Dr. Seuss’s Birthday! B, B, B!
We’d be seriously remiss if we didn’t mention that today is the birthday of the great Dr. Seuss. We feel forever in his debt because books like the ABC book, There’s a Wocket in My Pocket, Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? were some of the most essential pieces of the J-Man’s early learning. We found them indispensable in motivating him in his speech and reading work. Many of his early sounds and very likely much of his early reading skills and knowledge of the alphabet came from these Seuss books.
I have the ABC book memorized still. I spent many a day calming him down by reciting it and little by little letting him try to fill in a sound or word whenever I paused. After a long while, we could do the whole thing together. He’d say the next syllable, and then I’d say it, all the way through. We could do this without the book, both of us repeating it from memory like a liturgy. Really, that’s pretty much what it was for us.
So, Theodor Geisel, we thank you and honor you for everything you mean to our family and millions of others around the world.
by Tim on October 2, 2009
My health has just been for crap lately, so crawling out from under my self-pity and general groaning – which I’m not good at in general – has required some serious conscious effort on my part.
Thankfully, the J-Man has his ways of snapping me out of it with yet more astonishing new things he’s achieved lately. His last two weeks at school this quarter – which ended a week ago – were like a quantum leap forward for him. His progress at school has been extraordinary, and it seems like every day at home yet another new beam of light comes shining out from him.
As I noted one of today’s great achievements, I got to thinking about all his recent accomplishments and newly-developed skills. I decided to start trying to write them down so I could both celebrate them and snap myself out of my self-indulgent funk. So, here are a handful.
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In our last IEP goals recap from last quarter, the J-Man had a great nine weeks overall and showed great gains. This past quarter just ended last Thursday, and our little superstar continues to make great strides toward what we thought were some pretty ambitious goals for this year.
As a refresher for those curious about how we do things around here, the quarterly evaluations are done based on how well the kids are progressing toward meeting their IEP goals for the entire year, and then they’re assigned an evaluation code based on the following scale:
1 – Insufficient progress to meet IEP goal by end of year; below expected mastery of goal at this point in the year
2- Skills are emerging; mastery of goal is still inconsistent; student needs support to meet goals
3 – Consistent progress toward goals; on track to meet annual goal
3* – Consistent progress toward goals + some evidence of application and independence (Not sure why they need another 3 score here, but whatever. “Application and independence” are definitely two words we like.)
4 – Annual goal has been mastered; able to generalize the skill independently in multiple settings.
As I mentioned last time, don’t ask me why they felt the need to add a 3* in between 3 and 4 rather than just fix the scale to begin with. But anyway…
We rounded the halfway mark of this year early in March, so in light of that, his progress toward goals he has a few more months to meet is awesome.
Here are those categories and all the great stuff he’s been up to lately.
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We haven’t posted much lately partly because of being endlessly sick, but partly because we’re starting to become more and more conscious of the enormity of the next phase of our lives. I know this is not really breaking news, but the idea that the baby is coming soon (like 7 weeks! or so…) is finally starting to sink in. We live so in the moment around here that anything not happening in the next 24-36 hours has almost no meaning for me.
This past weekend, we went out of town on what – barring some emergency – will be the last trip we take before the baby is born. I guess it’s the idea of knowing that something is the last anything before the baby is born that makes it more real. Perhaps it’s that it gives time some definition and clear edges, like I said, something that doesn’t happen much in our hour-by-hour world.
Mary and I have this running thing on long car trips that we’ll think about baby names to pass the time, but for the most part until now it’s been a car game like “I Spy” or “License Plate Bingo”. Now we’re at the point where we really do need to pick a name. We’re down to under a half dozen first names, with a likely candidate emerging. I find myself saying the names out loud, letting my voice get used to the possibilities and seeing how I feel when I say them.
With that being our last trip, it started me thinking about how on earth we’re going to travel on our next trip – whenever that will be – now with two kids given how getting out of town now with just one feels like it takes 10 people and an act of Congress. What feels like a sea of little questions fill my head and stress me out more and more. Which side of the back seat do we put the J-Man on and which side will the new baby ride on? With the J-Man, one of us rode in the back with him on long car trips. Now, we won’t be able to. How will he react to a baby back there? How will the baby do with neither of us back there?
It’s hard enough for the J-Man to be away from home and the routine and the things he’s familiar with, though he does better and better it seems with each trip. We can now tell how much he tries to understand new situations by relating them to situations he’s already experienced. This is a very helpful skill for him to learn, but knowing that’s what he is doing is actually somewhat anxiety-making for me. I have a much better idea of what he’s thinking we’re doing even though that’s not what we’re really doing, because he’s trying to make sense of something new with something familiar. It’s his confusion that I feel stress about.
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And welcome finally to Part 3! This is the continuation of our series “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now?”, a journey through what’s happening these days in the life of our autistic 3 1/2-year-old son and sequel to our very popular original article, “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?”. I meant to write this sooner, but illness has swept through the Flashlight household and rendered us all pretty useless this week.
If you haven’t already, go back and read Part 1 and Part 2.
I’m calling this group “Moderately Present” as these things are generally more common than not around here, but not as prevalent as the “Significantly Present” group from before. As with the previous posts, some of these are challenges for us and others are just things that are part of our day-to-day life. None of these are meant to be value judgments, just information about what one autistic toddler is like so you can perhaps see similarities in your own children or learn more about how these things are part of another family’s life.
I’ll be dividing this group into two parts. So we’ll finish this up in Part 4 soon.
Note: Wherever you see “DSM-IV” below, this means that attribute is part of the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition or DSM-IV. In medical terms, a specific combination of those DSM-IV criteria is what brings about a diagnosis of autism.
Same obvious disclaimer as before: We are not advising you on how to evaluate your child. Go get them evaluated by professionals with extensive experience with autism. Don’t just rely on some random people on the Internet – namely, people like us.
And here we go!
Characteristics That Are Moderately Present
Fixation or attachment to a particular object or parts of objects (DSM-IV; hard one to nail down for us) – For some, this manifests itself as obsessive-looking hoarding and organizing of objects. You might also see this as what seems like excessive fascination about a particular object (looking at a particular train for a long time or staring at a ceiling fan) or part of an object (a spinning wheel on a car).
The J-Man is all over the map on this one. It has gotten more noticeable over time, but I wouldn’t call anything he does here a major issue. The object(s)-of-the-day rotate regularly through an array of toys. For the longest time it was wooden blocks. Then it went to pieces of his farm animals puzzle, and then on to flash cards, and then wooden numbers, and then stuffed animals (which was cause for much rejoicing actually!), and then plastic food, and then randomly back through the order, occasionally mixing in some other things.
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by Tim on February 22, 2009
This is Part 2 of our series “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now?”, a journey through what’s happening these days in the life of our autistic 3 1/2-year-old son and sequel to our very popular original article, “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?”.
Note: Wherever you see “DSM-IV” below, this means that attribute is part of the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition or DSM-IV. In medical terms, a specific combination of those DSM-IV criteria is what brings about a diagnosis of autism.
Same obvious disclaimer as before: We are not advising you on how to evaluate your child. Go get them evaluated by professionals with extensive experience with autism. Don’t just rely on some random people on the Internet – namely, people like us.
If you haven’t already, go back and read Part 1. If you have, let’s continue on!
Characteristics That Are Significantly Present (continued)
Difficulty with social awareness (a bit better but a lot to work on) – I don’t know whether this has an official meaning, but I think of social awareness in a very broad sense as being aware that there are people around you and that they can be engaged with at some interpersonal level. For some time, we referred to other kids in the room as ‘part of the furniture’ as our son didn’t interact with them much differently than any other object in the room.
School has helped him in this regard in that he has regular time every school day with the same children and is involved in activities with them on an ongoing basis. You still get the sense that he’d usually be content without them, but often the emotions of an autistic toddler are inscrutable.
He does enjoy watching other kids do funny things, but watching rather than playing with children is one of those possible signs of autism, and this is a fairly accurate description of where he is right now.
That said, it is nice to see that he’s aware that other people have names, and he can use a name to refer to a person, though usually now that’s only with some prompting.
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