autism

Hungry, Hungry

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R turned four this week.

Almost everything with R is a new experience for us as parents.  Yes, yes, I know that all children are different and are going to be somewhat like that anyway, but… the differences between a child with Autism and a child without Autism are night and day.  So on Wednesday, after singing happy birthday to R, after cupcakes and giving him a card… he asked where his birthday present was. (Smart kid, our R.)  And after a bit of hurrying on the wife’s part to grab something – we’d not planned on giving him a present till his birthday party in a week and a half – he was very excited to unwrap a “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” game.

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BANANA!

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The Monster's "Minion"

                     BANANA-NANANANA!

I think it’s too easy sometimes to take the literal way that some of our children with Autism regard the world, and take it to some logical extreme like “no originality”.

I know that I’m definitely guilty of it sometimes, which is usually a sign that the Monster’s overdue to do something to blow my mind. Continue reading →

Scripting Fail

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Just to clear the air before I start, I’ll put this failure wholly where it belongs, and that’s on me.

Vacations always throw the Monster off.  Anything that’s not highly structured, anything that involves having loose structure, these things all tend to make things difficult around our house in terms of trying to keep him moving forward.  And… well, nothing’s been going on since Thursday, due to the holiday weekend.  So what happened on Saturday was a predictable disaster. Continue reading →

But Is It Fair?

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One of the benefits of my job is that I’m able, now and again, to work from home to help cover childcare.  Since my company’s holiday party, I’ve been working from home to cover the kids – first the Monster, whose school has been out for nearly two weeks, and then R, because his school let out just before Christmas, just as the Monster’s “School’s Out” program at the JCC started.

Neither kid has really been ‘programmed’ while home with me, since still I have to work (obviously), but… tomorrow, the Maryland Science Center is doing a “Midnight Noon” event for the New Year and I’m taking the day off to go with R and my wife to it, after we drop the Monster at School’s Out.

But is that fair? Continue reading →

The Most Horrifying Thing

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Children are creatures of habit – children on the Spectrum more so.

It’s taken us a while to get the Monster into the swing of things in terms of a daily rhythm. Whether that day is a school day or not is immaterial.  Case in point – on Friday, he was home from school for the day, but he still got up reasonably “early” and still wanted to get dressed.  But while that’s not bad on a weekday, when I have to be up anyway, it’s not so great on weekends. Continue reading →

By Any Other Name…

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So this morning, I woke up to an interesting comment on social media regarding my blog, where someone took umbrage to our nickname for our eldest.  (Nevermind, of course, that there’s an explanation in several locations elsewhere in this blog.)  I won’t post it here, but suffice it to say, said person called me a horrible person… and well, my give-a-damn about people thinking I’m a horrible person is broken.  So, my response to the poster was – don’t be so judgemental and grow up.  But I’m going to go further here.

For starters – yes, we do call him the Monster, even offline.  But what does his nickname have to do with the price of tea in China? Continue reading →

A Wing and a Prayer

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IMG_1646The first flight I remember taking was when I was five, and my parents herded me and my siblings (numbering four kids in total) onto an Eastern Airlines jet to fly down to Florida.  This was, of course, back in the days before we had the kind of security we now have at airports.  Where you could meet your friends at the gate when their flight arrived, even without a ticket.  Where you got real food on aircraft with real utensils and plates, when smoking was permitted on board…

Okay, yes, we’ve established that I’m old.  And that a lot’s changed since I was a kid. Continue reading →

Progress

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Part of going to school is the quarterly progress report.

Our experience with the public schools has been somewhat hit-or-miss when it comes to the actual progress reports – public schools, at least here in Baltimore, have what seems like a weird system to me until you’re in third grade.  You don’t get “real” grades (A-E/F), but rather some thing that gives an idea of how you’re making progress.  But, as a special-education student, the Monster has been getting that report along with an IEP progress report, and the latter has not been particularly useful.

That’s not how it works at Gateway, though.
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