Take That!

Okay, pardon my journalism major while I paraphrase this post, because I'm old and my memory has holes in it the size of our school district's deficit. This gives you the gist.

My kids sat in the playroom at a small table making crafts. Each one designed a colorful creature using materials from a kit sent by their adoring and generous grandma. I eavesdropped from the kitchen.

Peaches: I'm going to name this guy autism. He's a bad guy!
Rooster: Yeah, autism is a bad guy.
Peaches: Let's punch him in the nose!
Rooster: (Laughing) Yeah, let's beat up autism!
Peaches: Kick him in the face!

Where on earth do they get this stuff?

I interject from the kitchen: Kids, you know people who have autism are not bad, right?

Peaches: We KNOW that. Rooster has autism. But autism is a bad guy!
Rooster: We're going to kick him in the face.
Me: Well, you don't have to like autism. But I don't hate autism. Because I know a lot of people with autism and I really like them.
Peaches: Well, but autism is not good. I mean, the people are good, but not the autism.
Me: Maybe. But punching something you don't like doesn't seem like a good idea. I don't like "beating up" talk. I don't think you should kick people in the face!
Rooster: It's funny!

My husband gets in on the conversation: You know, kids, autism means that your brain works differently from how most people think. That's all.
Peaches: This (holds up creature) is autism, daddy! He's a bad guy so we're going to make another guy who punches him.
Husband: Do you know any people who have autism?
Peaches: Yes! Rooster does. Come on, Rooster, let's play with these guys!
Rooster: Yeah! I want to beat up autism! Kick him in the face!

Priceless

After lunch at Z Pizza yesterday, we passed right by a shoe store. Since apparently someone has been plying Peaches with Miracle Grow, I thought we should duck in and grab her a new pair of kicks that fit. About a month ago, Roo got new shoes, so I had no plans to get him any yesterday. Of course, then he spied the light up shoes with skulls on them, and his sister says, "You HAVE to get those, Rooster, they are so much cooler than your OLD shoes." Thanks, Peach. Suffice it to say, my boy lost his marbles that I would not give in and buy him an extra pair of $50 shoes that he does not need and I find aesthetically abysmal. He cried all the way home and told me about 600 times that he HATES the OLD (more expensive, bought just one month ago, light up, cute) shoes because they stink and he would throw them in the garbage.

I did not back down one centimeter and gave him the same reminders all 600 times. (Not looking for opinions on that one, just saying.) When he threw his shoes in the trash, I made him take them out, apologize, and listen to my speech about appreciation, money, etc...

Cut to this evening. Although I am Jewish and my kids and I light candles, we also have a Hanukah bush and will open presents tomorrow morning in our play room. (Guilt, guilt, guilt.) So I suggested maybe we already have too much stuff and maybe we should do a quick sort and organize. Peach says, "What do we do to organize?" So I suggest we look through our stuff and decide what to keep, what to throw out, and what to give to other people who might need or want the stuff we aren't using.

Rooster appeared engaged in playing with toys. Without missing a beat, though, he looks me right in the eye and says very calmly, "I have some stinky shoes I want to give somebody who wants them. They can HAVE them."

I don't know if that READS funny at all, if you can picture the scene or you had to be there, but I can tell you it took me 10 minutes to breathe again because I laughed so hard it was silent, and the kids looked worried I might keel over.

So, autism. Maybe it causes some perseveration and tantrums here at casa del Rooster. Maybe it gives me worries that keep me up at night. But I think we spit in its eye tonight. Go, Rooster. Go wit, go conversation, go eye contact, go FUNNY, go joint attention, go Rooster, go. Happy New Year!

Pamper Your Chef

Okay, today is the day for you to do some holiday shopping.

http://elizabethaquino.blogspot.com/2010/12/pampered-chef-giveaway.html

If you click the link above, you will see my friend Elizabeth has exciting information about how Pampered Chef shopping can benefit one of the best community building resources out there for families raising special kids, Hopeful Parents. But hurry! Time is almost up!

By the way, I am partial to the stoneware, myself...

Ho ho ho!

Special-ization and Survival of the Fit-ist

As I type, I try to block out my son's screaming tantrum. We rarely sees these ragefests anymore, but they sure bring back old memories. We used to see this nightly. Now we go long enough between them that I can no longer recall when he last turned red as a tomato and slammed every door in the house like this. So you think I'm upset? Frustrated? Angry? I'm not. It's fascinating on so many levels.

First, as he stomps and screams and paces, his sister calls out prudent advice. "Take a deep breath," she suggests. "Do you want me to tuck you back in?" she offers. She modulates her tone of voice. She asks me for guidance. Shazam, my girl returns! Just like we haven't seen the Rooster act out much lately, we also haven't seen that sweet, gentle girl we call the Peach, either.

And I'm fascinated about how these things are coming together.

For a few weeks I've worried and lamented all about Peaches and her inescapable change in personality. She gets in some trouble in preschool, she acts out at home, she seems sensory seeking, she becomes remarkably hyper, she crashes into everything she can find, she puzzles us and her teachers, she gets distinctly LOUDER. Then, a few days ago, I picked her up from after-school care and she hands me a pile of adorable holiday cards she drew. "Thank you!" I cooed. "I love them!" She stares at me and says, "They are not for you! They are for the HELPERS. You have to MAIL THEM." Ah, a clue. On Halloween, we'd said goodbye to the "helpers," our ABA therapists who felt like they lived with us for two years. I begin to wonder if Peaches misses them, misses the structure, misses the attention she got when her brother's ABA included her. Fast forward a few days, and NPR has a story on siblings and why they tend to vary so much in personality. One theory ties in to Darwin, and generally follows the notion of specialization of species. Roo came along first and took the role of Tantrum King, so Peach came along to be Princess Perfect. Well, not always -- Pixie Mama can attest to Peaches not always living up to her name -- but now that Roo is doing much better overall, Peaches has plummeted. And it all makes some sense.

Tonight, before the Rooster flipped out because his daddy denied him some candy, I thought about these recent changes, and I asked Peaches, "How do you feel when Rooster behaves himself better than he used to?" She shrugged and looked down. "Peaches, how do you feel now that Rooster doesn't need helpers anymore?" She shrugged again. "Sweetie, how do you feel when people tell Roo how great he's doing?"

She looked at me. "I'm not doing great?"

Ahhhh. Can't believe I didn't see this all coming.

And then within an hour, the candy rage ensued. And there came my girl out of hiding, gentle and maternal and in charge.

I need to do a better job at balancing my kids' needs. I need to give them both room to specialize in excellence. I need to remember what we learned about ABA and the need for attention. I need to brush up on my Darwin.

The screaming just stopped. We all survived the fit. I call that survival of the fit-ist.

Chapters

We wrapped up a chapter in the book of Rooster's autism, and for us this means we come home at the end of the school day like free citizens. Yes, friends, we have graduated from ABA. For almost two years, I hightailed it from work to pick up each grumpy, noncompliant child, fought my way through LA traffic, and pulled in my driveway to find a therapist waiting for us to start part two of our work days.

When we started, we thought if we got nothing out of ABA but potty training, it would be worth it. We got a lot more than that. Roo learned to tie his shoes. To take turns. To sequence ideas. To stay on topic. To play games. To be a friend.

I can't say ABA did it all, but Friday when I picked him up from school, a little girl with pigtails abandoned her place in the jump rope line to race over and give him a hug before he left. Today we carried on a long and meaningful conversation about why he cannot quit going to his math tutor. And this afternoon he played a great monkey game with me while we got assessed for the next chapter -- AKA social skills classes. Ah, yes. We won't be slowly galavanting home every day all of a sudden. But during the holiday season, we plan to live a little freer, enjoy our newfound ease.

I remember right before we started I told the members of my autism Meet Up group that we had just been approved for 15 hours a week of ABA. "Oh!" several moms remarked. "Well! We will miss you! See you in a couple years!" I am looking forward to seeing them again. They were right. We stopped going to meetups because ABA took all our nights, and we saved weekends for chores, family time, tutoring, and horseback riding. This week, we ate dinner in a restaurant! Like regular families! Friday night I even took the kids to the holiday parade. Ah, to be a bird released from its cage...

I did not love ABA, but I have to say I feel really happy we did it. We struggled significantly more than the family on Parenthood, to be sure, and I longed for the privacy to eat dinner in my pjs once in a while, but ABA gave us some worthwhile tools, strategies and structure. For Roo, the programs did not look like the DTT programs I expected from my limited knowledge of ABA. Mostly, his ABA focused on play therapy. And while he didn't conquer every challenge, he took it as far as he could in the realm of playing with his sister, his therapist, and me every day. Now we're ready to try it with four kids in a social skills class. But get this... social skills is once a week. And. (Are you ready?!) I. Can. Drop. Him. Off.

Peaches has waited almost her whole life for some undivided mommy attention, and as Roo's behavior improved, hers fell apart completely. If she qualified for play therapy too, believe me I'd sign her little self right up pronto, but since her only diagnosis is stubbornness, I'm going to try to work some one-on-one magic with her my own ABA-trained self. I think this could be a good new chapter.

It All Adds Up

I always know when my husband has used the ATM to deposit his paycheck and any reimbursements he got from work expenses. A few days later, a letter comes from the bank. Thank you for the deposit of those checks, the letter says, and here is your corrected math...

Hey, I can't throw stones -- I took only college algebra, reveled in my B, and ran as far from the math building as I could to get my BA.

My boy, with double vision until almost 4, holding his head tilted and turned to help his brain make sense of the world, never had a real fighting chance at number sense with the DNA we gave him. Not that ADHD and autism help much, either. And, can you say, dyscalculia?

Every day, I sneak the same question into a conversation with my Rooster. It's always, in essence, 2+2. Sometimes I make it into a word problem. I've invented a character named Two Head Fred. Guess how many eyes he has? Cookies get involved. Legos. Two for you and two for me. His shoes and Peaches' shoes. Now, of course he is on to me. But in all sincerity, he looks at me daily and says, "2+2? Mom? I don't know? Five? Free?" He can't do TH sounds yet either.

Yes, yes, we have the Touch Math curriculum. Sure, sure, we've tried songs about math. Oh, of course we bought the stuff from Melissa and Doug. Absolutely I have Unifix cubes. What do you mean did we get a tutor? You betcha. YouTube? Watch it. Gotta love School House Rock. My husband bought a supply of nuts and bolts to use high interest manipulatives in patterning and sequencing practice. But so far, it ain't adding up for Roo. "Um, one? Seven?"

Sometimes I panic. Sometimes I lose patience. (Yes, me.) Sometimes I freak out. Sometimes I get lazy and let things slide.

Here is what works best, if not for Roo, then for me: I look back at the Pile. You know, the documentation. The assessments. The report cards. The lists. The bad reviews, as it were. I remind myself that we had days when we wondered if he could GO to school. You know, as in handle a day? And I thought he might be going to the prom un- potty trained for a while there. And reading, which has a LONG WAY still to go, came a long, long way in the last few months. Today my boy and his sister built a castle out of pillows and only fought about half the time that they laughed and conversed. Today Roo and his dad cooked gfcfsf corn dogs, and Roo wrote down his version of the recipe. Today I am reminding myself: all will be revealed in time. Don't go miscounting the chickens just yet. I mean, what works best for me? Keeping in mind that everything is relative. What works best for me today is this: If dyscalculia turns out to be our biggest problem, life could be worse.

It's November and I am thankful. You can take that to the bank.

Baby Talk

You are a big baby.

No, don't take it as an insult. I'm a big baby too. Proudly.

It's like Sandra Cisneros says in her wonderful book of vignettes called the House on Mango Street. "What they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one... Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree truck or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other."

So I for one want people to remember that sometimes I'm a baby, a teenager, a bride, a middle-aged mama, all at once; I am determined to remain more mindful that those around me are needy preschoolers, gawky tweens, ambitious college kids, even when their years outnumber mine, because it helps me remember our humanity. I am tired of my own intolerance toward people, and I am exhausted of the intolerance I witness. We tend to talk about children like they are sacred members of society but only until they become adults. What then? Yes, I see children as sacred. And the children you and I once were did not die, we simple grew our onion skins around them, some layers thicker than other; we too should respect the sacredness of one another.

I write this on election night, as I watch malicious slander turn democracy into a competition of who you most want to vote against, a contest of the lesser evils. For once I found myself almost able to imagine not using my rights and exercising my responsibility to go to the polls. Almost. (But my inner adolescent caved to the peer pressure on Facebook, the little girl in me listened to my grandma's voice inside my head, and my six-year-old self needed to wear that "I Voted" sticker to school today.)

I write this after overhearing one educator completely out of patience with a peer, disparaging their colleague in a way they would never treat a child in their classroom. If they heard their students speak in a like manner, they'd pull out some social stories and teach some important lessons!

Don't get me wrong, I espouse the idea, "You ought to be old enough to know better." Adults should act like adults - responsible, knowledgeable, reliable - and adults should face consequences for childishness. But by that same token, self-centered name calling IS childishness. Petty bickering, tug-of-war selfishness IS childishness.

All I'm saying is that, as adults, we can talk until infinity about the importance of inclusion in schools, anti-bullying measures in high schools and colleges, and friendship circles for kids, but we err when we think the cutoff for those needs comes at age 13 or 18 or 21. We (and I mean me, too) need to respect the feelings and the value of each and every person, big babies or small.

I am a big baby, and I endorse this message.