My Autism Insights

As I promised the district, I went to visit the class they’ve been trying to convince me to transfer Gus to.  I had spoken to the teacher at length last week.  On the positive side, she is very knowledgeable, has a diverse background, and we see eye to eye on many important topics like mainstreaming and homework.  But we also have some core philosophical differences, which could become a problem like the use of candy as a reinforcer.

I spent a good hour in the in the class.  At the moment, the class is quite small.  Next year it is expected to more than double in size.  Class size was always a concern of mine since it would be bigger than what Gus is accustomed to.  The room is set up to be very open, which I think would be very distracting for Gus, but she has a primarily behavioral outlook (Applied Behavioral Analysis background) and believes that his behavior would just have to be modified.  I don’t know that it is a) possible or b) totally desirable to do that in all instances.  There would be less sensory support for Gus as well, and there would be no internet capability.  So the learning program he’s using now would be out the window.

Academically, this class focuses on much more basic skills than what Gus needs, and there is very little emphasis on Social Studies or Science - his two favorite subjects.  She does have a very interesting take on Math instruction, which I plan to do some looking into.  Overall, I doubt his academic needs would be met, and he’d be bored stiff.

As much as I like the teacher, despite our differing opinions, I can’t see Gus succeeding or being happy in that class.  I’m going to bring him in next week (he’ll be out of school anyway) just to see what he thinks of the room.  But I’m about 99% sure that I’ll be fighting for him to stay in his current school next year.  Either that, or I become a home-schooler.

I mentioned in a previous post that My Autism Insights will be hosting Adonya Wong on her Virtual Book Tour promoting her book, In My Mind, and spreading autism awareness around the blogosphere.

“She will be sharing her thoughts on living with autism, writing, getting published, and future works.  In addition to these interviews, you can read reviews of In My Mind and listen to an audio interview by Autism Hangout.”

Adonya will also be conducting a giveaway - a pretty sweet one - for commenters along the tour route.  My Autism Insights will be stop #6 on Saturday January 24, so please be sure to follow along!  Here’s the rest of the tour itinerary:

Monday, January 19

Host: Bonnie Sayers, Autism Family Adventures

Tuesday, January 20

Host: Matt Gilbert, Doctorious.org

Wednesday, January 21

Host: MaryTara Wurmser, The Bon Bon Gazette

Thursday, January 22

Host: Katrina Shanks, The Queen’s Pen

Friday, January 23

Host: Sunshine Boatright, Rawtism

Saturday, January 24

Host: Andrea S., My Autism Insights

Sunday, January 25

Host: Lori Guthrie, Rainbow Project DFW

Monday, January 26

Host: Tim Welsh, Tanner’s Dad’s Blog

Tuesday, January 27

Host: Kari Wolfe, Imperfect Clarity

Wednesday, January 28

Host: Tammy Lessick, Autism Learning Felt

Thursday, January 29

Host: Adonya Wong, Healing… Through the Eyes of Autism

Please check out all Adonya’s stops!

And a small disclaimer, while I may or may not necessarily agree with everyone’s opinions, I do fully support their right to be heard and respect their contributions to the autism discussion.  We’re all interested in the common goal of raising awareness and furthering the discussion, so each perspective is a worthwhile one.

Have a great day!

It’s that time again!  I very nearly missed the fact that it is in fact Thursday.  Forgive me - I lose track sometimes!

Anyway, on to thankfulness…

I am thankful that the snowstorm that we are being threatened with is coming tomorrow instead of today even though that means Gus’s teachers won’t get their gifts until after Christmas.  But not having school canceled today allowed me to get some deadlines met, which is a BIG plus!

I am thankful that we did not decide to bake for Gus’s teacher gifts because they wouldn’t have lasted the two weeks that he will be out of school.

I am thankful that I don’t have to fight with Gus over homework for the next two weeks.  I think we were both a little done with it and the break will be much appreciated.  I’m going to try some online learning software if he’s open to trying something new to see how he does with them.

Finally, thanks so much to Barbara at Goal for the Green for two awards:

I’ll pass these along in tomorrow’s post.  Thanks for reading, and please post your thankful thoughts in a comment!

There were so many supportive and helpful comments to my post yesterday , I felt they deserved a post to say Thank You!!  It always amazes me that there are just so many awesome people who read and comment on my little corner of the Internet - it really boggles the mind some days.

We’ve tossed around some of your suggestions, and obviously this will be a process of trial and error as he grows and develops social skills.  We thought about Scouts, but without one of us to be at the meetings & activities with him, aside from the fact that I don’t see how Gus would even keep up, I’m not convinced that he wouldn’t bolt at the first chance, especially if the local troop is a big one. A friend suggested that maybe they’d have someone who could act as a shadow/mentor, but before I trust my son’s well being to anyone, obviously I’d have to know them extremely well.  And even then, the trust is tenuous at best.  I can’t say I’m the most forgiving person when it comes to some things.

As for sports, I think there may be a couple of indoor soccer games over the winter, but in the meantime, I’m looking into a special needs bowling league.  He might like that.  And I’m going to see if he can hang out, maybe over the holidays, with one of the boys from his class who I think doesn’t live too far.

He loves to sing, so I’m thinking maybe a voice class or chorus might be an option also.

At any rate, I will certainly take all your suggestions and input into consideration, and again, I really appreciate the great response to my question!!

Have a great Saturday night!

As my daughter’s class explores questions of wants vs. needs, and we spend a laugh-filled, lovely evening with some of my husbands oldest and dearest friends, I am forced back to an issue that I often avoid thinking about.  How do I help Gus find a friend?  Are friends a want or a need, especially for a kid who prefers to be alone?

Listening to all the hilarious stories of a group of boys between the ages of 12 and…well, now, I was struck by how such simple encounters made for the longest lasting memories.  I realized just how dumb ‘tween and teen boys can be (No offense, C!  I love the stories and I’m honestly a little jealous of all the fun you all had!) but also that on a very tangible level, they need the wild release that they can only get from being around other boys their age.  The wildness seems to forge them into the men they will become.  There seem to be valuable lessons in that nuttiness.  Look at Mowgli from The Jungle Book.  He had all those adventures with Baloo, which cause Baghera endless headaches, but in the end he was able to become civilized.  He grew from those adventures.  What happens to a boy then who doesn’t have those formative, crazy-male-bonding experiences?

The trouble is mostly that he never seems all that interested in being friends with anyone.  He has, on the rare occasion, approached a boy his age, but it almost never works out and he ends up alone - happily I should add.  There are very few boys his age in the neighborhood, and they don’t have the patience for someone who can’t quite keep up or for someone who takes so much work just to have a conversation with.  I’m usually just happy they’re not mean to him when he’s around; they just sort of ignore him.  Every rainbow colored moon, they will play together if there’s an adult (my husband) facilitating a game.

If he’s happier on his own then, is it right for me to push him into situations where he has to interact with other boys his age?  Is it fair?  Is it setting him up for anxiety and heartache?  But if I don’t, he misses out on a huge part of male development, it seems.

This came up at his parent-teacher conference, and we all tried to brainstorm ways to get him into a social setting.  We thought of music classes or bowling.  Soccer, which is on hiatus now anyway, is too busy to allow for developing much of a friendship.  They run, they go home, end of story.  Bowling has possibilities, and I’ll call about a special-needs team in the area.  Music classes don’t strike me as the best social opportunity, although he does love it.  I won’t even get into the cost issue for music classes.

Should I get him involved in an online community for kids?  Maybe I can find a Pokemon kids forum or something.  A pen-pal would be better than nothing at this point.

There’s also the possibility that I don’t need to be so concerned about this and he’ll be just fine without my interference.  I don’t know - thoughts?  And my apologies if I’m rambly - that kind of day.

Manic Monday prompt by Mo!

This is my least favorite time of year for so many reasons, but shopping is right up there on my personal Seven Levels of Hell list.  That’s probably why I do most of my holiday shopping in September and October.  Today is supposed to be Cyber-Monday, the Internet equivalent to Black Friday, I suppose, but I did my online shopping yesterday.  Thank you, Barnes & Nobel for your coupon deadlines!

Gus will be getting (courtesy of his grandparents) the Scholastic Children’s Encyclopedia and a boxed set of Encyclopedia Brown novels.   What could be a better gift for a kid who wakes up asking about things like the 4th dimension and time travel?  When it gets closer to the date, I’m also going to download Encarta 2009 for him, particularly cool because we get to avoid the packaging for this gift!  Go green gifts!

Our purchases for Gus have included: a few Pokemon themed gifts, my old MP3 player loaded with his favorite music (because we recycle) and assorted books for the stocking.  There may be a DVD in the works, if so, it will be High School Musical 3 and will probably be an impulse buy from Walmart while food shopping.  This may seem like a scanty list, but our goals this year were to give the kids more meaningful gifts that they will actually play with (as opposed to just stuff that will sit around cluttering up our already cluttered space) and also to make sure they enjoyed their holiday without being too materialistic.  We want to make sure it’s not all about a gazillion presents under the tree.  MM already gets as much pleasure from giving gifts as she does getting them.  They both love doing holiday baking and delivering dishes of cookies to their friends.  There are other traditions we have that are always much more memorable than what they opened from under the tree. Hopefully, we’re doing a decent job of instilling the deeper significance of the holiday season.

After all, you can’t shop for memories.

Thanks to Mo from Manic Monday

From YourDictionary.com : Harvest - noun - 4. the outcome or consequence of any effort or series of events.

This is the time of year when we typically receive the harvest of Gus’s efforts during his first quarter of school: his report cards.  He gets two reports - a district report card and an IEP report.  I was a little dismayed to see that the two reports were very different.  So during our parent-teacher conference, I asked why this was.

The district report shows his progress and ability in very generalized areas.  The IEP shows his progress in the specific areas that have been targeted for this year.  Generally, he’s doing fine.  But the specifics are pretty shaky.  There were several ‘not progressing satisfactorily’ marks, mostly having to do with his ability to focus and attend to tasks.  Yet, the meeting made me feel more hopeful.

After Thanksgiving, his teacher will be implementing computer time into the routine, and Gus will be allowed to complete at least some of his independent work on a computer.  So there will be no need for us to buy him a laptop for school, and as a matter of fact, the teacher would prefer he not use one in school because it would likely become a deterrent to complete some of the other things he has to do during the day - like group work.  That’s fine with me, and I think that any amount of computer time will be a benefit for him.

So come next harvest time, probably around the time just before or after the New Year, hopefully the results on his IEP report will be a little more positive.  At least I am certain that his teachers’ and therapists’ attitudes toward him are positive, and that is always a good thing.

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?

Janet at Dolly’s Daily Diary was kind enough to nominate me for the Lemonade Award which is given to bloggers who have shown a positive attitude and/or gratitude.  So, thanks to Janet for the honor!

The rules:

Put the logo on your blog or post.
• Nominate at least 10 blogs which show great Attitude and/or Gratitude!
• Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
• Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
• Share the love and link to this post and to the person from whom you received your award.

So here are some of my favorite blogs that inspire me to stay as positive as they do:

Marla Baltes on All That is Dazilous

A Life Less Ordinary

Mother of Shrek

Whitterer on Autism

Bon Bon Gazette

Memoirs of a Chaotic Mommy

Live Life 365

Mayhem Arts

On the Verge

Pregnant with Cancer

Drop by and check out these wonderful blogs!

Also, just a note to those of you who have taken the time to comment, I do read an appreciate every comment left, even if I don’t always respond.  So, thank you very much!  Have a great night!

These videos came to my attention courtesy of my sister-in-law.  They’re both quite beautiful in the sentiments they express.  The interesting thing about the timing when I got these videos is that I also got a book - work related - about the gifts of ADHD, not exactly the same, but similar enough.  If the universe is trying to tell me something, it’s certainly not being subtle!

The first video is entitled When God Created the Autistic Child, and the second is Autism: Not As Strange As It Seems.  With the second, you have to be sure to watch the entire thing before drawing any conclusions.

Hope you enjoyed them and please let me know what you think!