So, is this the way it's going to be?

Another post that's not really a post? Well maybe. But you're busy this time of year, too, right?

Following yesterday's post -- and trying to stay with the dentistry theme -- I'll share a little memory from the days back before autism when Oliver just seemed incredibly ahead of the curve.

Christmas morning, 2002. Switzerland. Oliver was four months old to the day. And that morning he looked up at me from the bed where he was nestled for the night and smiled. And there, front and center were two shiny new teeth.

I'm just the mother

This is going to sound like a big complaining post but that isn't the way I intend it. It's less of a complaint and more of an observation that can be generalized to, well, lots of interactions with professionals. You see, I take Oliver to a completely awesome pediatric dentist. Every parent I know who has a kid with autism takes their child to this dentist. The guy has a waiting list for his practice. But if you have a kid with autism? You go to the top of the list. Someone told me that the man is a Christian and that he sees his work as a service to God -- or something like that. I don't know about that but what I can tell you is that I'm sure God is most definitely pleased with this guy. Like I said: he's awesome from the clown printed surgical mask he wears right on up to the surfboards and fish hanging from the ceiling.

Anyway, I have on occasion (OK, every visit) had to remind him that standing just to the side and behind Oliver and reaching around his head is not such a good idea. I think it freaks the boy out that suddenly two disembodied gloved hands are trying to reach into his mouth. When you think of it, that IS a little freaky, right? So Mr. Awesome Dentist always graciously moves forward and tackles the job head on, which is much more tolerable for Oliver.

But now here is where I get to the observation part. Oliver hates to have his teeth brushed, although the two of us long ago reached a kind of détente and now I can do it with minimal complaint from the boy. However, Oliver readily -- easily -- lets me floss his teeth and lightly scrape them with the $10 set of dental instruments I bought at CVS (which I've been doing for years, mainly to make visits to the dentist easier all around). I might even say that he likes it as he will often bring me the dental floss or a scraper and ask me to clean his teeth.

I explained all this to the dentist. Multiple times. But he has his kind of routine about getting kids who are often traumatized by dental exams to feel comfortable and that proceeds incrementally towards a full cleaning. And that's OK. I get why he does it this way and I really respect his time and patience and dedication to care for kids like Oliver.

BUT.

Today the teeth-brushing part went kind of rough, probably because it started with the whole disembodied hand thing. And when I suggested that he try cleaning with the instruments the idea was shot down. I distinctly got the feeling that he thought I was trying to rush Oliver too fast. Then, perhaps to make me feel better, he tried flossing Oliver's teeth. When he saw how relaxed and cooperative Oliver became, he remarked that most kids don't tolerate that at all. Next time, he said happily, I think he'll be ready for the instruments!

Now, maybe this sounds kind of picky and, you know, it probably is. But um. ... oh, never mind. I'm just the mother.

For all you homeschoolers

Today is the Great Christmas Cookie Baking Extravaganza at my house in which I attempt to make four batches of different cookies in just a few short hours. My day began at the grocery store at 7am this morning. .... SO! Looks like another linking kind of blog post day here at DaySixtySeven.  This time I'm sharing links aimed at all you homeschoolers. But even if you don't homeschool, I hope you'll watch some of these videos because I think the ideas they convey are worth considering for all.

First, check out this link and read about some folks that you may have heard of that benefited from homeschooling in some way. Then, be sure to follow this link and watch the presentation about the unschooling approach. (By the way, I hate that name: it sounds so subversive and I think gives folks the wrong idea about this approach to education. When I tell people about unschooling I feel like I also have to declare: I am not a radical!)

Then, if you want to think even more about our education system, check out this very creative representation of a Ken Robinson presentation.

OK, off to rattle my cookie sheets!

The trouble with posting

I'm trying to post here more often, get back in the swing of things -- Have you noticed? I'm trying! Trouble is, writing is something I cannot do while multi-tasking. Unfortunately, until cloning becomes an option, or the holiday season comes to an end, it is all about the mult-tasking around here. Is it like that for everyone this time of year?

So, in the meantime, forgive me if I just throw a couple of links up here and call it a post. OK?

First, have you seen this trailer for the documentary "Where's Molly?" It has been linked to lots in the circle of blogs I visit but just the same, I can't get it off of my mind. If you haven't seen it, you might want to watch. And then go and hold your loved one with autism close.

And on a lighter note: A wonderful little video explaining autism. Do you know this guy? If not, go ahead, try not to get sucked into all the other videos on this site. We love the one about cow tipping.

Enjoy!

Five year RDI special package

Five years ago this week our family started working with an RDI consultant and changed the course of our lives. Taking that initial step has led to many, many surprising and rewarding discoveries for our family. It helped to normalize our everyday life. It helped us connect with Oliver in ways that we hadn't imagined possible. It empowered us by giving us the knowledge and the tools we needed to guide our boy as he makes discoveries about his relationship to the world around him.

In honor of, and appreciation for, our five year journey with RDI, I am offering two greatly reduced RDI packages to families in the Shenandoah Valley Region. So if you've been wondering if RDI might work for your family, now is the time to explore this as an option for very little cost. To learn more about the offer and my services follow this link to my professional site.

Our life in pictures

Two days ago I loaded Oliver's iPad with all the family photos that I had taken over the years. The boy has spent more time than I imagined looking through them and it has prompted some interesting exchanges between us. It feels like we are on the verge of being able to have a conversation about context and memory. We aren't there yet but it finally feels like a possibility. There used to be a time when I was afraid to even hope for such a thing.

Anyway, going through the photos was a good excuse for me to delete a bunch that were repetitive, blurry or out of focus. It was also eye opening in terms of what autism has meant to our family. The pictures show three boys always smiling. And the kid with the biggest smile? Always Oliver. That is one happy kid. And apparently we are always on the go. Yes, it's true, we are a pretty active family and this is, in part, due to Oliver, who is happiest on the go. No lazy Sunday afternoons for us! And the pictures reflect it: hiking, biking, swimming, sledding, skiing, riding the bus, train, trolley, airplane, horses, swings, slides, climbing trees, ladders, walls, mountains. And how far we've traveled! Every inch of our small city, other cities, other states, other countries! It's all there. Autism, it seems, has not slowed down our enjoyment of life one little bit. I wish I could have known that way back when.

Learning by cleaning

So, one of the really great things about RDI is that it has made us very conscious of the many ways that we can involve Sami and Oliver in the everyday, mundane details of life. Over the years, I confess, it hasn't always been fun to involve the kids in the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and all the other errands that pile up each week. But spending that time together, doing things together, modeling my thinking for the kids and helping them find many ways to participate in our lives together has ultimately been very rewarding. The real goal of working through all this stuff with my kids isn't about teaching them how to do the laundry or make a bed -- it's about executive functioning: what do you do when you are faced with something that isn't working out as we expect? How do you know when you've done something good enough? How do you plan? How do you evaluate and choose between two things that are similar? In RDI, this is what we call apprenticeship in thinking and now that the kids are getting older I can clearly see how it is benefiting both of them; each in their own way.

But the side benefit is, of course, that they were also learning to be independent. With Sami, I suppose he would have managed to pick all this up along the way, regardless of my efforts. But Oliver? He is eight and working independently is just not one of his strong suits -- to put it mildly. This weekend, however, I began to take note of just how far he has come in this, too. Shooing the kids into their room to clean up, I suggested that Oliver pick up the items on the floor and Sami make the bed. At first, Oliver kind of wandered around in a not very directed kind of way and I figured he probably needed some more help so I said: "How about if you start with the cars, Oliver." And then? I stood back and watched him put every car in the right spot. Then he moved onto the books and finally the random toys laying in a heap. Meanwhile, Sami made the bed and they finished up by working together to stack the giant cardboard blocks and then vacuuming. All without a word from me.

Now I know that two kids, five and eight, cleaning their room together might sound like no great shakes to some. But if you only knew how many times I wondered if I would have to stand forever beside my boy, telling him the next thing to do, then you would understand why a little piece of the dread I carry around with me when I think about what the future might hold for my boy evaporated.

And it helped that my house was spotless by the end of the day.

Everytime I hear it

This song lifts me up.

Great expectations

Before bed tonight, the boys and I were all snuggled down with the iPad, ready to watch chapter 3 of Rockford's Rock Opera (a totally awesome "ecological musical story" about extinction -- how's that for bedtime fare?), when Nik called out to Oliver that it was time to brush his teeth. "No, Thanks." he replied. So I joked: "C'mon, Oliver, tell us how you really feel about it." and he said: "I don't want to brush my teeth." This wasn't an argument that he was going to win, but still! Pretty awesome if you ask me.

I tell you that by way of introduction to the real story behind this post, which is about working with the professionals that work with my son. Some of you may know that I had a pretty stressful experience with a couple of speech therapists over the summer. We were trying to find a new SLP, one who was a medicaid provider, so that Oliver could have speech all year long as opposed to nine months of the year as provided for by the school district.

What followed was a harrowing experience. The new SLP was a very sweet, well-meaning and caring individual who wanted to work with Oliver. And she had some experience working with kids on the spectrum. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. Oliver balked at even going in to the building, she felt frustrated after each session, I felt like throwing up and I always ended up apologizing to Oliver for putting him through it. But the thing is? I wanted it to work out. I kept giving her the benefit of the doubt even when I saw that she couldn't, or wouldn't, incorporate my feedback.  For example, I suggested each week that she needed to incorporate more processing time for Oliver, that she should probably refrain from talking SO LOUDLY and that she could, after all, talk to him like an eight year old, not a baby (someday I'll write a rant about "therapy speech", which is right up there on my list of most hated things with sentences like: "Good sitting!" Attention all therapists: can you just try to be authentic with my child??). I also suggested that maybe it shouldn't matter if he got up from the table now and then and hopped around the room -- stuff like that.

Anyway, after six or eight weeks of this I was really ready to hang myself. And at the end of each session I would try to be positive and enthusiastic but really I was just super frustrated and saddened by another well meaning professional who looked at Oliver as a child who could not learn because of his "behaviors".  Carefully, diplomatically, I tried to explain that Oliver was responding to her and that, perhaps, by changing her approach she might also influence what he was able to accomplish. Why is this so hard to understand? Of course we respond to the person we are interacting with! Of course it impacts our behavior. This is true for everyone but maybe more so for kids who are so sensitive to the environment. But of course kids on the spectrum -- especially kids like Oliver -- aren't thought to be socially aware and so it becomes easy to throw one's hands up in the air and explain behaviors in terms of their "deficits."

At the start of the school year we happily went back to our old SLP, who is wonderful. I was, however, a little ambivalent when she told me that she would be supervising a graduate student intern who would be working with Oliver. On Thursday I listened to the session through the half-opened door and thought a lot about what I was hearing. Immediately I could tell that she was using far too much language, not allowing Oliver to process -- the result was that Oliver would verbally respond but without any thought whatsoever, rendering most of the session useless. The other thing I wondered about was this: why was it that she was struggling to get Oliver to respond using two word utterances when he is clearly producing much more complex language at home?

When the session was Over I went in and asked if I could share my observations and was gratified that both the SLP and the intern were enthusiastically receptive. When I brought up the question about language complexity, the student quickly assumed that this was a matter of generalization -- he could do it at home but not in the clinic (which I politely dismissed). After further discussion though, a light bulb went off for the SLP and she said: "It's all about partner expectations!" And there we have it: I know Oliver has full, complete, grammatically correct sentences in there and I won't let him get away with "want spin." But if you don't believe he is able to achieve more than that why would you even try? And Oliver, of course, is responding to the person he is interacting with: if you don't expect anything from him that is exactly what you will get.

I left the clinic feeling positively bouyant and hopeful. Because I know my boy has a long way to go but he will get there. And the getting there will be easier if I can keep finding professionals who are willing and able to turn the lens on themselves from time to time -- Lord knows I do it more often than I'd like to admit!

So tonight after the teeth were brushed and chapter three of the rock opera had concluded I asked Oliver to turn out the light, to which he responded, "No, thanks!" And then: "I. want. to. play. with. the. iPad."   He didn't win that argument either but I expect there will be many more in our future. In fact, I'm counting on it.

i think it's beginning to look a lot like iChristmas!

As you might know, I've been scheming about how to get the boy an iPad since the summer when I started to read about how much other kids were able to do with this new technology. Oliver has made such great strides this year and I'm thrilled with the learning and growth that he's achieved, but I'm ever on the lookout for ideas that might make that learning easier for him -- and the teaching easier for me! Then, just in time for the holidays, a local donor made my dream a reality.

Initially I had planned to download and experiment with the apps in the evening after the kids went to sleep, then wrap it up and put it under the tree for Christmas morning. But I just couldn't keep it to myself and on Thanksgiving day, two days after I had it in my hot little hands, I decided that it was the spirit of Christmas, not the day, that mattered. And? Oliver loves -- LOVES -- his iPad! And for that, I love it, too. And for me, a self-proclaimed and proud Luddite, that is quite a statement.

What do I love about it? I love that Oliver can easily do things with the iPad that are hard for him in other ways. For example, one of his favorite apps is a one that features Tangrams. We have a couple of boxes of Tangrams here that I pull out from time to time and, while Oliver does like them, it is hard to sustain his interest in them as they get more complex. He also tends to get distracted by the many pieces involved. Not so with the Tangram app -- watching him persist in solving even the most difficult ones just makes my heart happy.

Also, writing has been hard for my boy. When he holds a pen or marker or crayon, he dearly loves to just scribble. Asking him to control his strokes is like asking him to sit still -- he just can't do it. But with the iPad? He can do both!

The other thing I love about the iPad? Early mornings. Oliver wakes up fairly early everyday and then he is most happy to use his boundless energy. I, on the other hand, need to sit still and drink a cup of coffee and not have a kid jumping on my bed. Our new routine with the iPad involves sitting quietly in my bed, me with a hot mug of coffee and Oliver with any number of diversions.

Oh, and did I mention the sharing? Turn-taking? Interest in what a partner is doing? The iPad is one of the first things that has really motivated my boy to do these things. I love watching how he engages with his brother over a simple bowling app or a puzzle.

For all the great things, there are a few that are not so great. The biggest is that I can see how it could turn into a really static exercise if I am not careful. Oliver could get very hung up in doing the same things over and over again. For example, his favorite app of the moment is iWrite Words -- and I love it, too. But if I'm not careful to engage with him over what he is doing it could just become a static exercise that doesn't really promote any sort of thinking. The other thing I dislike about the iPad is that it has become an obsession for Sami. The first thing he said to me this morning upon opening his eyes was: "Where is the iPad?"

Overall though, I'm thrilled with this new tool we have in our hands! I'm so, so incredibly thankful to those who made it possible. I'm surprised to find myself a qualified skeptic of technology, and I'm excited to see what possibilities are around the corner!