Taking awareness on the road

On Saturday something happened that made me very, very happy.

Saturday was the day for our local autism awareness walk/run and this was the first year for me to participate. The event is sponsored by a local, parent-run organization and the money raised is then given out to families in the area in the form of scholarships, meant to cover needs not funded by some other means.

What I hadn't anticipated, however, is that Oliver would be with me. We had conveniently forgotten that Sami's first soccer game of the season was that same morning and, since Nik is coaching, that meant that Oliver and I were unexpected partners for the morning. We do a lot of walking so I wasn't too worried about the distance, but I didn't know the route, how many people would be there or how much support there would be along the way. So, at the last minute I decided that Oliver and I would bike the route. We had to bike to the event anyway since Nik had the car so, I reasoned, why not just stay on our bikes?

The main challenge to biking the route came from navigating safely around walkers and cars since the roads were not closed to traffic. But really, I must say, Oliver did beautifully. He adjusted his speed to mine, dodged people moving unexpectedly into his path and stayed to my right or my left depending on which side of the road we were traveling.

The absolute best part of the walk came about mid-way through the course. We were nearing the crest of a small hill, Oliver standing up to pedal, the bike swaying from side to side beneath his powerful legs, when I looked over to our right and saw a woman that I had hoped I would never run into again. I wrote a post about her sometime ago. That post marked the beginning of pretty big learning curve for me in which I discovered that professionals are only just people and some of them are full of shit. And I'll admit it: I am still quite bitter. Quite bitter. The kind of ABA that this woman and her organization practice cost us a lot, emotionally speaking. Her low-expectations for my son were manifest from the beginning but it took me a long time -- too long -- to figure out. By the time I walked away from the whole thing, Oliver had developed a phobia for adults. I think I did, too. But I walked away having learned some important lessons. And a resolve to never classify a living being according to any perceived notion of "functioning." So, to have this woman suddenly appear in our path, when Oliver was so beautifully managing, so gorgeously coordinating with me, so utterly competent and graceful -- well, it made my heart soar.

I'm sure this professional in our community wasn't the target of the awareness meant to be raised last Saturday. But I hope that when she saw my boy and I riding past her, skillfully navigating our way, past all sorts of obstacles, that maybe, just maybe, she revised her assumptions about what she thinks she knows about people with autism.

Sleeping makes me hungry!

I'm over at (Never) Too Many Cooks today. If you haven't had a chance to check out this food blog, take a moment to click on over. And while you're there, bookmark the site. I'll be posting there every other week or so and I hope to write a bit more there about our continuing efforts to cook locally and with the seasons. Today, though, I'm writing about rice. Rice? Yes, rice!  Not the sexiest of culinary topics but if you've ever struggled to make the perfect pot of steamed rice you might be surprised by how easy it can be using the simple technique of measuring with your fingers. But the best part of this blog is that in the near future it will be set up to generate revenue that will be donated to an autism-related charity. So stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, who couldn't use some what's-for-dinner-tonight-inspiration?

First day of Spring. ....

. ... and it was glorious!

Sleep is the new coffee

Want to know how to kick the coffee? Try sleeping. Seriously, I cannot recommend it more highly. I've stopped counting the numbers of nights. I almost take for granted that I'm embarking on a solid night of sleep once my head hits the pillow. Almost.  And during the daytime I never wonder anymore if I should skip the mug and just mainline the caffeine.

There's still one or two things that amaze me about the whole shift in sleep thing. For example, I didn't tell you but after about a week of solid sleeping I decided, on a whim, to move Oliver into his own bed in his own room. You would think at that time I would be worried about changing something that finally seemed to be working, but, well, I didn't really think it through. But it didn't seem to matter. So Oliver is now sleeping in RT's room while he is away in London. But the really, really amazing part is the way he goes to sleep each night. You see, Oliver has never, ever been able to fall asleep without me or Nik next to him. Before we discovered the joys of melatonin this sometimes ate a two hour chunk out of my evening. And usually he wanted me to sing to him as he drifted off. It's a good thing I have fond associations with Twinkle Twinkle or I might by now have an unabiding hatred for the song!  These days, however, we all gather for stories in the big bed -- the one Sami and Oliver have shared for the past few years-- and then Oliver will inevitably tell me that he wants to go to bed, I'll say good night and off he goes. Nik tucks him in, turns off the light and we don't see him again until sometime the next morning.

How amazing is that?

And with all this rest, Nik and I are doing radical things: He is taking a half day off on Fridays, we take a yoga class together, then a leisurely walk home. We've hired a babysitter two Saturdays mornings a month so that we can start biking together again. We're thinking of going out in the evening! Together. Like on a date.

Radical things, I tell you, are happening in this new year!  I think we're all shifting to a better place.

A Month and a Day

Oliver continues to sleep.

Nik and I are grateful, of course, but we certainly can't point to a single thing that might have brought about this dramatic change. After years and years -- Oliver's whole lifetime -- of charting and guessing and trying to draw lines from point A to point B, it seems right and appropriate that this shift should also seem so random. Whatever it is, we'll take it.

It has been a whole month now, or a month and one night, as the sleep cycle started on February 7th -- a day that I hope we celebrate in some fitting way next year after 333 more days of good sleep. It hasn't been all smooth sailing -- Oliver woke at 4am two mornings in a row this past weekend. We worried that our run of good sleep was coming to an end but the next two nights were fine.

Over the past 4-5 years, if you asked me, I might have told you that Oliver didn't seem that affected by his lack of sleep. I might have told you that he simply seemed to need less sleep than almost every other person on the planet. I believed this to be true because lack of sleep never seemed to affect him in the way I thought it should. It certainly didn't seem as debilitating for him as it felt for the rest of us. Getting so little sleep, all of it broken, caused me to feel cranky and irritable, it affected my eating habits, I had trouble concentrating, I couldn't remember things like I used to, I was easily distracted, easily frustrated. ... none of that probably seems very surprising for a person who averaged 4-5 hours of sleep for years and years. But Oliver! Oliver is one of the most easy-going kids I know (considering all we ask of him) and always, always so full of energy. In fact, keeping up with him when we were often so very tired has been one of the most difficult parenting challenges that we face.

After a month of sleep, I'm revising my former opinion about Oliver's need for sleep. I see changes emerging before my eyes and now realize how much the lack of sleep had impacted his ability to function and to learn. Exhaustion just looks different for him than it did for me. For one thing, the manic energy is decreasing. He doesn't run or gallop everywhere these days. His appetite -- while still hearty -- has decreased. He is calmer, spends longer periods of time focused on tasks and doesn't seem to get Lost in Space quite as much as he used to.

A couple of days ago I noted the George Will editorial -  "How to Ruin a Child" in which he writes: "Until age 21, the circuitry of a child's brain is being completed. ...  Research on grade schoolers showing that "the performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader." In high school, there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.

Tired children have trouble retaining learning "because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. . . . The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night."

I found this very interesting in light of what we have been observing in Oliver after just a month of long, restful nights.