Posts from — June 2008

Today I heard the J-man count to 10! Yes, 1-7 were mostly “cuh-cuh” but when Tim got to 7 and the J-man said “ayyyy” and then Tim repeated “eight,” and the J-man said “niii” I just about wet myself.

Not that I knew this the other day when I was grousing about the whole incorrect minutes from our meeting with the county…

Maybe we should teach him to count in some other language where 1-7 don’t begin with letters he can’t say. Uncle Jason?

Here are a couple of pictures of the J-Man working at his desk in his home classroom. These originally were just going to be staged shots, but he actually sat there and worked the whole puzzle by himself, and without either of us sitting there keeping him from running away! That and he’s having fun!

He looks like such a big boy in these pictures. My God how the time flies.

That last picture is exactly what I’m talking about when I say seeing how proud he is of himself when he accomplishes something makes any stress we may feel seem completely insignificant.

We met with the county people yesterday to see if the J-man would “qualify” for the school-system-run preschool. We had to take the J-man with us in an un-napped state, because the ONLY slot they had available was at 3 PM. You know, right in the middle of rest time. Good times.

The people were nice and all, and they think the J-man is adorable (because he is) but seriously, the woman who took minutes? Has no business ever writing again. And she’s a teacher. Also, the coordinator may want to re-think her strategy of “sharing” her monitor with me because obviously “sharing” is “inconceivable.” (”You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) Sharing does not mean briefly flashing the screen towards me, and then choosing what you think is best without consulting me.

Today I had to send the coordinator an email giving her all the errors in the reports and minutes. She was NOT pleased with me, and kept insisting that something had happened yesterday, when it obviously had not. Really, why would I tell you that my child knows his numbers, when he doesn’t? It seems bizarre, since from what I understand, parents should make their child’s issues look as significant as possible to get the kind of support actually needed. *sigh* We went back and forth, and finally she said she would just attach my corrections to the bottom of the report (where they are oh so likely to be read *eyes rolling wildly*).

Not exactly the way I wanted to start our relationship.

In completely unrelated news, my boss’s wife is in the hospital today being induced with their newest child. Last I heard, he was tracking the contractions via a spreadsheet. I seriously work for a geek. But a nice geek.

J-Man has rarely been one to get fixated on an object and carry it everywhere. Glo-Worm and the music-playing caterpillar used to go with us in the car and to some degree around the house. The music calmed him down and made life better for everyone. Even then, they weren’t with him all day.

Yesterday during speech therapy, he was impressing the therapist with his ability to point to a particular letter on a block even when presented with several blocks to choose from. For good measure, he often said the letter. It’s hard to describe what a quantum leap forward this is for him. If you present him objects (ball, cow, book, for example) and ask him to point to the cow, it’s rare for him to do it. Give him a pile of letter flash cards and say, “point to the ‘A’,” he’ll point and get it right about 90+% of the time. I’ve got no idea either. The speech therapist was floored.

He particularly likes ‘K’ since it’s the one sound he’s been able to make consistently. Oddly enough, it’s one of the hardest sounds to make. One of the hardest for him is that B/P type sound - he almost never can - which is apparently about the easiest sound to make. It comes out this curious, guttural, glottal, whatever sound. In any case, he found the ‘K’ block and held on to it the whole session. He also decided he liked the ‘C’ block and held it in the other hand. So, with a block in each hand, he would ‘point’ his fist at whatever she was asking him to.

He held on to them throughout the therapy, which started about 9:00AM. He then kept carrying them… and carrying them… We went to Target about 10:30, and he carried them to the car. He carried them into the store, and in the shopping cart, and back out to the car, and back home, and climbing up and down the steps. He held on to them through lunch (both in one hand), eating with the other hand. We managed to pry them from his hands (to much unhappiness) while he ‘napped’ (ha!). When he got up, he grabbed the blocks again and carried them around through the whole afternoon and dinner and up to the bathtub, where we had to pry them out again (to much more unhappiness).

Finally I just hid them. Today, he hasn’t looked for them.

I have no idea why, but yesterday was Block Day. I’ve never seen him carry something around for the better part of 10 hours. Go figure.

Who said all this wasn’t interesting?

If you live in North Carolina (like we do), there’s a fantastic resource called Generations-Tadpole that a few people and a couple of therapists mentioned to me. We haven’t used it yet, but I’m sure we will.

The best way I can think of to describe them is like Netflix for assistive and augmentative technology. If you live in North Carolina, you can borrow something out of the ‘library’ for a couple of weeks, try it out, and then return it. The best news - unless I’m missing something (and I asked around and looked on their site) - is that for NC residents it doesn’t cost you a thing, not even for shipping. Of course, you actually have to return things on time.

Obviously, one of the main issues with assistive technology in general is that there’s no easy way to try it out without spending tons of money on something and likely being stuck with it if it doesn’t work for your child. This stuff is way expensive (makes me think I’m in the wrong line of work) and not something you try out on a whim usually. Our local Early Intervention office has a lending library of their own, which we’re going to try to use before our time in EI runs out soon. From what I gather, it gets a lot harder to get loaners from the preschool system just because their inventory is always checked out. At least that’s apparently the case in our county.

Our primary interest is in ‘augmentative communication’, or ways to help J-Man better communicate with us and others. They also have a bunch of other resources such as learning and literacy aids, devices to assist with daily living, loads of educational CDs and DVDs, computer software for kids, and more learning toys than you can shake a stick at. There’s a bunch of other stuff too.

After reviewing Tadpole’s inventory, I noticed one issue that our developmental therapist gave us a heads-up on - augmentative communication devices often talk for the child through pre-recorded phrases assigned to the buttons, so partially-verbal kids whose verbal skills are improving (even if very slowly) may derive little or no real benefit from these devices.

If an older child with a very limited spoken vocabulary needed to ask certain kinds of questions that they couldn’t sign or communicate non-verbally, provide certain responses to questions also not easily communicated non-verbally, or generally needed to interact in some fashion independently of someone who could ‘translate’, I could see the real value in this. If a child got lost and needed to say “My Mommy’s name is Jane. Her phone number is 555-3333,” then a programmable device like this could really help. Since some of them can also be reprogrammed or significantly customized, they are quite adaptable to different situations.

But that brings us back to the original problem. J-Man can point to a picture for a handful of things (mostly food), and often say something that approximates the name of that item while he’s touching the picture. This really helps clarify what he wants. The pictures are a stepping stone to expanded speech. They do stand in for the speech itself sometimes, but it feels like the available technology is largely on a different path right now from where we are. While it would be entertaining to get more complex things from him than ‘cup’ (just waiting for a recorded version of “Daddy, you smell like a baboon’s butt.”), it seems like digitized phrases aren’t yet a part of the path we’re on at the moment.

That said, the yes/no switches might be worth playing around with. I’m willing to play 20 Questions with him if it helps better narrow down what he wants (and assuming he gets the point of it), but I’m uncertain about how well that fits into our current plan. It’s free for us to try, so we’ll play around with their inventory to see what we see.

I think a gap in the range of these devices comes on the lower-tech end. A more portable, configurable, extensible picture system - without all the programmable recordings - would be a real benefit to us. I know a simple, small photo album works for some kids, but J-Man doesn’t seem ready to flip through something. He needs to see all of his choices at once. Given what I’ve seen, I may have to sit down and actually design one that works for him. It’ll give me an excuse to go to Lowe’s if nothing else.

If anyone knows of other lending resources, feel free to comment or e-mail us!

Assuming you have good relationships with them - which to a person we’ve had with all of ours - your child’s therapists become your friends; they leave and you mourn. They bring you the one blessing you want as much as anything. They help your child take the one step at a time they need in order to grow into the fullest expression of themselves that they can.

J-Man’s developmental therapist is moving away this week. Her last day is tomorrow. She’s worked with him for about 15 months now - almost half his life, and far longer than anyone else. When she started, he would become immediately frustrated and upset when you tried to get him to do most anything. Stacking two blocks together or putting a big plastic coin in an even bigger slot looked like asking him to climb Everest. Even being near an open container of Play-Doh would make him gag. Touching fingerpaint would make his little sensory system go into red alert. He had at best a handful of random, unclear words. If an activity took more than two seconds, he couldn’t sit still for it or complete it. It’s hard to realize that when we started working together, he also couldn’t walk on his own. And it would be some time before he did. He had only very recently started sleeping through the night at that point. We were worried, exhausted, and growing more distraught by the day. It was a very hard time.

I see how he still struggles, and every day I grapple at least some with keeping perspective and staying positive. With her leaving, it’s made me look back and see just how far he has come. She was there when we had no idea what was going on, she’s seen us through his autism diagnosis, and she’s given us the tools and resources to know where to go next. She’s given us a wealth of information on how to set up his new home classroom and a home program to complement everything else he’s doing. Over the span of the last few months, she’s poured out so much of what she knows into us. We’ve learned more than I imagined possible, and we have a plan. I hope I’ve been a good student.

She has given us something words cannot describe, but those of you who have been through this know exactly what it is.

In a couple of months, we’ll also say goodbye to his other preschool teachers and therapists as we move into the county school system. Her departure starts this season of transition and mourning that we won’t get to see these people every week who have meant so much to us. I’ll feel this way a lot over the summer as we keep saying goodbye. They have all been so wonderful to us. It’s impossible to adequately express our gratitude to them. They’ve kept us upbeat when we were struggling. They love every kid who walks in their doors and steadfastly refuse to give up on anybody. If they ever wonder how much their work matters in the grand scheme of things, they need only to ask people like me.

I’ve realized that this isn’t a sprint or race; it’s a marathon relay. It’s the kindness and commitment of these once-strangers who have seen us through this far. It is because of them that we have hope in the people we have not yet met and things that we have not yet seen.

Whether they are developmental, occupational, speech, physical, or another other kind of therapist, the ones who enter our lives and offer their hands, heads, and hearts to people like us are often unsung superheroes.

They are worth their weight in gold, and probably get paid their weight in recyclable plastic.

They are reimbursed for gas at about the same rate as pizza delivery people - except they can’t take tips.

They are energetic Macgyvers, making limitless supplies of therapy aids out of egg cartons and dollar-store junk. They don’t even need duct tape, though give them a laminator and they can rule the world.

They will stand on their heads if need be. They will come up with stuff that boggles the mind.

They see our son achieve his latest miracle, and they cry, too.

They’ve never grown up, and we love them for it.

They can turn animal crackers into an epic story.

They know how to work an inscrutable health care and insurance system to get what your child needs.

They will hold your hand and believe, even on the days you can’t. They know when to talk and when to stay silent.

They believe every child has a bright future. They don’t give up. They love each and every child just because. No one needs to prove anything to them first, and no one needs to earn their love.

They work for sticky hugs and don’t complain about the rest.

They still deserve more money.

As families come and go and as they themselves move from place to place, they often don’t get to see who ‘their children’ become. In many cases, at age 3 many of those kids move on. I hope that at 13, 23, or anywhere in between or beyond that I’ll be able to send them a story or two about the kind of person J-Man grows up to be - better yet that he will be able to write to them - and to say thank you for everything. They are as much responsible for the progress he has made as they are for all the things he will yet discover how to do.

Thanks, Meg. We owe you. May the dollar stores always have what you need for your magic therapy kits, and may all your days be blessed.

Well, probably not… Though I could probably poll some former college friends and they might provide some corroborating evidence for this.

J-Man literally put the ‘gross’ in ‘gross motor skills’ tonight. After hurling up his entire dinner intake and probably parts of previous meals, he proceeded to walk up the dozen steps to our upstairs all by himself for the first time, holding on to the bannister and nothing else, and much of it with just one hand. Go him! Stairs have really been hard for him to deal with.

He also struggles with stepping into clothes, and stepping into his big boy diapers (pull-up types) after his bath is very difficult. He could knock over a two-ton grizzly bear with one hand but standing and holding up his foot a fraction without holding on to something for support is very hard for him. But he managed his best ever at it tonight - I guess with some nebulous benefit from blowing chunks. I suppose lightening the load a little helped his coordination.

So he’ll either wake up starving at about 3AM or spew off the side of his bed tonight just our luck, but maybe not. Who knows what brought this on. Sometimes it happens.

To provide some symmetry to the whole thing, one of the cats coughed up a fur ball on the blanket on our bed. There is no indication it improved the gross motor skills of whichever one did it as they are both conked out in their respective sleeping spots at the moment.

Well, sometimes eventful is a good thing.

On a better note, we’ve just about finished the home classroom and figuring out what kind of home therapy program we’re going to do in complement to his school and regular therapies. That’ll require either many posts or separate pages, but I’m working on it. So better programming with less gastrointestinal content is coming soon!

Recently we have been laminating fools over here in the Flashlight household. The J-man has really been into his alphabet flashcards, so we decided to laminate them before he completely shredded them. While we were at it, we (OK, Tim) laminated eleventy-seven pictures of things for the J-man to do. Some were therapy related (the desk, etc), and some were fun/reward kind of things (the swing, the computer game). Tim posted them on a piece of posterboard using velcro dots, just like we did with the food pictures. That posterboard is now hanging in the kitchen, right at the door to the classroom. We haven’t introduced it at all, though. We haven’t even pointed it out.

I was bustling around the kitchen cleaning up and making dinner, and the J-man was running around doing his thing, when he came up to me with the picture of the computer game in his hand. I’m not sure if he had been pointing at it before, but he made SURE I knew he wanted to play with it. What could I do but set him up to play? Besides, it let me cook dinner without worrying about him being near the stove. SCORE!

Estee over at The Joy of Autism blogged today about knowing her son knows much more than he can verbalize. Seeing the J-man carry over his knowledge about how the food board works to the actions board reinforced our belief that he knows SO MUCH MORE than he can say. If he’s anything like his daddy, he’s going to be crazy smart, and it looks like he’s heading in that direction.

Also… we cut his hair again tonight. It was not NEARLY as easy as the last time. Sigh. Poor monkey. He didn’t even want to be near me afterward. Talk about your Mama Guilt!

So, here I was today at the Yes, We Can! preschool (yeah, not really its name, but that’s a good name for it anyway). I was talking to a couple of the other moms and one of them pulls down the waistband of her two-year-old daughter’s shorts a fraction.

“Look!” says Mom1.

“Oooohhhhh!” says Mom2.

WTH? thinks Dad1 (um, me).

Um, oh! I get it now! thinks Me some indeterminate number of seconds later.

“Oh! How about that!” says Me out loud with some combination of genuine and feigned interest, the exact ratio of which I’ll leave up to the philosophers.

We proceeded to have an intelligent conversation about Dora underwear and potty-training achievements.

I’m not making this up.

Excuse me while I run to the store to buy something with camo on it. I think there’s a 24-hour Army Surplus down the road somewhere.

I found these words in a journal I was writing in almost three years ago, before J-Man was born. What it would be like for the me-of-then and the me-of-now to meet given everything that has happened! And what would the me-of-then think of how many layers of meaning there were to his words that he couldn’t possibly have known about then?

These entries are excerpts from those journals and are addressed to our son. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to go over the whole 40 weeks!)

——————–

(written a few days after Mary got her positive pregnancy test)

It was only a week ago that we found out that you were going to become a part of our life. We have been stunned most of the time ever since. Becoming a parent for the first time, especially when you are over 30 like us, is hard to comprehend. For me, it’s the sense that I won’t be a good father and that I won’t be all you need me to be. Maybe by the time you read this, I will have proved more to you than that.

There’s always the fear at the beginning that things will not go according to plan. It happens to a lot of people. We tried very hard to prepare the way for you to come into the world and have wished so hard that it would come true. As I often do, it’s also a time for a lot of anxiety wondering whether something will go wrong. Writing my thoughts down here perhaps is a way to make it seem more real, but mostly as an expression of faith that I know now that you will come safely into the world and into our lives.

(when Mary was about seven weeks)

Next week comes the first exciting doctor’s visit. Using some Doppler ultrasound device I don’t remotely understand, we should be able to see your heart beat for the first time. At eight weeks, such a thing astonishes me, especially because the pictures in the book say you probably look like a very tiny, wriggly, alien-shaped entity attached to an oversized head. I’ll still think you look great regardless of the pictures.

Sometimes during this process of waiting, I wish I could dump everything I know through your cord and into your head. Not book knowledge really, but experience and hopefully some wisdom. I imagine, though, that there are a lot of things we’ll just have to learn together. I’ll apologize in advance if I’m overprotective or obsessive about helping you learn how to be and live in the world. It can oftentimes be a scary place. I know you’ll figure it out though.

(after the first ultrasound at eight weeks)

In the first eight weeks, you know that you are going to be parents and feel excited about it, but it’s still so hard to believe you are actually coming. Seeing and hearing your heartbeat brought it all home in this one overwhelming moment. Someday when you are in the same place, you will know what it feels like.

We will always remember this day because your heart lit up in front of us for the first time and our love for you was so strong that in that moment I could not imagine being able to love you more; but I know I will. It has been that way with your mom. On our wedding day, I looked into her eyes and knew all the way down to the very core of my soul that I loved her far beyond any love I had ever felt. I could not imagine loving her more than I did then, but it happened anyway. The great thing about love is that there is room for everybody, and it never has to know any limits.

(about nine weeks - right after our Snow Storm From Hell that year, and strangely symbolic of things to come)

Someday someone may mention this storm to you and you can tell them this story about how I left one part of town at 1:00 PM and didn’t get home until 9:00, over what should have been a 20-minute drive. I feel a strange sense of accomplishment for beating the odds and getting home. Maybe the moral of story for you is, use common sense but stick with it and work your way out of whatever is in front of you. Determination mixed with some good common sense is a valuable gift to have.

(after the 11-week ultrasound - don’t worry, last entry)

To see you today with a very identifiable head and face, your torso, and little arms and legs was amazing. How far you have come in only three weeks!

You were pumping those little legs like you were trying to run around in there. Your heart is strong and you are starting to stretch your legs out to come into this great big world. Keep doing your dance. Grow strong.

[Back to the present day - Three weeks is still a long time in your world even now. And how I love to see you dance.]

——————

If you’ll humor me a bit longer, this is a little poem I wrote about what it feels like for me to watch J-man grow up so much each day. I wrote it well over a year ago, but it still fits me. It expressed both my joy for all the memories I have of him when he was really little, and the grief that comes when you box up your child’s baby stuff. You have to admit to yourself that they’re growing up. It all goes by so quickly.

As I read this poem now, I think how much of my fear of not being a good dad has been boxed away now, too. Experience is a great teacher, but my son may be the best teacher of all. When I wrote it, I never imagined we’d be where we are now. I’ve realized how many of my old ways and habits that brought a lot of negativity and fear have gone away either because I put them away intentionally or because they seemed to have worn out on their own.

That doesn’t remotely mean I’m all ‘with it’ now. What a joke that would be. It just means that this is a good sign I’m learning something - something I never would have learned without being the father of this wonderful little boy. You are the best Father’s Day gift I could ever hope for.

Outgrowing

I put new griefs into boxes
reminding myself to store them
somewhere away from the old.

There’s the little, white onesie with
	the tiny, yellow ducks,
the sleeper with I Love Daddy on it,
the little footie socks you wore last winter,
the blue hat with the doggie ears
	that you refused to keep on,
the red and white-striped jumper you wore
	your first time at the beach,
the soft, cream-white sleeper you wore in the hospital
	against your jaundiced skin.
It was the only newborn outfit you ever wore;
we had to stuff you into it for pictures.

You’ve outgrown these blankets that swaddled you
while I plowed furrows in the carpet
during your walking naps.
They go in with the hooded towels,
especially the one with the teddy bear head
that covered your long, wet, hobbit hair.

You’d pull the hood over your face
waiting expectantly for us to find you;
we always would.

Someday I hope you get to pack away memories like this. 

I guess I should put away too my fear
of being a bumbling father.
We’ve done well together so far.

I tell myself, it’s OK to outgrow things.

Thanks for reading.

The J-man has a new and exciting talent - the ability to say a whole phrase. That phrase? “My name is ‘J-man’!”

It goes like this:
Mama: My
J-man: muh-muh
J-man: na-na
Mama: name
J-man: i-i
Mama: is
J-man: na-na!
Mama: ‘J-man’!

[We assume you know that neither 'na-na' nor 'J-Man' is his name, and in both instances he and Mary got his name right. ]

He’s getting so big, and it seems like it’s all of a sudden. We had to switch to Good Nites instead of the Huggies Overnights because he outgrew the size 5s in what seemed like a week. He’s wearing “big boy shoes” every day now, and thankfully the Preschoolians came in, because the other shoes were getting harder and harder to put on. He’s VERY clear about what food/drink he wants now, and will go over and BANG on the picture if he thinks you are ignoring him. Tonight was the best stair-climbing he’s ever done, with very little leaning on me.

In terms of communication, it seems like a lightbulb went on over his head. Now he gets that if he makes the sound, he gets what he’s asking for. He’s so proud of himself - now he runs around and bangs on his belly and yells.

My little boy is growing up, right before my eyes.

Given J-Man’s sudden proliferation of letter recognition and continued progress with picture communication, it looks like he may be a prime candidate for some sort of assistive technology device to help him communicate. While I’m a self-professed geek, I don’t know the first thing about what the technological possibilities are for him. I know a lot about designing web sites for people who use screen readers and otherwise creating accessible web sites, but I don’t know jack about what devices an almost-three-year-old could use to communicate.

Since his speech therapist seems to believe it’s likely he’ll have a hard time being understood for a long while even if he starts getting more words out, this is a path we need to consider.

So, this is where you come in. We’re looking for anything anyone knows about assistive technology for helping autistic toddlers communicate, or kids in general. Please leave a comment in this post or e-mail us privately and let us know your experience. We’d really appreciate it.

Here are some questions we have now. Obviously there’s stuff we haven’t thought of, so please feel free to stray from the questions and tell us everything you know.

• Have any of you used any sort of assistive technology devices to help your kids communicate? If so, what devices and how well did they work?
• Do you know of any good web sites that provide helpful and accurate info about this? (I looked up some stuff on Google real quick and the sites were either marginally informative or just broken links.)
• I have heard that it’s a requirement that assistive technology be discussed during the IEP process and a determination made about whether it’s appropriate for your child. If that’s correct, has anyone gotten their schools to cover this? If so, how hard was it? Did they approve something that was the equivalent of a 20-year-old laptop and you have to pay out of pocket for something that worked well?
• What’s a good way to get ‘loaners’ and try this stuff out before money gets shelled out for it?

Really, just tell us anything you know. We’d be most grateful. Thanks!

We got through it. Anything that can be described like that is a victory.

The dentist was really good. Turns out his wife used to work for the doctor who did the autism evaluation, hence the referral I assume. Regardless, he was calm, skilled, listened to us, understood the situation perfectly, and best of all, was quick. Can’t beat that!

I rarely drop the word “autism” into a conversation with a stranger about our son unless the conversation is actually about that. People’s automatic prejudices about that really get to me and only serve to piss me off, and if he’s acting a bit destructively - which is rare - I don’t want to be one of those parents who makes excuses for their kids. If I’ve heard “Oh, he’s just that way; he has ADD” while their child is rampaging around the playground knocking kids down and taking stuff from them, I’ve heard it a thousand times. I don’t care if J-Man is autistic or purple; I want to have the same boundaries and rules and expectations that I hope other parents have for their own.

He jogged laps around the waiting room and entertained everyone. He did many of his usual array of things others may find quirky, but since I find them endearing, I had a great time watching him. There was a ramp into the kids’ play area that he would take a step up, change his mind, and come back down. He did this at least two dozen times. He has this thing about inclines. He’ll do steps now with some help, but put a ramp in front of him and his wires seem to get crossed sometimes. He was his usual cute self and everyone responded accordingly, with adoration of our son like they’re supposed to.

That preamble has a point. I figured they had a “special room” at the dentist’s office somewhere. The office is enormous and there’s a fairly open area with dentists’ chairs all over the place. I knew we’d have to do some wrestling with him to get this done and I’d rather not do it in public, freak him out even more, and then freak out the other kids - many of whom were very young and a couple who looked like it was their first time at the dentist and wouldn’t understand why this boy was screaming while some large adult (namely, me) was piled on top of him. So I sprinkled “autism” in a couple of places during our initial conversation with the hygienist. We got the “special room”. I usually don’t work a conversation like this, but it turned out to make life much more manageable for everyone.

The hygienist made little headway into checking his teeth so we all waited on the dentist for a few minutes. Singing and letting him explore the common area helped him calm down and pass the time. He never sits still in a new place so we let him work off some of that until the dentist was ready. He talked to us for a few minutes about concerns we had, was very understanding, knew completely what to do, and generally made us all feel better. His usual bag of tricks (e.g. show the kid the little dental mirror and let them play with it before using it) was pretty much pointless, but I appreciate the sentiment. J-Man was in the process of going over the edge at that point.

Like everything else, the winning plan is to be quick. I sat him in my lap facing me, then we tilted him back with his head into the dentist’s lap, Mary took one arm and the hygienist the other, and the dentist worked his magic. He managed to get a good visual exam in during all the commotion. Good for him. Verdict - no problems with his teeth!

He did have some staining on his upper, front teeth, mostly because all he’ll drink is iced tea. The dentist said a little pumice on the rotating brushy thing dentists use (no clue what it’s called) would clean that right up. It would take about 30 seconds. We figured we could survive anything for that long and it would look a lot better. So, we decided to do it.

Reinforcements were waiting by the exam room door (an extra hygienist if needed). I literally laid across him (useful side effect is that deep pressure helps) to hold his body and feet, everybody grabbed an arm, and 30 seconds later, voila! He got some serious crud off. Ewww. Verdict - Stain gone, everyone survived, good enough.

J-Man recovered well (which is normal for him). I held him and walked him around for a few minutes and we sang a few rounds of Old MacDonald. By the time we got to the car, he was pretty good with life again. He was pretty subdued, but an OK kind of subdued.

Some things we learned:

• Preparation is 9/10 of everything. We tried to get mentally and logistically prepared before we even got there. We planned the whole day around it, timing meals, giving him some extra chill out time, letting him watch a little extra TV, lots of loving attention, etc. Best call of the day - put the soft shoes back on in place of the big boy shoes in case he kicked because they hurt less!
• Learn from prior meltdowns and keep trying to figure out the best way to get through something like this. Fifteen progressively worse haircuts were great lessons. Still, probably a lot more we can learn.
• Skilled, understanding professionals are worth their weight in gold. They really made it as easy as they could. Again, speed is everything.
• Ask around, get referrals, ask around some more. This is going to be stressful, shopping around for the best person is worth the time. We relied on the referral of someone we trusted and it worked out well. We will definitely be going back there.

Final financial damage - $68, and see you in six months. We’ll take it!

I claim my own sensory issues. I really don’t like dentists. I’m being very diplomatic in saying that. If J-Man takes after me, the end of the world may be nigh.

So, now we have to take him to the dentist tomorrow for the first time ever. It originally took months of therapy just to get him to let us near his mouth and to eat table food of any kind, then it took us months to get him to let us into his mouth with spoons, washcloths, etc., and then it took a while to get him to put a toothbrush in his mouth. He still fights us brushing his teeth with a brush (we usually use a textured washcloth), but he will sorta brush his own teeth with one (emphasis on ’sorta’).

So, we know his teeth need cleaning. He seems to have an overbite too. Nothing good can come of this when a dentist gets involved.

Autistic kids often have problems with their teeth, primarily because it’s hard to negotiate with a kid about dental hygiene when having someone pillaging around in their mouths when they’re sensory-sensitive anyway isn’t really on their favorite activities list. It’s not like “go get your toothbrush and brush your teeth” is a practical course of action either at this point.

Here are some other things compounding the problem.

• Our dental insurance has no pediatric dentists in network. How dumb is that? So, this is out of pocket. Great.
• I fully expect him to fight to the death in the chair. Remember, this is the kid who required five people (and me of 225 lbs practically sitting on him) plus an entertainment committee and his favorite video to sort of get his hair cut. This time some stranger is going into his mouth with shiny, sharp, scary-looking instruments. You must be joking.
• Distractions are pretty much useless with him after a certain point. Once he slides past that point of no return, ain’t nothing you can do to get him back except wrestle or take him home. In really stressful situations, honestly the distractions don’t much work regardless. It’s more how long you can delay the inevitable.
• I also fully expect them to give up and say “you’ll have to come back and we’ll need to sedate him. By the way, go ahead and leave your wallet with the receptionist.”
• I personally hate dentists. This does not give off good vibes to J-Man I’m sure.
• It never gets easy watching him go through something this hard on him. It kills me every time.
• If he has cavities, I may start drinking heavily when we get home. There’s a ‘package store’ two exits before ours.

The one good thing - the doctor comes recommended by the person who did his autism evaluation. So, let’s hope for the best.

Urf. We’ll let you know…

In our continuing work to make your time here at Chez Flashlight more informative and enjoyable, we’ve implemented a few new features to help our growing (!!) readership.

Today we added the following new stuff for y’all to play with. We’d love to hear whether it works or doesn’t for you. As always, please share your feedback with us on this or anything else.

• “Some similar posts” - If you open an individual post or just happen to arrive here that way, at the end of the post you’ll see a “Some similar posts” list that shows five topics the blog software thinks are most related to the topic you’re reading. I haven’t played around with this enough to see whether I agree with it, but so far it looks pretty good. I realize navigating a blog can get annoying fast, so I hope this helps some.

  If you’re reading along on the main page and want to open an individual topic’s page, click a post’s title or click the link at the bottom of the post that says how many comments that post has (e.g., “2 Comments”).

• Most Popular Posts - On the left side of the page below the Recent Posts is the “Most Popular Posts” (of all-time!!) list. When you read an individual topic, you’re giving it a vote (more or less). This doesn’t require any action on your part beyond that. This will keep posts people like from falling off the front page.
• Sign up to receive notice of new comments - When you leave a comment, you should see a little check box below the comment box. If you check it, it will notify you by e-mail when follow-up comments are made to that post.
• ShareThis - The ShareThis button will allow you to bookmark the topic in every conceivable social bookmarking system you can think of. You can also use it to e-mail a post to someone you know or love (or both).

If you’re new here, don’t forget the keyword Tag Cloud near the top-right if you’re looking for something in particular. You can, of course, always use the Search box for that, too.

There’s also the Categories list, but I’m pondering removing it as the Tag Cloud covers things in greater depth. The Cloud is uglier than Barney’s incarcerated second cousin, but I’ll work on it.

Please subscribe to our feed through FeedBurner to get the latest and greatest of everything our opposable thumbs can come up with.

Future improvements in the works include a much more comprehensive set of links to sites that have helped us with researching and better understanding autism, speech delays and speech therapy, occupational therapy, educational/behavioral therapies, etc. We’re also working on a reading list of books we’ve discovered that have really helped us out and a glossary page because some stuff we post here I know goes over the heads of some readers new to the jargony world of autism.

We also have oddles of exciting posts planned for the next few weeks. We’re plunging headlong into IEP Days, so you get to walk through it with us. Plus, I’m about done with the home schoolroom to complement J-Man’s therapy work when he’s not at school or with a therapist. Lots of news on that front.

All this and more, coming soon to Both Hands and a Flashlight! Huzzah!