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P..P..Progress…

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Just goes to show that sometimes, when I prepare a posting in advance (shock of shocks – I actually wrote ahead for once), something else jumps out of the queue to deserve publication first.  I’ll also circle back to yesterday’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee meeting in a few days, after I’ve had time to collect my thoughts on it.

So last night, the wife went to a concert with her sister, leaving me with the kids.  I’d decided to take them out to dinner, arrived at the restaurant to find they were both asleep, and so I came back home.  This resulted in the Monster going to bed without dinner (I couldn’t rouse him sufficiently to eat), and with a dry diaper. Continue reading →

Meeting Time

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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 →

#thisiswhatautismlookslike

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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 →

Speaking in Tongues

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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 →

Genetically Speaking

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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 →

Hot and Bothered

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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.

Continue reading →

Fathoms Below

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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 →

Have a Ball

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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 →