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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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 December 14, 2008
We’ve returned home from another weekend trip that’s left us all pretty much exhausted. It was an action-packed weekend, and we don’t really do ‘action-packed’ very well.
No point going into all those details, but I was impressed with the J-Man on several levels this weekend. One thing in particular was how he’s learned more complex strategies for successfully coping and finding calm when he gets really stressed out. The cousins were so excited to see him, and we had family Christmas early to save us a trip back down for a third time in less than a month at Christmas time.
‘Excited to see him’ usually comes with a lot of understandable volume and activity. At one point while all the cousins were over, the J-Man came over to me, took my hand, led me into Mary’s parents’ bedroom, closed the door behind us, went over to the far side of the bed, and indicated (non-verbally) that he wanted me to sit on the bed and hold him. I was impressed that he came up with this rather complex strategy and set of steps for leading me to a place where he could get the calm he needed. He never had a meltdown or anything. He knew when and where to go to keep his stress from escalating any more.
Later he took me into the kitchen and we had a similar calming session. I took that to mean he didn’t feel like he needed as much separation from the action at that moment, but he knew he needed to be in the other room for a few minutes.
It’s hard to overemphasize how impressed I am that he figured all this out. Ideally, we’d develop some sort of verbal or sign language-based way to communicate how he’s feeling before it gets to this stage, but regardless it really does seem like he knows how to go get what he needs to regroup before it gets unbearable for him. He’s showing he knows how to stay ahead of it, which is a darn impressive and valuable skill to develop.
Now if only some of the adults I know could learn to do the same for themselves!
by Tim on December 9, 2008
Last night I spent a couple of hours at our neighborhood’s more-or-less-annual HOA meeting. Because this public forum for complaining about things in the neighborhood only comes once a year, that’s a lot of griping and moaning to cram into two hours. Surprisingly, there seemed to be quite a bit less of that this year – that or I’m just used to it. We live in a pretty subdued neighborhood, and generally I only get worked up when there are safety problems like people parking all over the place so kids can’t easily see traffic and vice-versa. There are always a small number of people who seem to have nothing else better to do than complain about every minor thing, but that’s how life is everywhere.
I ended up leaving early because it was getting late and the peak of productivity for that meeting – such as those things are – seemed to have long passed by that point. I had meant to be home by the time J-Man would be going to bed, but I misread my cell phone clock and left the meeting late. He had become too tired to stay up any longer, and Mary had already put him to bed so I missed our nighttime routine. This made me sad.
Apparently he had been pretty confused about why I wasn’t there, which also made me sad, though he handled it well. I also missed reading him his nighttime story and doing our little father-son ritual, which is really quite a liturgy of sorts if you think about it, and which also made me sad to miss. And I also missed him trying to read the words on Mommy’s shirt before he went to bed, which also also made me sad.
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by Tim on December 1, 2008
And tonight we get a reminder of why it’s often not the travel that gets you, it’s how the disruption in routine completely ruins sleep patterns for days after you get home.
6:30PM – J-Man is face down on the couch, so Mary brings him up a half-hour early for bath time.
7:00 – After a less-than-ideal, but tolerable, bedtime routine, J-Man passes out in the rocking chair. Mary puts him to bed.
8:24 – Tim has gotten some work done and thinks, I really should go get some dinner finally. This marks the culmination of Tim’s biggest mistake of the evening.
8:25 – J-Man wakes up crying and then screaming.
8:28 – Tim asks Mary to throw a bowl of soup in the microwave and to relieve him in 10 minutes.
8:38 – No chance in hell of sleep happening. J-Man gets mad if Tim leaves room.
8:55 – With still no idea why he won’t sleep and just remains upset, Mommy and Daddy come down to offer him some food or drink in case he really needs them. Refuses both. Tim reheats soup. Mary and J-Man try to rest on couch.
9:05 – Everyone goes upstairs; Mary rocks J-Man; Tim goes back down and reheats soup again.
9:12 – Mary yells down for Tim to get stuff to give J-Man some ibuprofen since no one has a clue what’s wrong. Tim abandons remainder of soup.
9:25 – Clearly nothing is working, so we go to Mommy and Daddy’s bed. J-Man sort of calms down, but keeps tossing and turning. If he wedged himself any farther into Daddy, they’d be conjoined. Mary falls asleep. Tim’s arms fall asleep but the rest of him does not.
10:00 – J-Man seems calm and groggy. Carry him to his room, rock him a while, put him down, whimpers a bit, and finally seems to go to sleep. Tim gives up on soup entirely, makes popcorn, and he and Mary watch the last half of some stupid thing on TV about Barrow, Alaska having really bad weather.
10:30 – Give up on the evening.
Yippee… Guess we should be thankful, though. It used to be much, much, much worse.
