Tomorrow is the Monster’s annual IEP meeting.
Now, I know it’s not been “a year” since his last IEP, since we agreed on the IEP that sent him to Gateway at the end of July. Still, his annual IEP has always been March-to-March, and in spite of how long last year’s took… it’s that time of year again.
But I’m feeling good about tomorrow. Continue reading
I’ll admit it freely – I’m rough on my kids. I pick them up and throw them through the air, and watch while they land with a whump. Or I chortle merrily when I just shove them over, simply because I like to hear them shriek when they fall.
Mean dad? I think not.
I’ll admit that most of the time, I’ve somewhat reconciled myself to the “normal” around our house. The shrieking, the single words or canned phrases to express needs, the way toys get played with…
And then, when you least expect it, ‘normal’ just pops out of nowhere.
I wonder sometimes how much my kids really miss me when I’m not around.
R has gotten to that annoying age where he’s definitely Mommy’s boy, and… well, let’s say he’s fairly verbal about it. He’s made it clear that he’s Mommy’s and the Monster’s friend, and not my friend. Hurtful, but he’s four.
The Monster, on the other hand… Continue reading
What we call things matters.
I think I was first struck by this years ago, when I was sitting in a pew at synagogue and my clergy-person at the time was talking about the distinction between being “a Jewish-American” and “an American Jew”. It’s a question of what word modifies which, and which one gets the emphasis, and the distinction that word-order makes has stuck with me through years. Continue reading
I don’t take for granted what it is that the Monster notices or retains. There are good days and bad days, and subjects where I know he’s well-versed.
Descriptive, literal language, he’s fairly good at. For example, on Friday when he and I went down to the curling center, we spent most of the ride there and back talking about what we saw while we were driving. He’s very good at distinguishing between things we see while we drive, though not always with precision, and with a little bit of prompting, he can work around his own scripts to describe things. Narrative language, on the other hand, is a deficiency that I don’t know how to work on without significant prompting.
But even I underestimate sometimes his descriptive retention.
The weird space where this winter storm, working and my outside interests collide…
So, in the middle of everything with Snowzilla, a pipe at my curling club sprang a leak, which ate a hole all the way through the ice. Members of the Ice Crew have been spending the week fixing the damage… but today was a controlled melt, which requires someone to be sitting at the club to monitor things.
And because of the weather, Monster’s school was closed again. So this seemed perfect – I could sit there, get my work done, monitor the ice, and watch the Monster.
You’d think. Continue reading
God, I hope schools reopen soon.
The biggest problem, I’ve found, with any serious disruption to our routine is that no matter how plastic the Monster is in terms of schedule disruption, large-scale disruptions don’t go over well, especially when coupled with copious free time. The perfect-storm of being stuck in the house for five days – the Monster’s school was closed on Friday as well – and having little enough to do is getting to the children. Continue reading
The Monster doesn’t quite grasp the idea of “winter”, I’m learning quickly.
I mean, okay, yes, he can recite the seasons and he can tell you what the weather is (usually). But getting that snow means we can’t get out? Not so much. Continue reading
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.