[Many good things have been happening at Chez Flashlight in the last 24 hours. Mary decided to make S'mores last night, and we have a guest poster! The expert commenter known as Gigi and her daughter Stephanie are about to wow you with some brilliant, valuable advice about Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).

Gigi is a retired special needs teacher and guidance counselor of 31 years. Stephanie is a speech language pathologist (SLP). So you know you're getting top-notch information here. We're honored to have you two post this. Thank you!! - Tim]

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If someone has not yet given you a copy of your rights through IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), ask for a copy, which they are required to give you. This is your bible and you should never attend an IEP meeting without it. Here is a link to download the most recent (2007) pdf format Resource Guide for Parents. Other IDEA highlights are noted throughout.

Although IDEA is federal, every state is required to have a Protection and Advocacy system. Check for yours at the national website at www.napas.org.

You have a right to see all the assessment results and meet with the assessor(s) BEFORE the first IEP meeting so you have time to absorb it and get questions ready.

Educators are famous for turning everything into acronyms (see IDEA above and many others below) and use them as if everyone knows what they all mean. If you don’t, ASK!! Every 5-8 years or so, all the “label names” are changed to more politically correct ones, so just as soon as you learn them, they’ll all change. Personally, I think they do this just to screw with us.

Follow your gut. If something sounds fishy or not quite right, it probably isn’t. Ask questions, make requests in writing to keep the IEP team accountable, and don’t take no for an answer the first time. You might even tape record the meeting to keep everyone on their toes. Some IEP teams will be pretty ticked off by this and there may be much eye-rolling. Smile and insist. Remember – they may be the education experts, but YOU are an expert on your kid!

If you request a particular service and are told it is not possible or that your child does not qualify for it, stand firm. Request the assessment for that supports the need for the service you request. If the results don’t jive with what you think your kid needs, you have the right to request an IEE (Independent Education Evaluation) provided at PUBLIC EXPENSE. Again, make that request in writing.

The primary goal of the IEP meeting is to place your kid in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE). This is especially important if full or partial inclusion in a regular classroom is likely and/or desired. Optimally, full inclusion with modifications should be the initial goal, working back to more restrictive options as needed. MEASURABLE goals and objectives should be written BEFORE placement is determined. In fact, it should shape how placement is determined. Modifications can range from providing an aide to providing visual cues, speech therapy, etc.

As I read through this list, it struck me that most of these tips either hint or scream at an adversarial relationship with the school district. Let me hasten to point out that most school districts really do the right thing, really have your kid’s best interest at heart and are really there to help you. They have been through this process many, many times before, to the point where it sometimes seems rote or rubber stamped. You may only need to gently remind them that although this is their 1,648th IEP, it’s your first. Knowing your rights is your responsibility to your kid, nonetheless.

(This is Stephanie talking now-Gigi’s daughter, the SLP).

The only things I have to add is regarding the specific goals/objectives, etc. More than likely they will be written before the meeting. If you don’t agree, want to add more, etc, it may seem time consuming and you may need to meet again, but it is possible.

Also, you mentioned that you were concerned about how to make the skills that J-man is showing (i.e. naming letters, colors, etc) into functional goals for the IEP and how to generalize them to naming other items. I may be totally off on this, but I do believe this is fairly common with kids with autism. I think it has to do with the fact that letters, colors, numbers are considered “rote” naming or rote memory and that naming other objects is more of “labeling”. I can’t remember the reason behind it, but the teachers will probably be familiar with this type of learning and memory and will help to incorporate that into his goals. AND those skills are very functional for a pre-school classroom, so it should all go hand in hand.

About AAC devices (augmentative and assistive communication), I know that the IEP process is different in each state, however I do believe that every IEP has a section that asks about assistive communication evals, or have all appropriate evals be completed (may not specifically say AAC). You can have that sections checked and then they are required to do an AAC eval (separate from the typical speech eval, etc.

As far as the actual eval and devices, I would recommend that several devices be tried out with J-man before anything is chosen. There is a TON of different types, software, vocabulary that should be looked at to figure out which one would best suit him. I know that some companies will even rent them out to see if they work for a specific child. I know that this is a long process and you may get frustrated, but keep with it if it’s what you feel is best for him. PLEASE feel free to ask me any other questions!!

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.

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?

As we develop this hybrid of therapy work for us to do at home in between J-Man’s work with his therapists and his time at school, we have been drawing a big blank on one critically important piece of the puzzle. I call it ‘reward pellets’.

The concept comes basically from how they train animals. They do something right, they get some sort of reward. Often, it’s a food pellet.

This may sound completely silly in a conversation about autistic kids, but it’s an important part of the structure and motivational processes needed to keep moving forward. The more you talk about this stuff, the more it sounds like training a schnauzer. But, it is what it is, and you get over it eventually.

If you have an autistic child, this probably isn’t news to you. In certain instances, if your child completes a new task, responds to your question, names an object for the first time, or something along those lines, you’ll give them a special treat or reward of some kind. We tend not to do this quite as often as some therapies lean toward, but we do have “you’ve worked hard, you’ve earned X” as part of the equation.

As part of the home classroom work we’re devising, we’re coming up with a system of ‘picture scheduling’, a way of using visual cues of some sort to illustrate how we’re going to sequence something, whether it be daily activities or the classroom tasks we’ll be doing for that ’session’.

For example, on his desk, we now have three (or four for lengthier sessions) colored shapes (red heart, green square, blue circle, plus yellow star for the fourth) in a row across the top of the desk. Next to him (on his left) is a bookshelf with three (or four) open-top plastic bins with those same shapes in the same order.

Our goal will be to get him to remove the first shape from his desk (red heart) and match it with (stick it on) the red heart on the bin (it’ll stick on with the velcro), do the activity in the bin, put it back in the bin, put the whole thing in the ‘done basket’ (a large clothes basket on the floor), then move on to the next shape and activity, and so on until we’re done.

[I'll get around to posting a picture of this soon.]

Here’s the missing link. At the end of the row of shapes is (or should be in our case) a picture of the ‘reward’ (also known as a ‘reinforcer’ or ‘reinforcing object’ I think). For some kids it might be a picture of an M&M or a favorite toy or something. The idea is that it should be something special and not otherwise part of the classroom routine.

Our main problem? J-Man isn’t really attached to any toy, food, or anything else for that matter. He’s really attached to us, but it’s not like we’re going to reserve hugs for rewards or something.

Our partial solution is to use pictures of his favorite TV shows. When he completes all the tasks, he gets five minutes of a show. This means we have to cue up the DVR to the right place beforehand so that it will just show five minutes and not abruptly end mid-show. Easy enough, though. The hope is that this whole cycle will take about 15 minutes - 10 for the activities and 5 for the ‘reward’ - with the goal of completing four cycles in a row (or an hour total, however that works out). I’m not real jazzed about using TV for this purpose, but we’ve been low on options.

If the end of those activities mean the end of the classroom time for a while (i.e., we’re off for a couple of hours), the picture could be of his swing set, which is NOT something we could do for five minutes without inciting a riot. Plus it’s getting so hot that our ability to use it will get limited soon.

That brings us to our latest discovery, which may very well be the reward we were looking for.

Going on the “keyboards are the best things since cheese toast” revelation, we discovered the LeapFrog ClickStart My First Computer. It’s a regular QWERTY keyboard like ours (he would have noticed if it wasn’t) and the games included on the console can be simplified enough that all he really has to do is sit there and type. Letters appear, it names letters out loud, and generally fun things happen. We think it’s cute.

He thinks it’s so great he’s almost beside himself.

Yay!

To make sure he doesn’t just use it to zone out, we sit there and ask him to type a particular letter (he may or may not), encourage him to try various parts of the keyboard (he’s pretty fixated on ‘K’ because he recognizes it and he can say it), and generally be there to be interactive. He also was getting very excited, which results in lots of hand flapping and general overload, so we’re there to do the normal stuff we do to help him stay centered (deep pressure, massage, singing, etc.)

The obvious question is, if it makes him do that and you have to center him, why do it? Mostly because his best learning takes place in a certain zone (we call it the ’sweet spot’) where he’s not too over or under-stimulated. Under-stimulation is just as stifling to his ability to do anything as the overload is. He can zone out or get overloaded in just about any activity. The ones he’s really excited about do make it hard for him to settle down, but that’s part of the process of things he needs to learn. By being there and being interactive (and not letting him drop out or go into his own world with it), we turn it into a quality activity.

Anyway, looks like Leap Frog has provided our ‘reward pellet’ for now.

Question for the masses, particularly those whose kids are attached to very few things - how do you handle the reward thing?

With some regularity, conversations come up about what ‘autistic stuff’ J-Man does and doesn’t do. I know some of these are stereotypical traits, but many of these come out of evaluations and the various ways we’ve tried to figure out his diagnosis.

So for the benefit of our readers who are wondering whether their kid is similar to ours, here’s a description of him and what he does, kinda does, or doesn’t really do. We’ve been recompiling this for his upcoming (re-)evaluations and preschool/IEP stuff, so we thought we’d share.

Obvious disclaimer: This isn’t a substitute for having your child evaluated. You are parents and you know your child better than anyone. If you suspect there might be a problem, trust your intuition. We are not advising you on how to evaluate your child. Go get them evaluated. Don’t just rely on some random people on the Internet. You’re smarter than that.

Reminder - he’s a bit over 2 1/2 years old. A doctor (psychologist with a bazillion years of experience at evaluating kids) diagnosed him with an autism spectrum disorder. He said that at J-Man’s current age, labeling him with “mild”, “moderate”, or whatever wasn’t terribly useful and likely to be inaccurate. He’s also been diagnosed with sensory processing (or sensory integration, depending on who you talk to) issues, apraxia, and motor planning issues, among other delays.

Significant issues he has:

• Severe speech delay - Obviously, yes. We figure he’s going on 18 months behind. The belief is that he has apraxia, which isn’t at all unusual in autistic kids.
• Communication problems - Struggles to communicate in other ways, too; sign language, etc. isn’t in his repertoire. Unless he can pick it up and bring it to you, he has a very hard time asking for things. He also will use your hands to do stuff rather than his own, which is something we discovered is a characteristic of autism.
• Rarely points at what he wants - That’s pretty self-explanatory. He tends to use much more broad movements, which are very difficult to figure out.
• Hand/arm flapping - Flaps his arms when he gets excited or overstimulated. Primarily he does this in the car (the moving scenery apparently is too much for him to take in) and in places like the store (especially ones like Target that are bright, busy, and red). It’ll also happen if he’s watching some TV show that gets him excited. Interestingly enough, he usually looks happy while he does it. The suspicion is that this is a lot of ’sensory overflow’ and doing this helps him order and calm his system.
• Learning problems - We don’t know cognitively where he is because he’s hard to engage in those sorts of activities, but he definitely does way better at puzzles and things like that when he’s calmer. We suspect he knows a lot more than he’s shown.
• Eye contact - Pretty poor, but it seems to be getting better lately. We can get a few seconds of it with people he knows well, not so much with strangers. He definitely is better with this when he feels pretty balanced sensory-wise.
• Sensory problems - Oh yeah; feeding, vestibular, proprioceptive are the biggies. We’ve known he’s had sensory integration issues since forever, and they still affect him a lot. The last couple of days he’s taken up sucking his shirt to soaking again. Yuck! He still loves exaggerated movement (throw over your head, swinging outside, bouncing on the exercise ball) and seeks out deep pressure (big hugs, firm back pressure). He also sleeps wedged in the corner of his bed and was a total swaddle baby. He finds sticky or slimy stuff on his hands really icky (finger paint = yuck). He dislikes most food textures, and will gag at ones he really hates. He’ll sometimes gag when he’s sensory overloaded regardless of what negative sense it is.
• Seriously picky eater - Eats just about nothing except toast, chicken nuggets, crunchy stuff like chips, and purees. He also has some reflux, but that’s minor at this point so I doubt it affects much here. No other GI issues have been indicated.
• Lack of imaginary play - He doesn’t really engage any of his toys in this way; he can be playful with others but I wouldn’t really call it imaginary, nor would I call his play with his peers consistent or much like what you’d expect for his age. His level of play is very cause-and-effect, meaning he presses some button and the toy does something back at him. It’s a much more literal way of interacting, which is another common autistic trait.
• Social awareness - He usually doesn’t acknowledge other kids in the room, but he’s pretty good with adult women (he’s pretty flirty). At preschool, he’s typically off doing his own thing.
• Joint attention - The fancy term for wanting to share with you something he finds very interesting. Example: Child sees a car, picks it up, shows it to you, and then looks at the car and then at you to make sure you are seeing it with him. J-Man does this very rarely, which is another characteristic of autism.
• Responsivity to order in learning - This isn’t so much an issue as it is a common strategy for autistic kids, but he responds very well to doing his ‘learning work’ in an orderly environment, at his little desk, doing specific tasks, without a lot of distractions. Imposing structure has dramatically helped out with his learning and growth.
• Travel - One or more nights away sucks; in the car is normally fine; he just won’t sleep well at all anywhere else but home - two nights away is pretty much our limit before everyone is sleep-deprived and mental.
• Fine motor issues - He has a very hard time manipulating certain objects; e.g., hard to feed himself with a spoon without a lot of help, though he has made great strides in the last week.
• Motor planning - He has a hard time figuring out how to accomplish many tasks, and only occasionally will successfully do something you ask him to do. If it requires a sequence of more than a couple of steps, he pretty much can’t do it yet. “If you’re happy and you know it stomp your feet, clap your hands, and shout Hooray!” is incredibly frustrating for him. You can see him trying to work out how to do it, but his body won’t comply. Yes, it really pulls at my heart to watch him struggle like that. We’ve wondered whether this has made sign language nearly impossible for him; we’ve been trying for over two years. That said, he has made great strides (literally) in the last week or so in going up and down steps by holding on to a railing or your hand. This is a major leap forward for him.
• Responding to his name - This is sort of borderline to me, but he doesn’t do this that well; it’s not so bad we can’t work with it, though.
• Walks on his toes - Yep, but usually only in short intervals.
• Poor muscle tone in his trunk/core muscles - In his arms and legs, he is as strong as an ox on steroids, speed, and Starbucks, but he ain’t going to be on 8-Minute Abs any time soon. Related stat: I weigh 225 and he has knocked me flat on my butt from standing.
• “Flight Risk” - If you put him down, he’s usually going to take off running. We’d never be able to set him down in a store or a mall. If we did, he’d be off to the races. This happens outside too. It’s exhausting to say the least.

Issues that aren’t too bad:

• Fixation or attachment to a particular object - He was pretty attached to Glo-worm and his Leap Frog caterpillar early on, and now he’s pretty fixated on his piano keyboard and other things that make music, along with some of his books. He can get pretty zoned out on them, but not so bad that you can’t break him away from it with some effort or that he doesn’t get up eventually and go do something else. We do have to sometimes hide whatever it is so we can keep him focused on us enough to do his therapy work when the zoning out gets to be a problem.
• Emotional awareness - He’s pretty good with understanding people’s emotions, especially when people are laughing or are sad.
• Sensitivity to routine - We do keep a routine, but mostly out of habit from back in the days he wouldn’t sleep and because it helps him learn better; we can vary it without any real issues as long as we’re not out of town and as long as we give him some downtime in the afternoon.
• Needing physical order - It’s very important to him to have all the doors closed wherever he is. This is annoying sometimes, but not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I’ve noticed that there are a couple of toys he wants in the ‘right place’, but why these few and not all the others is a mystery to me.
• Sleep issues - Rarely naps anymore but does sleep through the night (12 hours on average); this is SUCH an improvement over the first 18 months when he never slept through and often got up every 2-3 hours.
• Gross motor - He was a very late walker (almost 23 months) so this used to be a real problem, but he’s pretty self-reliant with this now even if he’s still a bit behind. He definitely has his own style, but he rarely falls. Going up and down steps upright (though still with a lot of help) is a recent highlight. There are a lot of steep stairs around, and heights freak him out, so this is a real challenge.

Issues we haven’t really seen:

• Regression - His development has been very slow on various fronts, but he still has steadily improved. We have setback weeks from time to time, but our overall trajectory is toward improvement. He didn’t have a bunch of words and skills and then lose them like some.
• Self-destructive behavior / self-injury - He’s smacked himself in the head a few times, but nothing at all that we’ve worried about. I can’t even remember the last time he did this.
• Uncontrollable tantrums - Never; he does a great job dissipating his frustrations and rarely pitches a fit for more than a couple of minutes. He does some pitiful drama and then we move on.
• Repetitive behaviors - Very little except for the hand/arm flapping.
• Lining stuff up/compulsive organizing - Pretty much never. Our house is often a wreck and he doesn’t seem to care. Like I said before, he has a couple of things that seem to have a ‘right place’, but it’s so minor that it barely registers as anything more than a quirk to us.
• Fixation on orderliness - Doesn’t seem to care if we move stuff around.
• Detachment - He’s very attached to us, loves being with us, and often wants to be held. If you’re familiar to him, he’s very loving. He’s hit or miss about strangers, or even acknowledging that they’re there.
• Aggression - We’ve had it repeated to us several times that an aggressive act is not the same as aggresion. He’s so fidgety sometimes that he can be rough as he rolls all over you rather than sitting still. That said, he hasn’t struck out in anger that I know of.
• As far as we know, his hearing and vision are fine based on previous tests.

Phew. Got all that? We’d love to hear how your child is similar or different from this. They don’t call it a ’spectrum’ for nothing, and there’s so much for all of us to learn. I didn’t even cover a bunch of stuff. If you have questions, feel free to ask!.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

One thing we’ve already figured out is that once you get an autism diagnosis, whatever the secret code is for the Autism Parents Underground Society gets embedded in you like the security tags they use to keep you from stealing stuff from the store. The big positive with that? You start getting helpful information from people who have been down the road you’re on, instead of just getting information about autism from TV, well-meaning friends and family who also got their information from TV, or Tom Cruise.

Our driving principle: Do whatever it takes for J-Man to realize his full potential and be the best little man he can be, but do so armed with all the possible knowledge and wisdom and feedback we can stuff into our brains. This may mean that he ‘loses his diagnosis’ someday, or it may not. Whatever that will look like eventually, we want to help him discover all of his gifts and talents and loves and then express them as far and wide as he can. This means we have a lot of work to do, and there’s no shortcut to it.

You quickly learn that there are a lot of debates in the ‘autism world’ that remind me of philosophical or religious debates where people argue endlessly and stop talking to people who don’t agree with them. It’s like watching another form of religious fundamentalism.

A few people I’ve met are getting more invested in movements and doctrine than their own child. I understand the emotional investment parents have in their children’s improvements - and thank God for it - but right now I find all of this debating a distraction. If you want to argue cures vs. neurodiversity, that’s fine. Just do it somewhere else for right now. None of that means jack to me when my son is flapping his arms like mad in the back seat of the car. Luckily, the number of people I’ve personally come across in this category are in the minority.

We’ve been reading and researching for two years about feeding issues, sensory integration disorder (or sensory processing disorder depending on who’s talking to you), physical therapy, reflux, speech delays, apraxia, and every freakin’ therapy you can think of around them. This has been great practice for discerning what therapies and ‘cures’ for autism have some potential for success and which are pure excrement. The latter looks to be winning in a rout at the moment, but that’s another story.

Thankfully, the anecdotal suggestions from strangers (”We know a parent who had their kid piss into a strong, North wind every morning for a month and got him cured!”) has been pretty minimal so far. We’ve developed pretty good BS detectors, which is one of the most important skills for a special needs parent to have.

I also classify certain therapies under the heading of ‘well, it couldn’t hurt’, so I’ll try some of them even if some seem a little odd. I’ll give serious consideration to many diets, vitamins, or supplements, even though we’ll do a lot of research into them before we dare try them with J-Man. This will likely mean we’ll dismiss ones that seem invasive, dubious, completely unproven and untested, and anything else suspicious.

I’m skeptical of many vitamins and supplements because, with all of my own ‘issues’, supplements have at best made marginal, imperceptible, or no improvements for me. None have caused me any real harm as far as I can tell, so there was no reason not to try many of them. A couple made me sick to my stomach for a couple of days, but that was about it.

There’s a whole lot of stuff in the Whole Foods home chemistry aisle that appears to lack everything but a salesman on a soapbox. You can’t easily tell what really could be helpful and what would be more cheaply achieved by gnawing on an Amazon.com box. Again, you gotta research. There are no shortcuts.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how supplements work, and some of the ones that involve some fringe-sounding stuff may cause problems for little people with developing brains. If they’ve been tested for all of about a day and a half on ten kids, you have absolutely no idea what good it could do, not to mention the possible long-term harm. You have to read, talk to people you trust, read some more, and then decide.

To me, one of the best ways to do your first pass at weeding out options is to look at two pieces of information about these or any other therapies: 1) Has it been tested on a sample size of more than three neighbors’ kids, and 2) has it been around for longer than a five minutes. Not to be overlooked: Does the person advocating it have a financial stake in it? That should eliminate about 3/4 of the possible therapies right there.

Notice I never said, look for studies where the scientists have medical degrees and lots of acronyms after their names. There may be all sorts of correlations between therapies and improvements in autistic kids (we’ll do ‘correlation vs. causation’ some other day), but degrees and acronyms isn’t one of them. I may not know a whole lot yet about therapies specifically for autism, but I’ve been researching everything else for two years and much wisdom and common sense carries over. The biggest difference is that our emotional investment in improvement is even higher than before, and that’s saying a lot.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying none of them work; I think it’s safe to say that some of them do help at least some kids. I’m saying that I begin with healthy skepticism and then work toward being convinced or unconvinced. I’m not sticking any old thing into my kid’s body unless I have some sound evidence that it might help and it won’t hurt. There’s at least a “first do no harm” principle here.

Some therapies really intrigue me and seem worth a try. Music and auditory therapies might work well for J-Man because he’s such a musical kid. I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but my iPod is like my portable therapy device, so I won’t discount the value of it even if I have no clue how it might work for him.

His OT is trained in one kind of auditory therapy so I’m interested in giving it a try. Getting him to wear the headphones might be the hardest part. Again, this falls under ‘it can’t hurt’. Currently, insurance and Early Intervention are financially supporting much of this part of the effort so now is as good a time as ever to try something like that.

It’s that and we’ve learned that we can truly trust his therapists and preschool teachers because they are smart, caring, and always have J-Man’s best interests in mind. If they tell us something is worth trying, we’ll listen. The best thing you can do is develop a network of professionals, family, and friends whose advice you trust and know is sound. They will help you separate the wheat from the chaff better than just about anything.

All this is to say, we’ve learned a lot over the past two years about how to sort out much of the snake oil, ‘breakthrough cures’, and outright loony crap from the stuff that has some reasonable, scientifically-based chance of working. I’ll even go as far as to say that anything that is sold as easy will be struck from my list of things to try. I’ve learned in life that there are rarely any shortcuts.

I wish there was an autism Santa Claus, but I know better. It’s depressing, but I know I have to make my peace with this.

For someone who has been unable to sleep for almost two weeks, feels emotionally spent, and who thinks beer and ice cream sounds like a good dinner tonight, I feel oddly lucid and confident about our ability to differentiate between hope, helpfulness, histrionics, and horseshit. And the fact that I can string four h-words together right now just astounded me.

I know I haven’t talked about education, behavioral work, and the other therapies in the standard repertoire. I feel confident in the approaches we’re already taking and feel like we’re getting great advice on what else to try. I’m less worried about this. Perhaps I’m approaching this by weeding out all the junk first so we can see what our best options are. Distractions are my nemesis, and God knows there are a lot of them here.

And in case this point wasn’t clear - there are no shortcuts.

I read. I read a lot. I mean… a lot. I can’t stop myself from reading if there are words in front of me. I read for work, I read for pleasure, and I especially read because a book is about someone else’s troubles and not mine.

Lately (and by lately I mean the past few years) I’ve really worked on reading books with a strong female protagonist. Usually that means I’m reading either mysteries or fantasy/science fiction. I try my best not to read scary stuff, since I get nightmares from that. I also own a lot of children’s fiction, especially historical fiction. I have learned a lot about living in the 1850s through early 1900s. This is part of the reason that I am the Mary-pedia.

I learn from reading (verbal), and I learn from listening (aural). As an education major in college, I found that most children learn best from those two methods… but that there is a sub-set of kids who learn through body movement (kinesthetics), or music, or from visual stimulation like art.

I wonder… how will Mister Man learn the best? Will his sensory issues stop him from wanting to learn through movement, or will that be the best way for him to learn? Will he be unable to “get” art class because he spends the whole time concerned about getting messy? He loves music… is that the best way to help him remember? (I remember learning specific literature quotations while listening to music, and being able to remember them by just thinking of the song’s melody. Of course, that didn’t amuse the people who sat near me during an exam, because I would unconsciously hum!)

What do you do to escape from life for just a little while? Tim turns on the iPod and tunes out the world. He watches science programs on TV (best when they’re narrated by William Shatner). He used to just stand in the shower, but since we’re in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history… he doesn’t do that anymore! He goes on solitary walks.

Me? I read.