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#blogjune family anecdotes

Boundaries

Mr 3 has always been a climber. And a runner. He just doesn’t recognize boundaries the way that other kids do.
In the past couple of days (of course, only since I’ve been sick and haven’t had the energy to stop him / teach him that it’s wrong / it’s dangerous) he’s taken to pulling all of the clothes out of his wardrobe, then using the shelves to climb up as high as he can before he’s discovered. And the shelves are deep, so he crawls right inside and can’t be seen unless you’re looking. Luckily the evidence, spilled all over the floor, gives it away…

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This is the shelf he climbed to today. It’s easily one and a half meters off the ground.

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Now how am I meant to stop this??! Ideas, anyone?

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#blogjune

Tech-savvy kids

I love the fact that my children are digital natives. The screen of my MacBook Pro is covered with little fingerprints from when they’ve been using my iPad / iPodTouch, and have forgotten that they’re not on them anymore. When it comes to technology, their brains don’t ask “can I?”,  but instead “how do I?” – they automatically assume that anything is possible. Whereas I, and others of my (and surrounding!) generations ask “IS that possible?”
Mr 3, in particular, amazes me with what he works out. (And I find it funny when Miss 7 and Miss 4 also ask, “How did you do that?’!) Case in point: the app Vid Rhythm. It’s a cute little app, making cute little video clips from various sounds that you copy. Mr 3 figured it out by himself – and then kindly saved me a copy of his creation. I had no idea that he was even playing with this! He was on the iPod Touch in the lounge room, while I was making dinner one night. I only discovered it after he was in bed that night:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldTKj6r-XYw&feature=channel&list=UL]

 

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#blogjune

Little fingers

Mr 3 was about 18 months old when he first decided to steeple his fingers. First, he touched his thumbs together, then his index fingers, his middle fingers, his ring fingers, and then his pinkies, until all 10 fingers were touching their opposites. And he had such a look of concentration on his face! He looked just like a little old, wise professor, trying to find an answer to a difficult problem. And he had worked out how to do this, all by himself; unlike my girls who had to be shown how, at around the age of 3 1/2.
Since that age, he has continued to develop his skills in finger manipulation. By two, instead of speaking about where he wanted to go, he would point. But where most children would point with a straight arm and straight finger, Mr 3 would curve his finger to point around the corner to where he wanted to go. He would then turn his hands so that his finger would point in the next direction, if what he wanted was more complex. In this way, he would explain fairly lengthy instructions regarding which directions he wanted me to follow him.
I think that his fingers have a sensitivity which mine do not. He also used to intentionally avoids touching substances which were wet, sticky, or cold.
And just last week, he surprised me. He woke early, and walked himself into our room, and crawled up onto the bed, in between Hubby and me. I draped my arm over him in an attempt to keep him still – because he finds keeping still a *really* difficult thing to do! – but Mr 3  picked up my arm and moved it, until he was holding my hand. He then used the fingers of his hand to spread out the fingers of mine, and then squeezed gently so that our fingers were entwined together. I was in shock! He’s three! I don’t know for certain, but I’m pretty sure that Miss 7 only did that just a few months back, and Miss 4 has never done it!

Sensitive fingers? I should say so! I think I’ll go and teach him some Piano now…

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#blogjune family anecdotes

ECDP

It’s Wednesday. Which means it’s the day that Mr 3 and I attend his Early Childhood Developmental Program. It’s basically a playgroup run by a teacher trained in Special Needs. There are 6 children in total (all boys – interesting, hey!) aged between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2. After 3 1/2 they then attend the ECDP Kindy program, until they are old enough to go to Prep.

The difficulty with attending the ECDP Playgroup on Wednesdays has been that it is for the diagnosed child and his/ her parent/s ONLY. And with Miss 4 not yet in school, and with child care being just so darn expensive, she stays home with me. (Well ‘staying home’ isn’t entirely true. Both Miss 4 and Mr 3 also come to meetings with me, appointments with printers and advertising people etc etc for Bloxham Marketing!) Organising to go to the ECDP with Mr 3, and only Mr 3, was problematic – until we realised that there was a centre at Talara Primary College, which is around the corner from my Mum’s place. So now, every Wednesday morning, Miss 4 goes to ‘Grandma playgroup’ and Mr 3 and I go to the Talara EDCP, then his Speech Therapy session, where he amazes us with stuff like I wrote about on Monday.

We missed going to the ECDP last week. I was too snowed under with work, and he was coming down with a cold anyway, so we missed a week. As a result, I’m looking forward to today. He enjoys it, and it’s good for him to get some early exposure to ‘classroom routines’ that he’ll come across in a couple of years. And just for your enjoyment, here is a short video of their “outside playtime” the previous week. He, of course, is the one in the green hat. With the red shirt and the long black pants. The cute one. (Not that I’m biased!!!)

[flickr video=7341616632 secret=c379dcf23e w=400 h=225]

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#blogjune

Viewpoints – part 2

My post yesterday was about how Mr 3, my autistic son, sees the world differently. I shared a few examples – making a seesaw out of train tracks, playing both controls of a two-player playstation game, because his big sister was at school, and using the ‘word’ instead of the ‘picture’ to match cards in a Speech Therapy ‘game’.

I had a bit of response to this post – I apparently was nominated for ‘The Sunshine Award‘ (not that I know how this all works! But I’m extremely flattered, nonetheless! Thanks, butimbeautiful!); and on twitter I caused @jobeaz to *sniff* at what she thought was a ‘beautiful post’ and @gigglesigh to make the comment ‘different minds open your eyes to new things… new experiences’.

Her tweet made me stop and think. Yes, that’s so true. And I replied to this effect, hinting that I hadn’t always felt this way.

And then I thought that I’d like to explore this idea further in a blog post. So here ’tis.

I have always been a perfectionist. I’m smart, okay. Smart enough to realise that that last sentence sounds remarkably conceited, and I’ve just lost all but maybe two of my readers. But I’ll continue anyway, because I want to nut this out in my own head, and sometimes that’s easiest when I’m typing. So anyway…

Yes, I’m a perfectionist. I’m bossy. I know that I can get things done, and they’ll probably get done pretty well – if they get done *my* way. And Ghylene’s tweet made me realise that, you know what? I’m actually not entirely comfortable with “new things… new experiences”. I want things to be the best they can be, because I’m a perfectionist, and for that to happen, I need to be in control of it. Yes, I’m probably one of the biggest control freaks that you have ever met. Yes, I like ‘new things… new experiences’… but only on *my* terms.

So to *suddenly* (haha) have an autistic son has really thrown my world out-of-kilter. Suddenly I’m not in control – and, worse still, I’m aware of this fact. Suddenly I have a little body in my life who does things unexpectedly; and although the things that he does may often be those that society deems as ‘not appropriate’ (i.e. banshee screams accompanying tantrums where he loses any semblance of self-control) – reacting to these things as I would react to any other ‘normal’ child, by assuming that they are engaging in intentional misbehaviour, is also wrong. Because his reactions, although these may be ‘abnormal’ by   my / our / society’s standards? These reactions *are* normal for him. And that has been a difficult adjustment for my 37 year old brain to make.

A few months ago, when Mr 3 was officially diagnosed and I was on the biggest emotional roller coaster I’d ever been on, I was overwhelmed with the support I received from many, many, many, online friends. One such, sent me a link to a blog post written by another mum whose son had recently been diagnosed with autism. She wrote about how her life had substantially changed, overnight, without warning. She described it as planning a holiday to one country, (I think it was Greece?) but had ended up in another (Italy? from memory…). And how it took a huge amount of adjustment, but then she was able to reflect on the beauty that lay in the new path she’d found herself on.

I think that slowly, I’m starting to appreciate some aspects of my new path. It’s taking a while. I cry – like when Miss 7 identifies a storybook character as autistic – from the very first page – and she’s right (Wrong Way, a book about three duckings and their mother who tries to cope) – like when Mr 3 finally says ‘Bye, bye, Mummy”, in context, and gets it sounding almost recognisable, and I realise that he is just so darn far behind his peers because he’s almost 3 1/2 and children who’ve just turned 2 can speak more intelligibly – like right now, when I’m writing, thinking of my beautiful little boy and how I love him so much and want to protect him from all the crap that life can dish out…

Anyway, I just wanted to get that out there. I’m a perfectionist, and a control freak, and I need to change all that. Hopefully,  prayerfully, day by day, I am…

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#blogjune family anecdotes

Viewpoints

I blogged yesterday about Mr 3’s ‘different’ viewpoint on life. I used to think that it was due to his gender that his thinking was so different to Miss 7 and Miss 4. But since his autism diagnosis a few months ago, I’ve been questionning whether it really *does* just come back to the fact that Hubby and I are parenting a son for the first time.
So I thought that today I might share some of these differences. Cute examples like when he took two bits of straight Thomas track, and instead of adding them to the track he was making, he joined them together to make a longer piece, put this over the bridge of one of his feet, then sang (his version of) See Saw Margery Dawe while seesawing the train-track back and forth over his foot.
Or a ‘focussed’ example, like I wrote about yesterday. Where he was fixated on being in a two player game on the PlayStation. Usually he plays these with Miss 7, but she was at school. Never mind; he used both controls at the same time.

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Sometimes he’d win against himself…

[flickr video=7325209522 secret=ba41d9fc20 w=400 h=225]

… at other times he’d lose.

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It didn’t matter though; he was happy!

And lastly, a quirky one that surprised even me. It was at his first ever Speech Therapy session, and his therapist Maria, was testing his comprehension. She pulled out a number of large square cards, each with a 3 x 3 pattern of squares on them (like in bingo, or in tic-tac-toe) and placed these on the table at which Mr 3 was sitting. One 9square card went directly in front of him; the others went into a small stack to one side. Each of the 9 squares showed a picture of an easily identifiable object – apple, ball, car, etc. My little man was then given a few individual cards, slightly smaller than a single square on the larger card. On each card was a picture, identical to the pictures on the 9square card on the table. The aim of the ‘game’ was to see if, once Maria had said the word, he could match the smaller card in his hand with the correct spot on the 9square card, and place his card on top of the correct picture on the larger card. So she said, “Apple. Can you find the apple? Put your card over the apple picture.” The square with the apple was the bottom centre square, and so we both expected him to put his small ‘apple’ card over the apple picture, centre place in the bottom row.

Mr 3, however, decided to turn his smaller cards over. He noticed that the card with the apple picture on it, had the word ‘apple’ on the underside. He then picked the 9square card up off the table, and noticed that its underside was also split into 9 squares, each containing the word of the picture. In the centre square of the bottom row was the same word, ‘apple’. So Mr 3 placed the 9square card down, word side facing up, and put his smaller ‘apple’ card (word side up) over the word ‘apple’, on the underside of the 9square card. I was gobsmacked. Maria, also, was rather surprised. “Well, I’ve never seen anybody do *that* before!’ she said.

Yep – that’s my boy! Sees the world differently. And that can be a good thing.

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Focussed

There’s no doubt about it, Mr 3 can get focussed. Very, very focussed. For the past couple of days it’s been our Thomas the Tank Engine set that’s captured his attention. Prior to this, it was the PS2, and before these, it was my iPod.
When he focusses, he gets absorbed. Completely consumed by the task before him.

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Train in each hand, puzzling out his next move, that’s my boy! And yes, that sounds about right for any 3 year old boy too, right? Well, yes. And I love that.
The trouble is, just five minutes after this photo was taken, we had to head out shopping. And it was his reaction to this turn of events that wasn’t ‘about right’ for any 3 year old boy. Yes, he had a tantrum. Yes, he screamed in frustration and kicked his train track and broke it into several pieces. Yes, he thrashed against me, who had picked him up and was attempting to hold him tight and calm him down.

Yes, all of which (it could be argued) is also fairly typical for any 3 year old boy. But it was the sheer strength (and length!) of such reactions that, had anyone who didn’t know my little cherub, been within earshot of my house at that time, they would have thought, “That’s not normal. There’s something wrong with that kid.” And it’s that, which concerns me. Not their thoughts – but the fact that they had them. The fact that he has such huge tantrums which are out of character for what society says is ‘normal’ – but completely in character for a little autistic boy who sees the world differently to ‘normal’.  And when circumstances occur that cause a mismatch between our view of the wold and his, then he’s going to let you know about it, darn it!

You see, he was happy playing with Thomas. Figuring out his next move, train in each hand. Completely and utterly absorbed. And he wanted to remain this way until *he* had finished; until *he* had decided that it was time to take a break. Having parents come and tell him that no, it was time to go *now* just didn’t fit with his view of ‘the way the world should work’. So he communicated his frustrations the only way that he knew how. Helping him to see that wrecking his train track wasn’t the best choice to make – because we wouldn’t be gone forever, and he could keep playing once we got back – was difficult. But I managed it, and once he understood that we’d be back fairly soon, he was more than happy to go and put on his sandals (and hat! Don’t forget the hat!) and hop into the car. It was just that initial lack of understanding that caused the problem.

And that’s my concern. Because at the moment, he’s three. But ‘turn around twice’ and he’ll be five, ready to head to school, and how on earth is his Prep teacher meant to handle such tantrums?

The way I see it, I have a small window of opportunity – just eighteen months, or thereabouts – to teach him resilience. To teach him that his view of  the world, although completely valid, is not the only one; and that others are equally valid. To teach him how to react – how to behave – when his viewpoint collides with others. To teach him the protocols which the world considers ‘acceptable’; ‘normal’ even – although I’ve come to realise that there really *isn’t* any such thing as ‘normal’.

And at the same time; I want to enjoy his ability to focus whole-heartedly. Have a great day, dear readers!

Categories
family anecdotes Life Random thoughts Uncategorized

Wise furniture choices

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It’s now coming up five years since we moved from Landsborough. We had built a four bed 2 bath brick and tile home there, back in the year 2000. After a couple of years, we extended it and enclosed a large patio, creating an entertainment room. We furnished this room with a lovely 6 piece outdoor setting – wicker-look chairs and tempered glass table.
Fast forward seven years and you see us moving house. To a cute (read tiny) place that definitely would not fit all of our furniture… well, not if we wanted to fit in there too. So we halved our furniture, keeping the outside setting and giving the dining table and chairs to Neighbours Aid Community Stores. Reason being, even though it was larger, the glass tabletop helped to not make our new dining / lounge area too crammed – and the wicker look fitted in with the holiday feel of our new place.
Fast forward again, to April 2012. Mr 3 has decided to develop the habit of spitting / dribbling any unwanted food out of his mouth – in full mouthfuls. Outside furniture copes well with this. Just take the chair outside, hose it off, wait half an hour, and then everything’s hunky-dory again. Bread, milk, cheese, tomato sauce, tuna, soggy chips, ice cream – it really doesn’t matter.
I was thinking about this, this morning after my little man decided to experiment with tipping his large cup of milk all over his right leg, and then screaming because he was surprised by the consequence.
Because it doesn’t matter if I hose off one chair, two chairs, or all six chairs in one go – they’ll still all be fine in about half an hour. And think that’s pretty cool.

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Technology

Favourite “Speech” Apps

I was asked in a tweet the other day about the Apps I have. And I realized that I couldn’t reply in a tweet, as I have far too many! So I’ve decided to dedicate a few blog posts to the topic. The question related specifically to apps that help with speech development, so I have categorized this first list into ‘word recognition’ and ‘encouraging speech through interaction’. Hope it might be helpful!

Word / Sound recognition (simplest to most complex)

1. I Hear Ewe – three pages of common sounds with very clear, short explanations

2. My Preschool Word – my kids love unlocking jewels by listening to the song of the word they just met – and then putting the image onto crazy photos!

3. Dot to Dot Numbers & Letters – simple dot to dot, with clear number pronunciation

4. Baby Cloud Apps First Words Free – clear pictures with spoken object names

5. Melvin’s Marvellous Words – a memory game using words

6. Little Speller… Three letter words – learn to spell with large pictures and clear word / letter pronunication

7. My First Words; Flashcards – categories with large pictures and clearly spoken words

8. A1 Spelling App – eight categories, with the words spoken by a child instead of an adult.

9. Phonics Genius – clearly spoken words in word families. No pictures, though.

10. Articulation Station – divided into sounds, and the sound placement within the word. Examples are given in words, sentences, and stories. A very thorough app!

 

Encouraging speech through interaction

  1. VidRhythm (pictured) – this app really encouraged my youngest to copy the sounds and words, to make the music video. Of this entire list today, this App would be my favourite.
  2. Puppet Pals HD – make your own puppet show using up to 8 characters and 3 backgrounds
  3. Play School Art Maker – theme-based, choose which characters and objects you want to play, and record videos of your play.
  4. Talking Gina the Giraffe / Talking Tom Cat and similar ‘Talking” apps.
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family anecdotes

Lightbulb moments

My family and I are currently on a journey of discovery. It began when Hubby and I first started suspecting – for real this time, without wondering jokingly – that Mr 3 was autistic. It continued through doctor appointments and referrals, through two Paediatric appointments, and through numerous forms, CentreLink visits, phone calls with relevant groups, and an interview at the Early Childhood Developmental Program coordinator at Talara Primary College.
And in this journey that our family is taking, through the diagnosis and subsequent creation of an ‘Early Intervention Program’ for Mr 3’s autism, I’ve discovered that I’m having lots of ‘Lightbulb moments’. I had another yesterday.
Soon after midday, I took Hubby away from his work and we took our three cherubs down to the Brighton centre of Autism Queensland. Our appointment was with Kris Jennings, from the Autism Advisor Program. And in the midst of her questions, something clicked inside my head. I swear it was huge enough to be audible! And looking back now, I’d answered all of these questions before – but maybe it was their order that helped me to make the connection.
You see, one of my first indicators was his pretty complete lack of spoken language. I’d actually blogged about it earlier, humorously – maybe as a coping mechanism myself! But he has very few words and phrases, and the vast majority of these are only intelligible if you’re familiar with his desires and his behaviours in that specific context. So I was aware of his need for Speech Therapy. And I was also aware that his diet was a problem (he basically refuses all food with the exception of bread and milk). But it wasn’t until yesterday that I’d put the two of them together.
Yes, I knew that he was having trouble with the actual formation of his words. The vowel sounds weren’t really a problem – it was just all the different consonants, and their combinations. But the thought occurred to me that the two were related. That food is a problem for exactly the same reason that speaking is a problem. It’s muscle usage. Ha!!!
So, chalk up yet another “lightbulb moment” for the mum. They’re getting to be quite regular occurrences…!
Anyway, the upshot of the meeting is that we (meaning ‘me’, Hubby’s too busy) now have a few more leads to follow when it comes to developing an Early Intervention Program for our youngest child. And, due to his high number of strengths, the more intensive the Early Intervention, the more effective it will be.
So here goes…!
CC image courtesy soils at http://www.flickr.com/photos/an_solas/6539937579/