by Tim on February 12, 2009
This may be the most bizarre toy behavior I’ve ever seen.
The J-Man usually picks a couple of letters or numbers to be his favorite for a given length of time (for a day or two, most of the time). Recently, he settled on two particular numbers while playing with his LeapFrog Clickstart keyboard. So, like many kids who perseverate on things, he’d press the buttons for those numbers many (many) times in a row. The computer/TV would say them back to him, you’d see them on the screen, and from time to time he’d say them along with it.
One of the games on it he likes is Type Time, which basically just lets you type letters and numbers as much as you want. Well, not quite as we discovered.
On the day in which I discovered this mind-boggling ‘feature’, one of those numbers was ’7′. The other was, well… you’ll see. And you’ll see exactly what the Clickstart won’t let you do.
[This is a video of me (well, my hand at least) with the keyboard and TV both visible so you will see that I'm not making this up. You may have to bump up the volume a bit. Sorry the picture quality isn't super.]
[click to continue…]
by Tim on November 11, 2008
After several serious posts and two days of croup in the house (thankfully getting better thanks to an armada of humidifiers), let’s take a break and find something fun to play with.
So I give you, The Muppet Whatnot Workshop courtesy of FAO Schwarz. Believe it or not, you can actually buy whatever bizarre muppet you devise, but creating your own franken-muppet is absolutely free.
Consistent with the mood we’re in around here, I made Bert’s evil doppelganger.
Back to normal programming tomorrow assuming the croup goes away. Be gone foul Croup!
by Tim on August 24, 2008
The Surfer’s Healing day camp is a highly-acclaimed, insanely-popular surf camp for children with autism. Everybody who has done it has given it rave reviews. We’re obviously not ready for such an adventure, but I keep hearing about it from parents here, so I was glad to see them do a piece on local TV about them. It’s so popular that getting a spot is very difficult and they’re already booked up for the season, but I wanted to mention it anyway just because I’m so impressed with their vision.
(Click here to read the piece, or click here to see the video of the TV spot. – Note: Will definitely make you all teary.)
The program was started by Izzy Paskowitz, whose own son is autistic. He saw how surfing did such wonderful things for his own son and got the idea to spread this gift to other children. He’s interviewed in the video, and you can tell how big a heart he has. He has the face of someone who has tapped into something amazing. It makes me feel better just knowing people like that exist in the world.
For parents of autistic children, many days are difficult. We know we’d bear anything and do whatever it took to give our children a really great day. Most parents we know of ‘typically developing’ children don’t really understand what that means to us. We watch our children struggle bravely through every challenge, and all we want is one day where these challenges fall away for a while and nothing but joy pours out of them.
You can see the faces of the children and the parents in this video, and one thing is clear – this was a really good day.
