As I mentioned in yesterday’s post – I’ve been under the weather. Being sick tends to do all sorts of hellish things to one’s schedule (and not just in the sense of having me post quite a bit later than I usually do).
Likewise, the Monster’s schedule got thrown off, further proof that he’s been suffering through being sick. Last night, before he went to bed, he was finally done coughing and wheezing, and we thought that everything would be fine coming into the week. Continue reading
So, somewhere in the last few days, both the Monster and I came down with something. (Which is why this one’s a bit shorter than my norm – I’m still quite under the weather myself.)
I’m only assuming he must have caught it at one of his camps because no one around me in the office has seemed ill. Of course, the biggest problem is since he’s not the most verbal, we can’t ask him if he’s been feeling unwell. Continue reading
When the Monster had his IEP meeting a few months ago, one of his providers had recommended an end to his physical therapy.
Now, he’s hardly uncoordinated or a threat to himself when navigating around. The boy does like to run, and he’s got decent motion even on uneven ground. Our major protest was the fact that he’s still not doing some of the age-appropriate behaviors, like switching feet while ascending/descending stairs. Continue reading
So we’re part way through the summer – if I read my calendar right, we’re about seven weeks from the start of the Monster’s first year of public school. (And that’s weird enough to think about.)
The other thing that happens over the summer is that my employer announces the latest slate of employees who have been selected for our in-house leadership-training program. Unlike last year, I didn’t bother to do more than scan the message to see if anyone from our office was selected. Continue reading
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
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