by Tim on December 9, 2009
We wanted to write a public note to say thank you. Thank you to all of you who recently have left such thoughtful comments on our posts or have e-mailed us to share your stories, experiences, and feelings of solidarity in our common parenting journey. We have been touched by the depth of your responses, your encouragement, your amazing insights, and your love for your children.
We’ve been so lax in responding to you, and for that we apologize. We’ve spent many a day waking up, going 100% all day long in hopes of just getting everybody through it, and then crashing at night. We’ve spent a lot of time recently focusing on starting over on many of our approaches to daily life and how we manage everybody’s needs in the house. And the good news is that we finally feel like we’re making progress.
The downside still is that so many other things got dropped in the middle of all this that we’ll be digging out for a while. But, it feels like we’re starting to move forward again, and that helps.
We just wanted you all to know how thankful we are for all your caring, kindness, honesty, commitment, and support.
May your holidays be filled with peace and hope.
by Tim on October 24, 2009
I know it’s been a long while since we posted something. For the most part, family life itself has been no more crazy than it usually is, but there are some areas in our lives that we know we need to make some changes in. The effort this is taking – and will continue to take for a while – has been exhausting. I think all this will result in our lives being much more like we want them to, but right now we’re just spent.
Sorry if this is a bit vague and cryptic. Nothing bad is happening, so don’t worry. It’s more that we’re making some significant lifestyle changes that will hopefully allow us to focus more on the kids, projects that are important to us, and autism advocacy both for the J-Man and for kids and parents everywhere.
I’m feeling very positive about what I think is going to come out of all this, and see this time more as growing pains than anything else. While the specifics of some of what we’re envisioning are still percolating, my excitement about it is keeping me moving forward through all the transitional stress.
We thank everyone for all of your thoughtful comments lately. We’ve been reading and enjoying them, though obviously we’ve been slack about responding. We appreciate each and every one of you and the comments you write! And we hope to catch up soon!
We should (hopefully) be resuming what passes for our normal programming in the very near future. Thanks!
Here’s an odd fact about our site. Over the last couple of months, more people come to our site on Mondays than any other day – by a wide margin. I can look at the site statistics graph and see it peak like crazy every Monday.
Things like that fascinate me for some reason. If you’re like me, the weekends are utter chaos and you spend Monday – when presumably you might have a little more free time – trying to figure out how it all went so wrong. Maybe your child is back in school or preschool – after one of those crazy weekends where everyone is off schedule – and it’s a good day to look some things up.
So, do you do more autism research online on Mondays? If so, why? Maybe there are some useful insights in here somewhere. Of course, maybe this only interests me. 
OK, I’ve pretty much been a ‘what the heck is the point of Twitter?’ person for a long time. I think I’ve finally found a useful purpose for it. Many friends and family keep up with the daily goings-on at our house via my Facebook statuses (statii?), which 99% of you would never see, however. It’s a whole lot easier for me to post a couple of random lines there than to write a blog post in the chaotic days we’re in around our house right now.
So, I got to wondering whether it would be helpful to anyone out there to get a Twitter-style glimpse into the lives of parents with an autistic toddler. Assuming we are anywhere near what passes for ‘average’ for that kind of parent, you might get a representative sample of the ups, downs, struggles, celebrations, frustrations, etc. we experience – a couple of sentences at a time. If nothing else, I promise you’ll see a lot more of our daily roller coaster that doesn’t make it up to the blog, sorta like Both Hands and a Flashlight Unplugged.
This is a total experiment, and it may involve me tweeting to myself. (OK, that sounds bad. Moving on…) But I have a Twitter update app on my iPrecious that lets me update the Twitter page in about 30 seconds from just about anywhere (i.e., I don’t have to be sitting here at my computer concurrent to being free of screaming children), so it’s a fairly easy experiment.
Anyway, you can see the most recent handful of tweets on the right-hand column of this page. (Yeah, I know the text formatting currently sucks; I’ll fix it sometime soon.)
To visit our Twitter page, go to http://www.twitter.com/autismparents. Not surprisingly, we (it’s listed under me, but we are a we around here) are ‘autismparents’ on Twitter, so follow us or do an @autismparents and tweet us!
(Still sounds a little personal to me, but that’s what being in your mid-30s does to you.)
If you visited the site this morning (and probably late last night), you likely noticed that the whole site had imploded. We were moved to a new server, and in the process something broke. I still haven’t figured out what it was as in the midst of my own troubleshooting, it just started working again. I’d like to claim credit for that, but not sure I can.
Anyway, you may find that some things are borked around here today. Sorry about that. This affected some of my other sites too, so it’s been a fun morning…
by Tim on February 23, 2009
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