@Good Enough Mama – Welcome! My RSS feed reader of autism blogs runneth over at the moment, but we do try to keep up with your goings-on. Yeah, we know about star alignments. When the J-Man finds something that he completely loves, he just tunes out the rest of the world and enjoys it. Water seems to align the stars for him. It didn’t seem to matter to him one bit that other kids were there or not. It was him and the water.

But there are other things he loves where having other kids around causes him some over-excitement (or lots of it, depending). He gets pretty stimmy, but we’ve learned how to differentiate – at least for the most part – happy stimming from overloaded-please-save-me stimming. He likes certain parts of playgrounds, but we try to go when hardly anyone is there or just use the one in our backyard. It’s generally because I’m more afraid he’ll get trampled with his general lack of safety awareness esp. in high sensory situations, plus I do think it’s more enjoyable for him during low-traffic days outside.

@Maddy – I think we’re so into this way of life that we get to the point of being like race car drivers – we can hear the minutest change in pitch and know that something’s off and probably even know pretty quickly what it is. We have to be both that in tune with our kids and following them that closely since their needs and such change so quickly.

Of course, then they go and impress the heck out of us by doing something we didn’t think they could do and then looking at us with that “Dude, I got it. It’s all me. Just sit back and marvel!” face. And then we feel like maybe we’ve been over-reacting all along. Guess that’s our job, though.

@bellasmom – We found a water table at the store, so we’ll probably get it rather than me building something. It was fairly affordable. It’s been cold and rainy for the last four days, so I think we’ll wait till it warms up though!

I just saw that someone clicked through to my blog from yours, so I thought I’d drop in and say “hello.” So, er, hello. Thanks for linking to me.

Water tables (or deep bird baths, ha!) are awesome fun for kids of all ages, aren’t they? My Little Man LOVES playing with water. Well, as long as there are no other kids in a 1 kilometre radius. Oh, and the stars all have to be aligned properly. Can stars be aligned? Ack, I don’t know. You get what I’m saying though, right?

Again, thanks for linking to me. Feel free to drop in and comment any time!

Kia