery of the Ghost

as told to me by Gus

In a haunted mansion in Transylvania, on a Thursday, in March, there was a weird sound.  It was a ghost.

“What an emergency!” one of the people shouted.

First, it threw a rock.  The rock was almost thrown into deep space.  It wasn’t like it was elementary or something, but the ghost said, “WOOOOOOO!”

“One North America…two North America…” said a voice.

“What was that?” said another voice.

Then another voice went, “Ya ya ya!  Ya ya ya!”  That was just a bunch of people in daycare.  The ghost got confused and went back into the grave until all that, “Ya ya ya! Ya ya ya!” stopped.

The End

P.S. Have you seen Transylvania?

My son, budding mystery/suspense author…or comedian.  I swear, I did not change a single word.  I’m struck by the fact that the ghost didn’t like noise, and also very amused by the opening line.  If only I could remember to have that level of specificity in my own fiction…

Anyway, try having your kids make up some ghost stories & let us know how it works out!  Happy Monday, y’all!