This morning, while I’m sitting at work, I’m watching tweets about the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee meeting fly by on the screen.
The IACC, for those who haven’t been following, is an inter-agency committee that manages the federal government’s response to Autism in the United States. This panel was set up under President Bush (43) as part of the Combating Autism Act of 2006, and was reauthorized under President Obama. Continue reading
All of us have heard the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ at some point in our lives. Mostly, this has been an admonition against eating loads of junk-food, but there is a little bit of credence to the phrase itself on some level.
And of course, as most parents are aware of, kids are a bit less self-regulating on this account. Continue reading
Just so that I don’t have to regurgitate the entire debacle online, check out this article at the Huffington Post about something stupid said by the rapper 50 Cent… and the response from Holly Robinson Peete. (It saves me typing time, and they can certainly explain the issue better than I.)
The quick synopsis for those who haven’t gone to look – two days ago, 50 Cent chose to respond to a follower who got under his skin by telling him that he looked ‘autistic’, and then followed up by saying he didn’t want any ‘special needs’ followers. Ms. Peete responded with an open letter chastising him about the comment. Continue reading
Part of the Monster’s autism is a persistant developmental delay when it comes to his use of language. He’s delayed both expressively and receptively to a large extent, which has the effective result of having him communicate as if he were a little more than a year younger than he really is.
The majority of the time, his expressive language tends to be riffs on canned phrases. Lately, it’s taken up his repeating artifacts – commercials he’s heard on the television or radio, things he’s heard people in his environment say, or weird linguistic artifacts he’s come up with himself. Continue reading
I think most of us in “the same boat” can agree that, as a whole, we don’t know more than we do know about autism. We don’t know what causes it, we don’t know how to “cure” it, and we are still in the phase where we’re trying to figure out how best to treat it.
We’ve known that something was not quite right with the Monster since before his second birthday – as I’ve mentioned previously, that factored into our timing for child #2. One of the factors that went into that timing and decision was weighing the risk of having a second child with developmental delays… and the fact is, there’s not a lot of research into the probabilities of it happening twice. Continue reading
We live in the area affected by the storm that hit on Friday night.
The wife had her book club that evening, so I had been ‘exiled’ to the family room to be out of the way. Throughout the evening, I’d noticed the forecasts by a local group advising that we ought to plug in our devices before the storm hit… and silly me, we didn’t do it. So, promptly about midnight, the power went out when the storm hit, leaving us in the dark. When we got up Saturday morning, the power was still out, with little sight of it being restored any time soon. Because of the heat, we made the decision to pack up and take the kids to sleep at my wife’s parents’ place, where there was electricity and air conditioning.
With the mercury climbing well past 90 (does anyone actually use a mercury thermometer anymore?), we decided to spend the majority of the weekend at the pool.
Not that the Monster minded this one iota – while he has, in the past week, expressed once that he wasn’t in a mood to go swimming (on a day where he’d already gone in the pool before we’d asked), telling him that we’re going to the pool is a quick way to get compliance from him to get him changed, sunblocked, and loaded into the car. And while all of us went to the pool together on Saturday, I managed him at the pool by myself on Sunday. Continue reading
We’re usually fairly careful about paying attention when it comes to the Monster.
We’ve gotten better about keeping track of when the front door is open at the house – he’s only gotten out once in the last week or so without us being directly with him, and that one time my wife caught him before he got far. Continue reading
I wasn’t very athletic as a child. Yes, I played rec soccer and little league, and I learned to play tennis, but a lot of that was my parents’ insistance that I play some sports. (I did ski, but there’s a reason I don’t quite hold that in the same class, as will be apparent shortly.)
The irony is that as I’ve gotten older, I have taken up more sports on my own – I’m a curler (if my profile picture hasn’t given that away), I enjoy the occasional volleyball game, and I dabble with golf. The major difference is that I now mostly participate in sports for the social aspect, and gravitate towards sports that emphasize that – for example, I don’t think I’d enjoy golf as much, especially with my horrible handicap, if it didn’t offer the opportunity for me to chat with the rest of my foursome. Continue reading
I genuinely try to keep a good sense of humor about the things going on in our lives. I think that’s come through very well in the majority of what I write. There’s enough horrible things in the world that something like this – having a relatively high-functioning autistic son – is a minor speed bump in an otherwise pretty decent life. It’s not like we’re dealing with a fatal illness, with poverty, with hunger, with homelessness or the scourge of war.
No, it’s just a clump of small problems that tend to wander around as a mad little mob, waiting to pop out at the odd times.