Achievements

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

by Tim on November 29, 2011

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao-Tzu

Today I achieved something momentous, and I almost missed it. I completed my 1,000th mile since I decided to start running again and taking control of my health in August 2010. I’ve run well over 800 of those miles in 2011, including a marathon in March. Just to give you some idea, a thousand miles is approximately the distance from New York City to Daytona Beach, Florida, and farther than the distance between New York City and St. Louis, Missouri. To which I thought to myself, Holy crap! I can’t believe I did that!

A thousand is certainly a nice round number, but in light of Lao-Tzu’s quote, it means something more to me. Today I completed a circle, and now I get to start a new one.

With over a year’s worth of perspective, I better comprehend what a deep mess I was in last year. You can read all about The Great Burnout, but the short of it is that I was physically and emotionally exhausted and in trouble. It was a real low point in my life. It was either do something or fall apart. I am obviously glad of the choice I made. Little did I know where it all would lead.

I remember very well that August day last year, a couple of days before our wedding anniversary as a matter of fact. I laced up a clunky pair of running shoes, strapped on my iPod, and headed out the door for Week 1, Day 1 of the Couch-to-5K program. It primarily involved a walking warm up, alternating 60 seconds of running with 90 seconds of walking for 20 minutes, a walking cool down, and beaching myself on the couch after the effort. I felt like I weighed every bit of the almost 235 pounds I was then. I plodded along slowly and completed the workout in one piece. It was a manageable effort, and I felt satisfied. I had started, and that, it turns out, was the first step on an amazing journey.

The workouts got much harder. All I wanted to do was complete the 5K autism run that October with a goal of finishing in under 30 minutes. My knees started killing me. I fell back into a despair. But I knew I couldn’t quit. Much more than a 5K was on the line. I was on the line. I told my body I was taking a few days off, but then it was on, regardless of the pain. I don’t normally recommend running in that much pain, but my situation called for desperate action. I pushed through it, completed my training, and eventually finished that 5K in 28:52, with a knee that looked rather like a large grapefruit. I didn’t care. I felt like I was coming back for good.

One thing led to another. My runs got longer. Then one day while on a long run, in a fit of pique, inspiration, or sheer insanity – or all of the above – I decided to set the biggest goal I’d ever thought about going after. I decided to complete a marathon three months from that day. This past March, eight-and-a-half months after I started running again, I crossed the finish line and completed my first marathon.

It is true what they say. The finish line of your first marathon is a transition line for your entire life. You cross over, and your life is never the same again. And it hasn’t been. It showed me that if you keep taking one step after another, anything is possible.

That’s what the J-Man first taught me. His life and growth are a series of steps – some small, some enormous leaps – each hard-won. No particular one may be all that glamourous or noteworthy all by itself, but when slowly but surely added together, they create magic. This is one of the wows of autism. And for me personally, I’ve discovered this is one of the wows of life itself.

I have tried to apply what our J-Man has taught me to my health and fitness, to my work, and to my life. It’s working. I think I get it now. I may be a slow learner, but I have an excellent teacher.

I feel more confident in adding new and harder running goals, working to get our lives in better order, and growing my work and hopefully my income, too. I feel like I have some idea what the heck I’m doing now. Our J-Man showed me the way to believe again.

There’s no magic plan here for you to follow. There’s no checklist to fill out and work through. It’s not quick or easy. You can’t make an infomercial out of it. You most likely won’t get results any time soon, but you will get them. You just decide what your heart wants most, and you go get it. You go outside your proverbial or literal front door, you take a step, then another, and you don’t quit until you get there. There will be setbacks and detours, you will often doubt whether you can do it, but if you keep your eyes on the goal and never quit, you will get there.

I made that journey of a thousand miles. It taught me enough lessons to fill a book. And now I get to begin another journey. Where it will take me next will be beyond anything I can yet imagine. I know it. So today I take that next, single step.

So go take your step. Don’t wait for anything. Right now. Go.

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After So Long, I Believe It Now

by Tim on November 21, 2011

Speak your mind — even if your voice shakes. – Maggie Kuhn

Our J-Man is starting to string syllables together. Not many, but he’s doing it. He’s slowly but surely doing it without prompting. It rarely exceeds three or four halting words, but he’s doing it.

This feels like our version of the moon landing.

After so long doubting that he would ever really talk, as I was pulling into the driveway the other morning, for the first time something struck me. I started crying in the car. I believe it now. I really believe it. He’s going to talk, and he’s going to tell us about wonders we never imagined possible.

Even if he never did talk, would it change how dear he is to me, how much I love him, how much I will cheer for him, how much I will fight for him, how awesome he is and will be? Not one bit.

But I see how hard he works at trying to communicate verbally. I see him get so frustrated and upset at being unable to get his point across. I want to know how he feels, what he thinks about, how he sees the world. I want desperately to find some way to unlock his voice. I don’t care if that’s via his voice box, an iPad, or something else. But I feel him trying to show us how much he wants to figure out how to use his own voice. The more Dale Jr. talks, the more amazing things I realize he has to say. And I feel more like a failure as a parent that I haven’t found a way to help our J-Man do the same.

Recently he has been scripting some. He’s stringing together sounds, syllables, and approximations to repeat things he hears, often from kids’ shows he likes such as the “Here’s the Mail” song in Blue’s Clues and the intro song to Pinky Dinky Doo. These are motivators for him, and we are all about those especially since so little historically has been a strong motivator for him. They are familiar, they give him something to focus on, he can use them to practice sounds, and most of all, they make him happy.

I know we all have kids spanning the entire communication spectrum, so to be clear, he’s not suddenly uttering these crystal clear sentences. Some words are shortened – some to the point they sound like rapid, breathless speech. Some of his syllables vary greatly in length and use stresses you aren’t used to hearing. His inflections at the end of words may be all over the place, though they sound almost melodic. But you know, it doesn’t matter how he does it because there’s no one ‘right’ way. This is the purest music to us.

We were talking with his speech therapist recently, and we were all rejoicing that he’s started experimenting with these inflections and different intonations. He’s trying to close off words and say all the sounds in the word, not just the first syllable or two. He works so hard to get it all out, and now he’s staying with it longer and trying to finish the words he starts. He’s known for his clipped, monotone syllables when he does speak. He’s creating his own verse now with rhythm, tone, and meter all his own, and he continues to experiment and improvise.

What he’s doing now sounds like jazz. No, it is jazz.

He experiments with the notes. He is unbound by the stress and unstress of our so-called speaking. He is finding his own way. He is making it up and discovering it as he goes along. We can’t make his mouth, tongue, throat, and lungs make the sounds. He is the musician here. We can try everything we can think of, but so much of this is his journey of discovery. And he’s doing it.

His syllables sway and dance haltingly like middle schoolers at their first dance. He takes verbal steps slowly, carefully, daringly like a toddler, but he keeps at it, laying out one syllable after another. He lines them up like whirling dervishes, dreamy sloths, or slippery snakes, not going where he wants them to yet, but indeed they are going somewhere exciting.

And like a crossword, enough clues are now filling in that it seems bit by bit to be getting easier for him. Eventually there’s a tipping point where the momentum shifts in your favor. Maybe, just maybe, we’re finally there. Slowly but inexorably, it’s happening.

He sees everything around him, feels entire constellations of emotions, has wants and needs, has opinions and ideas, and has untold riches to share with the world. He may experience some or all of these things very differently than most of the rest of us, but that’s what so wonderful about it. What he sees and feels and thinks is unique in all the universe. I want him to be able to share that with whomever he wishes to.

And now these little rays of sunshine are poking through. It’s going to happen.

I see his face beam when he does get the words out. The light bursts forth from every pore in his face. I see his whole body rejoice when he is heard and understood. If there is anything that makes my heart sing more than seeing this in one of our children, I don’t know what it is.

And most of all I see it in his eyes. He now believes it, too. It’s going to happen.

I want this as much as anything. I want him to believe in himself. I want him to know that he can find a way to do whatever he seeks to do, no matter how long it takes. Forget however long it takes anybody else. I want him to know that doesn’t matter. This is his journey of exploration and discovery. He may have to take paths less travelled, or ones not travelled at all. He can blaze his own trail through sheer force of will. There’s magic out there to be found.

I remember all the days trying to get more than ‘kuh’ out of him (the sound that once meant anything and everything). It took months of work day in and day out to get just one new sound. I remember having no idea how he’d ever find ways to communicate and how we’d ever be able to help him tell us what he wants, needs, and thinks.

But slowly and surely over these years, it’s happened. One syllable at a time, he has pulled himself up this Super Everest. I’m still not sure how all this will turn out, but he’s made a believer out of me. He has that effect on everyone.

After so long, I believe it now. And we get to spend the rest of our lives discovering everything he has to say. How amazing is that?

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Lessons from the Road – One Year Later

by Tim on July 30, 2011

One year ago today, I started running again after many years. My resolutions from The Great Burnout last year were to run and change my diet. That was basically it, though each involved massive lifestyle changes. But my what changes they have wrought in my life. If you’ll indulge me a bit, here are some things I learned over the past year. Hopefully at least one of them will mean something to you, too.

As with many attempts to improve one’s life, the part not long after I started was the hardest. If you think about it, just starting something new is perhaps the easiest part. Many of us do it every year with New Year’s resolutions. Often they might last a few days or weeks (or hours) because it’s the next step after you start where it’s usually the hardest. The honeymoon is the easy part. It’s when you have to commit to the day in and day out relationship that the work begins. Often, there’s not as much passion and glamour in this ongoing work as we’d hoped there would be. We have to draw our energy from somewhere else.

For exercise and health-related changes, I tend to call this the ‘Rocky Training Montage Problem’. In the Rocky movies, Rocky Balboa has some life crisis, some period of doubt where he thinks about giving up, something then happens to inspire him, and then cue the epic music and grunting in the gym where Rocky transforms into a perfect physical specimen ready to face and defeat an invincible foe, all in the span of about four minutes. The all-day, everyday devotion to the training and hard work required to get there are left on the editing floor. That’s where the really great stuff happens, but it’s also where most of us give up.

[click to continue…]

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Social Stories and the Revelation

by Tim on June 7, 2011

I love it when we have “Holy crap, I can’t believe that worked!” moments. They are admittedly rare, but sometimes you stumble across something that not only works but works so amazingly well that it’s a revelation. And the odd thing is that it may be something you’ve tried before, except now it just clicks for some reason. This time it’s social stories.

A bit of background for those of you new to the concept of social stories. Basically these are simple stories you create ahead of time or even on the fly – typically with both visuals and words – that you go over with your child as a means of rehearsing a situation that they are going to do ‘for real’. This lets you describe a situation to your child in a form that they often enjoy already – by telling a story. You can read it and talk about any pictures with your child in the same way you might Cat in the Hat.

This is a more elaborate example of a social story, but you can make them very short and simple, too. Here are a few more examples and more background on social stories. There’s even more info here (with some sales-y stuff).

Social stories serve many purposes. They can:

  • Explain potentially upsetting situations to your child ahead of time in a safe, calmer environment like your home.
  • Give visual references and cues that help your child understand what is happening, what is expected of them, or what they should do.
  • Serve as a sort of schedule they can refer to again while they are playing out the story for real.
  • Take advantage of our children’s tendencies to script things by providing a sort of script for a new situation.
  • Reduce resistance to a variety of situations in general.

However, whipping up a picture-based social story on the spur of the moment is often not practical unless you have the equivalent of Dora’s backpack filled with picture cards. It often requires planning ahead and typically some computer-based method of putting pictures and text together. It can work great if you are much more organized and forward-looking than we are, but usually it’s when we’re already neck-deep in the mess that we realize we need them.

Cue now the real-life examples of necessity is the mother of invention.

The J-Man’s class recently went to a school assembly that involved a lot of song and loud noise. Not surprisingly, this isn’t his favorite thing to go do. But his teacher, ever the quick-thinking genius she is, drew on her experience with him and her seemingly radical idea to call what must have seemed like the educational equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. She scribbled out a social story on a sheet of paper in a tiny notepad. Just wrote it out by hand, no pictures. And it worked. She read it to him, he appeared to read and reread it to himself a few times, and then he started to calm down. He even seemed to enjoy himself a bit toward the end.

The story was just something simple. I don’t remember it exactly, but this is close enough to get the gist of it.

The J-Man is going to an assembly in the gym.
Assemblies are loud.
People will be singing at the assembly.
Assemblies are fun!

At the bottom of the paper but folded over and hidden from view was “Finished”. When the assembly was over, she unfolded it, showed him “Finished”, and he got up and the class went back to their room.

I thought the success of this might knock us all flat. I didn’t think a social story would do much for him yet, regardless of whether it had words, pictures, videos, or feel-good drugs mixed in with the paper. The fact that a few simple sentences handwritten on a little notepad worked feels like me suddenly being able to bench press an airplane.

And if that don’t beat all, this has kept working, too. Our developmental therapist was with Mary on one of our ‘let’s go practice being in public’ trips to the store. The J-Man refused to go into the store and had a pretty major meltdown from what I heard. Being the resourceful, think-on-your-feet type she is, our DT typed out a social story on her cell phone and showed it to him. She read it to him, he read it to himself, and it worked.

Then at the pool the other day for our class field trip, the J-Man really didn’t want to go to the changing room with me to put on his dry clothes to go home in. He didn’t want to leave the pool either, but Dale Jr was seriously ready for a nap and we had to go. One of his teaching assistants had the inspired idea (sensing a theme here!) to write out a social story about it being time to go. We didn’t have any paper, so she wrote it out using a colored marker and the back of a pizza box. I kid you not. Basically it more or less said, “Pool is all finished. Time to change clothes. Then time to go home.” It worked.

I’m not sure which of these situations was more amazing. To say that I am still awestruck by this is an understatement.

So I’m crazily experimenting with iPod note apps that let you tinker with font sizes and save a library of notes so we can always have social stories ready. If this proves to be the key to overcoming all sorts of issues we’re having, I may start weeping with joy uncontrollably.

Here’s one I whipped up yesterday morning when he wouldn’t get out of bed. I typed this up on my iPod Touch in about 30 seconds. This is a screen shot.

iPod Social Story

He kinda laid there in the bed on his side and read it, looking rather thoughtful about it. After about a minute of motionlessly staring at it, he finally got out of bed and on we went.

Social stories don’t work that well or at all for some kids, at least not without a lot of practice. There’s often a disconnect, especially early on, where the child doesn’t make the connection that the story has a direct relationship with what’s going to happen in their lives.

When we were part of a research study last year, they sent us an illustrated social story booklet about what would happen during our visit. The J-Man loved reading it, but seemingly had no inkling that it was any different from the books he normally reads nor did he show that he made any connection between the story and the research study building when we got there. But that seems perfectly normal. Social stories take practice to integrate into daily life. I have for a long time viewed social stories as a neat idea and worth experimenting with, which we did, but not terribly applicable to our lives. Boy has that changed now.

We’ll keep you posted.

Anyone have experience with social stories that you want to share?

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How We Finally Got Through a Trip to the Store

by Tim on May 13, 2011

One of the ongoing problems we’ve had here that we’ve felt most depressed about has been our J-Man’s fear and loathing of most stores and many public places in general. This began about a year ago when he had a full-blown panic attack at Target, a place we’d been to countless times previously. We tried for months to figure out whether there was something about that specific trip that bothered him or just something in his development, and we couldn’t come up with anything. We tried going back a couple more times not long after that particular ‘adventure’, and each trip resulted in the same panic.

We had no idea what to do. He typically would consent to being carried in my arms, but we can’t shop like that. That’s doubly not an option when you have two kids. I did actually carry him into the mall several months ago in order to go to Stride Rite to find him some shoes. He desperately needed shoes (and he needs the wide shoes we can only find at Stride Rite), and I couldn’t think of any other way to get through it. I felt terrible for him, but we had to physically go this time because he’s an oddball width, and we needed to try specific shoes to see what would fit him. Let’s just say it was so difficult that I pulled several muscles in my back and prayed we’d never have to go again. (To Stride Rite’s credit, they were very patient and understanding with him.)

We went through some rough phases last year in general, and this could have played a large part in all the anxiety around public outings. But these misadventures made us very reluctant to try again both because it was clearly such an awful experience for him and we didn’t know what to try to help get us all through it. So we ended up doing most of our errand-running while he was at school, but we never stopped being depressed about all this.

We got to the point where we knew we had to figure this out. We needed some outside help. Cue our developmental therapist and savior.

Recently, we finally progressed far enough along in our county disability services to receive 10 hours of in-home developmental therapy (DT) each week. We worked out a set of goals with our DT, case manager, etc. – some ambitious ones at that – and got started. Not surprisingly, between school all day and DT some afternoons and weekends, this makes for a full calendar for the J-Man. However, he’s handled it well and really thrived with our DT. She rocks!

One of our big goals was helping him be more comfortable in public, particularly in stores and malls. We can go to certain public places if there’s something he likes to do (e.g., go to a park) and there’s not a ton of people or too many wide-open spaces. Otherwise, the potential for disaster is constant.

The reality by this point was that we hadn’t gone to the store as a family in about a year. This has been a real source of sadness for us. We don’t want to put him through things that make him that upset, but we do want to do things together obviously, and he does need to learn how to be in public. So, we set overcoming some of these challenges as one of our major DT goals.

We brainstormed with our DT for probably a couple of weeks about how we were going to try to take him to Target. We decided to go on a weekday when he wasn’t in school and earlier in the day when hardly anyone was in the store. We also chose to set a very modest goal for the first time. We’d structure the trip as much as possible and try to be in and out in less than five minutes. Our realistic goal was just to get in the front door. If we had to turn around and leave at that point, that would be OK with us. We’d try to get further next time. We decided that pretty much anything beyond that would be gravy.

But we structured it as if we were going to do a complete, yet miniature, shopping trip. The J-Man, the DT, Dale Jr., and I all would go to Target, find two things in the store that the J-Man recognizes and likes in some way, put them in our basket, buy them, and leave. We decided to create a little picture schedule on my iPod in hopes he’d understand each step we would take while there. It was a simple list: Go to Target (picture of a Target store), Get cookies (with picture of Chips Ahoy, which he doesn’t eat but likes to hold), Get chicken nuggets (picture of the box of Tyson Breast Nuggets, one of the only foods he’ll eat), Buy them, then Go home. Each time we finished one, we could check it off the list.

We went over all this with him verbally and with pictures before we left home and again in the car before we got out at the store. I had no clear sense whether he understood what I was telling him, and particularly whether he was agreeing to participate, but he had no adverse reaction up to that point. The proof would be when I got him out of the car and tried to put him in a shopping cart. We knew there’d be no way on earth he’d walk on his own in the store at this point.

I carried him from the car to the front door. (Thank God for handicapped parking placards!) We went through the door to where the carts are. So far, so good. I listened – by sound and touch – to his various body signals. I’ve developed a pretty keen sense of when we’re close to him panicking. I felt an increase in his tension, but he seemed like he was hanging in there. So far, still OK.

We tried to put him in the larger kids cart that has a double seat, where presumably he could ride next to Dale Jr. in a seat large enough to accommodate him. No dice, but he didn’t react strongly to it. He offered enough resistance to get his point across but didn’t fight or loudly protest or anything. So we passed on that idea. I then tried putting him in the main part of a shopping basket. Same kind of resistance – enough to get his point across, but no panic yet.

So I tried putting him in the ‘toddler basket’ part of the shopping cart. This is where he used to ride long ago, but he’s outgrown it by quite a bit now. But he was agreeable to this. Instead of riding sitting up with feet through the basket holes like you’re technically supposed to, he rode mostly sideways scrunched up in that part of the cart. He’s probably 15 pounds over the design limit there, and all I could hope for is that they built in some redundancy. We’d gotten this far. We were plowing ahead.

I took out the schedule and we checked off the Go to Target step. Score! Next we went and got the cookies. He took them from me and clutched the bag like he was in a desert and this was the last water on earth, but that was OK. We took out the schedule, checked off the cookies, and I told him it was time to get the nuggets now. Two for two! We went to the freezer section, got the nuggets, I took out the schedule, and checked that off the list. Holy cow, I thought. We’re going to pull this off.

His eyes were darting around some, and I could feel his body tension fluctuating – a sign he’s uneasy but trying and otherwise finding enough to hold his interest to get through this. We went to the checkout line. I went to the lane with the guy I recognized, who we’ll call Redheaded Checkout Dude. I swear you could walk through his lane in a spandex wrestler’s costume screaming out random phrases and he’d be cool with the whole thing. This is a useful attribute to look for in your local store employees. The only minor issue we had was that the J-Man refused to hand over the cookies for the price scanner, so Redheaded Checkout Dude nonchalantly took out his wand scanner with the super long cord and scanned the barcode on the cookies through the J-Man’s protective fingers. Done. I swiped my card, got my receipt, and I took out the picture schedule and said, “All done! Great job! Time to go home!”

I could sense him relaxing a bit. Extracting him from the cart was a bit of a challenge because of how he was wedged in there (which in and of itself likely helped him sensory-wise), but as long as he got to hold on to the bag of Chips Ahoy, he was OK. He kept his death grip on the cookie bag until we got home. I didn’t care what he did with them at that point.

This trip to the store went beyond my wildest dreams. We were speechless. I’m honestly not sure whether the schedule helped a lot, a little, or not really at all. Maybe it was that, maybe it was the passage of time since we last went, maybe he’d grown comfortable enough in his own skin and in the world to be ready. I don’t know. But we did it, and I was thrilled to the point of tears.

That afternoon, I got really ambitious. Dale Jr. was home taking a nap while Mary worked in our home office. So the J-Man and I went by ourselves to Lowe’s to get a couple of random supplies I needed. No schedule this time. If we needed to leave early or not even really go in at all, so be it. I was feeling brave and riding the high from the morning’s success. I was feeling how much I wanted to get back this part of our life together.

Maybe it’s a father-son ritual we’ve somewhat missed out on that’s made me sad for a long time now. But we cruised the store for a while, and he seemed content to look around and take it all in. Again he rode in the shopping cart sideways in the toddler basket. We got the couple of things I needed, paid for them, and left. I felt like I’d won the Super Bowl. Being able to go to the store together – just the J-Man and me – has been really special. We went almost a year without being able to really go out and do much together. Sometimes with the J-Man, one good experience is enough to get him over whatever barriers led him to avoid something before.

When we finally went as a family – all four of us – on our first public shopping adventure in eons, it was a memorable experience. It made us happy to do ‘normal’ family activities, just the basics of life like getting groceries. No big deal to most people, but a very big deal to us.

Next trick is the mall. No real cart for him to ride in there. He might still fit in the jogging stroller – though I doubt it – but there’s no guarantee he’ll even get near that stroller anyway. We’ll attempt to plan something quick and simple there that hopefully will appeal to him in some way and then try the picture schedule again. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Every child is different, but for what they are worth, here are my suggestions for what to try if you are having trouble going anywhere in public and want to take steps toward improving this.

  • Plan in detail a very simple and quick trip to one place (e.g., the grocery store). Keep your goals realistic. As I said above, we picked two – and only two – very familiar grocery items and created a visual schedule of what we planned to do and stuck to it. If you’ve used social stories with your child in the past, this is a great time to use one. If we were able to do everything, the trip would take less than five minutes. You want to create the conditions for success as best you can, and short and simple is the easiest way to do that.
  • Go at a time when the place you’re going to isn’t as crowded. Mid-morning on a weekday if you can work that out seems like the least busy time around here.
  • Have some calming techniques ready if your child does become very anxious. For us, there are certain songs I can hum or sing that will lower his anxiety levels some. These may only buy us a little time, but sometimes that’s all you need. Don’t be afraid to resort to bribery on these initial attempts. It’s better to employ these as you start noticing your child becoming anxious rather than waiting until full panic sets in. At that point, it’s often too late.
  • Have an extra adult with you in case you need backup or reinforcements to help with your child if he/she panics.
  • Build in some reinforcers. We bought items he is familiar with or is strongly attached to. I believe this helped a lot.
  • If your child’s anxiety levels get very high, be OK with leaving and trying again another day. I don’t think just getting through it come hell or high water simply for the sake of doing so helps anybody. Remain as calm as you can. Even though calm doesn’t necessarily beget calm, it certainly is more likely that becoming outwardly frustrated and upset will only increase your child’s anxiety. You want to give your child the best experience you can given the circumstances. A positive, or even tolerable, experience provides reinforcement and hopefully gives you something to build on next time. If your child only remembers it as an awful experience, it only makes it that much harder next time.
  • Don’t give a flip about what other shoppers think. This isn’t about them. I know that’s hard sometimes, but focus as much positive attention on your child as you can. I do think our kids can sense our stress about others around us in public places.
  • Learn from the experience. Whether it went perfectly or just sucked for everybody, make notes about what you tried and what happened. I recommend this for anything you’re struggling with. You can look for patterns and either try to find ways to improve things next time or, by noting what worked, see what techniques you can build on for next time.
  • Don’t give up. Our latest experiment with trips to the store went beyond our wildest dreams. I am not as hopeful about going to the mall given that it’s harder to structure and control. But I am determined to find a way to make it work and for it to become an experience our son is at least OK with. Being in public is an important skill to learn, and we have to find strategies to help our kids with that.
  • Ask for help both in your local community and online. Other parents have been through this, and there are plenty of professionals who can help you look at the situation with fresh eyes and come up with ideas.

Good luck to us all!

Thanks again to Danette Schott at Help! S-O-S for Parents for including this post as part of her May “Best of the Best” feature on anxiety and stress as they relate to invisible special needs, which will be published on May 15, 2011. She’s collected numerous posts from some top-notch bloggers, so make sure you check it out. And while you’re there, make sure you take a look at the previous editions of “Best of the Best”!

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Holy Cow, You’re Two!

by Mary on May 5, 2011

Two years ago on this day, I went into the hospital to be induced with what the nurses were calling a “BIG baby.” When the nurses, who see pregnant women every day, start talking about how big the baby could be, it’s a little startling. Well, the nurses were right, and Dale Jr was a giant baby!

And now, at two, he’s a big boy. He doesn’t really look like a baby anymore – now he looks like a toddler who is really on his way to being a child. The only time Dale Jr looks like a baby now is at night, when I dress him in a sleeper. I do that intentionally, just so I can pretend he’s still little. (We had planned to have pictures made last week or this week, but then the plague crashed the Flashlight household, and all Y-chromosome-owning people were hit very hard. We’re going to try sometime in the next two weeks with the same lady who did our awesome pictures from last year.)

I wrote a comparison piece about the boys when Dale Jr was 3 months old. The differences were startling even then. They are more so now. We see things we have never seen from the J-man. When Dale Jr first picked up a play phone and said “Allo! babble babble babble, OK, bye-bye” I was shocked.

So let me tell you all about this brilliant beautiful boy, who has enough words for several children. Dale Jr wakes up happy almost every day. He likes to wake up and play in his crib with someone popping in every few minutes until he’s ready to get up. He holds his blanket and sucks his thumb, and is peaceful. After I dress him for the day, we go downstairs where he immediately asks for either Rachel (Signing Time!) or Pinky Dinky Doo, although I tell him I get to watch my own show first thing – yay news for old people. He eats something for breakfast, but seems to have some attention deficit issues there – he eats 4 bites of applesauce, then asks for yogurt and has 1/2 of it, then asks for toast and only eats the buttered part… all while asking variously for juice, milk, and/or water. (He doesn’t yet know there are other things to drink in our house!)

When the J-man was little, Tim and I swore we would dance the tango if we ever had to tell a child to be quiet for just a little while. Honey, we need to take some lessons, because Dale Jr can talk and talk and talk. He says his ABCs and counts to 10, and signs a lot of words, and asks for different Signing Time videos by name (NiceDoMeetYou – “Nice to Meet You” – and HappyDayYou – “Happy Birthday to You” – are current favorites). He picks up any handy object and pretends it’s a phone, although he won’t talk into a real phone when he knows someone is on the line. He brings books to us to read, and will point out letters in the words, or will pretend to read the book to us because he has it memorized (OH wonful sounds Misser Brown do). If you sneeze or cough, he says “BessYou” – showing us that he really is listening. The other day I realized I would have to be more careful about my own words when I said something about “stupid people” and while we were in Target he kept saying “stupid people” as we would pass someone. Oops.

The joy that Dale Jr has brought into our lives simply can’t be described. He is the happy-go-lucky child that I don’t think Tim or I ever were. He still takes a nap every day, for which I am so thankful I don’t know what to say. He goes to bed at night with usually nary a peep, and only wakes up during the night if he is sick. People stop me in public to tell me how adorable he is, and all I can say is “Thank you – we think so.”

Every night, before I take Dale Jr up for his bath and bedtime, we do a bedtime routine, where Tim brushes the little guy’s teeth and holds him for a few minutes. We execute the “Family Sandwich” hug we learned from Pinky Dinky Doo. He says “I love Daddy and Mama.” And then he says “Night night Daddy.” And we climb up the stairs for bath and bed… so we can do it all again tomorrow.

Happy second birthday baby. We love you.

Dalejr2

Dalejr3

Dalejr1

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