Why It Matters

Over the past two weeks, Logan has been able to attend his Sunday school class at church and also participate in Cub Scouts.  These are things that for years I wished and hoped that he could do, and it just never seemed to work out.  Either he was not capable of sustaining a calm for that long, or it just wasn't the right time.

A dear friend of mine and her husband became Logan's Sunday School teachers.  She messaged me one day to let me know and I was overjoyed.  She has read my blog from its inception, and knew exactly what she was going to be dealing with.  She and her husband made Logan's first day of class fun and memorable, and he wants to go back.

Last Wednesday, Logan begged to go to Cub Scouts.  I was sure that I would have to bring him home again as soon as we got there, but this time was different.  The couple that was there understand autism very well, and they said, "We'll make it work".  Logan has to try extra-hard in a social setting not to stim or get out of control.  When he wants something badly enough, he will make every effort to control himself.  This is what I have seen him do for the last two Wednesdays.  He has had a positive experience there each time and wants to return.

Why does all of this matter?  It's just a couple of little things, you might say.  I am so grateful to these four people.  So I will tell you why it matters:

1) It matters because Logan knows that he's different and wants, like everyone else, to be included.
2) It matters because for years, literally years, I have struggled with taking kids to and from church, working out who will watch Logan, what we will do with Logan if he can't stay at church, and what will happen with him on Wednesday nights if his father doesn't get home from work on time.  It has been years that my husband has rushed home on Wednesdays, tired and exhausted, just so he can take care of our son.  It has been years of never, EVER, being able to attend a class at church with my husband, because one of us is always needed at home.
3) It matters because the more people who get to know Logan, the more people will understand what autism is and what it isn't.
4) It matters because the more kids that deal with Logan, the more kids will understand that some people are different and that's okay.
5) It matters because serving others is one of the highest forms of love you can show someone.
6) It matters because it makes a lot of stress in our lives disappear.

I would like to publicly thank these four amazing people, and people everywhere, who take the time to help out families who need it, and who see the benefit and the extreme need for including children who would otherwise be overlooked.  You make the world a better place, each day.

The Thing We Feared

Above you will see a picture of Harry Houdini, a Hungarian magician known for his daring escape attempts that few can replicate to this day.  He is often referred to as an "escape artist", and many illusionists strive to follow in his footsteps by wrapping themselves in chains, being buried alive, or exposing themselves to any number of life-threatening situations.

I've put his picture up because many autistic children are often referred to as "escape artists".  For some parents, keeping their autistic child safe can be a feat of nightmarish proportions.  Many of these children wander off, leaving the house or mom or dad's side suddenly.  One boy ran away from his mother in a grocery store.  She frantically spent over and hour looking for him, involving other shoppers and store personnel in the search.  They found him wedged behind some packages of toilet paper on a lower shelf, hiding.  Another child was not so lucky.  She left her backyard and wandered out into some land owned by her family.  She drowned in a stock pond.

It's frightening and no one wants to think about it.  But if you have such a child, you must  think about it.  Over the past several weeks I have noticed a disturbing trend in my own son...not listening as well, or seeming to not hear me at all.  A few days ago he climbed over the back fence.  Today he went into the front yard and ran down the road.

It seems we have a budding escape artist on our hands.  It's not something I had thought to deal with again.  In his younger years, he would do the same things...then he seemed to develop an inhibition about being too far from home.  Now it seems, as he is getting older, that that inhibition is slowly developing into a desire for freedom.

What can a parent do, who has a child like this?  We still have special locks on all of our windows.  We can buy door chimes from a home improvement store that ring when a door is opened or closed.  We can attach a GPS locator to our son's clothing, or have him wear an ID bracelet.  None of this foolproof.  If my son decides to take off his clothes, or take off his bracelet, what then?

The only other thing we can do is educate him, over and over and over and over again, about the dangers of straying away from home.  Beyond that, worry will lead to excessive stress.  Eventually, you learn to deal with each new challenge as it comes and stop anticipating the ones that may never arrive.

Little Victories

Every Wednesday night I take my son and daughter to church to participate in planned activities for the evening.  For my daughter it's usually some sort of craft or food or something, for my son it's Boy Scouts or a combined activity in which the young men and young women both participate, such as volleyball.  There is also a Cub Scout troop that meets at our church on Wednesdays. Logan is nine.  He is old enough to be in Cub Scouts.

Logan knows that he is different.  That is something that a lot of people don't realize.  He knows that he's different, and he is painfully aware of and sensitive to being left out of anything.  In the past I have tried to take him to Cub Scouts with little success.  We would arrive at the church and he would either want to hang out in the janitor's closet and look at the vacuum cleaners, or run around and be disruptive.  This would necessitate a quick trip home to drop him back off with his dad, which would also trigger a temper tantrum.  In short, it was more trouble than it was worth.

This last Wednesday we got ready to go and Logan said, "I want to come."  I told him no, explained that he couldn't and why he couldn't but he became more and more upset.  He got upset to the point that he was crying and exclaiming plaintively, "I want to come!  I want to come!"  In other words, "Don't leave me behind.  I want to be like everyone else."

It broke my heart and I couldn't say no.

So Logan put on a Cub Scout shirt and we went.  I fully anticipated having to bring him home again that evening, but that didn't happen.

The Cub Scout leaders turned out to be a sweet couple that had raised a child on the spectrum.  Their son, a really cool, sweet guy, just earned his Eagle Scout. I tentatively peered into the doorway and they ushered Logan in, shooed me away and said, "It will be fine.  We'll make it work."

That night, Logan stayed.  He participated in all the activities.  He earned five or six beads and was voted Scout of the day.  Things that any normal nine year old can do, but for him was unprecedented.  It was amazing and at the same time, shaming.  I should have tried harder to include him. I sometimes feel like there is so much about my son that I still don't know, and he surprises me all the time.  He wasn't ready before.  But that night, he was.

That night I called my mother and told her all about what had happened.  I cautioned her.  "I'm not getting my hopes up; next time he may not want to go at all." And she said something so simple and so profound,

"We have to celebrate the little victories when they come."

A truth to carry with you, into the spectrum and throughout life itself.

The Year of the Pirate

Well, I can't say I'm sad that 2013 is over.  What a difficult year.  My husband and I both, on separate occasions, contracted  unrelated, life threatening infections.  It took him a year to recover.  Mine was less serious, although it caused part of my face to blow up like a balloon.  Two trips to the ER and one scar later, I was fine.  I don't even mind that scar so much...it's on my chin and now I can become a pirate.

This year was difficult in so many other ways.  Family moved away, lost jobs, found jobs.  Friends left, suddenly and unexpectedly and painfully. Relationships changed.  It was a year of goodbyes and a year of pain and a year of a lot of uncertainty.  So of course, I welcomed the new year with open arms.

The thing I like most about the New Year is that it's full of possibility.  I have so many plans for this year that I get excited just thinking about it. I have two semesters of college to think about and look forward to, and a lot of other things in the works.

The other thing about plans  is that you can make them all you want to, but there is never any certainty that they will work out or that things will go the way you want.  Probably one of the most difficult lessons I learned in 2013 was that I cannot control everything.  It's a no-brainer. No one can control everything. Even in life-in your own, personal life-there are variables that are outside of your reach.  Things, or probably more accurately, people, will pull the rug out from under you, drop you on your ass and leave your head spinning.  Things that you never in a million years thought would happen, will happen.  And then you can waste a whole lot of time crying and worrying over what happened, and why did you make a/b/c decision that led to that particular scenario, and you can spend hours pulling it apart, wondering what went wrong and what you could have done differently.  You can try, until you are exhausted physically and emotionally, to succeed at something, fix something, apologize for something, and still, the best you can do may not be good enough in the end. And I'm here to tell you:

Let it go.

I spent the better part of 2013 making these mistakes:  looking at different situations, blaming myself for things outside of my control, apologizing for things that I had no business apologizing for.  And you know what?  It was a huge waste of time! It was a waste of time because a) I wasn't the only person involved in a/b/c scenarios b) I couldn't go backwards and undo whatever I did, or re-do things that I thought weren't good enough,  so why worry about it now?  and c)some situations really are outside of your control, like serious illness or the choices that someone else makes.

This year, your time can be best spent caring for and loving the people who honest to gosh love you and would never desert you.  Your time can be best spent improving yourself, either through learning something new or taking care of yourself.  Your time can be best spent creating a level of spirituality for yourself that you haven't reached yet.  For whatever that means to you...drawing closer to God, staying on the eightfold path, or simply creating peace in your life where none existed before.  And your time can be best spent serving others..whether they deserve it or not...this is one of the best ways to learn more about yourself and draw your focus outward instead of inward.

I wish all of my readers a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2014!

Dark Humor

Today I picked my son up from school.  It was already a strange day...the kids, getting out at 130 and 145 respectively for Christmas vacation, the fact that I was running on three hours sleep due to Logan's sleeplessness the night before (330am...want to watch Bee Movie?  Anyone?)  And the fact that Nathan was already done with home school just combined for a weird kind of day.

When I picked Logan up, his teacher assured me with a smile on her fact that he was "Sugared up and ready to go!  Merry Christmas!"  I love her.  I love his teacher.  She has done so much for us.  I will say nothing more.

Well, because the schedule was so messed up, and because Logan was so full of sugar and dye, he was extra cranky this afternoon.  By extra-cranky, I mean lots of constant yelling, screaming, and just general inability to deal.  He finally went in the bathroom and just sat in the tub naked and yelled and yelled.

I know this because I had his brother check on him.  He was sitting there yelling, "I need help!" when in fact, nothing was wrong.  So we left him alone because if he needed to yell, then maybe we should just let him.  Sometimes autistic children yell and stim a lot after school because they've had to "hold it in" all day.  When Logan gets in the car, depending on the kind of day he's had, he's either calm or he lets loose with a verbal smorgasboard sure to tickle your eardrums and rattle your nerves.  It's not his fault, he can't control it very much, and that's just the way it is.

So I sat here at the computer, chatting with a friend to keep my mind off of the total chaos in the other room, and the yelling continued, and all I could think was, "Polar bears yell when they poop."

Seriously, have you seen this meme, on the internet? You know, I don't know if it's true.  I know almost nothing about polar bears, except that they are more vicious than normal bears, extremely territorial, do not drink Coke, and it's best to just stay away.  But there's this pic going around on Pinterest that states the aforementioned interesting fact.  I will spare you a visual.

And what has this got to do with anything, you ask?

Nothing.  It has to do with nothing.  It has only to do with the fact that when things are completely chaotic, and you can't do anything about it, you have to find humor somewhere.  You can't sit there and cry or stay angry at a situation that is beyond your control.  EMT's do it all the time.  So do police officers.  Because the alternative of truly thinking about the situation in all of its stark clarity, and truly considering what is happening, especially when you can't do anything about it doesn't help anyone.  Humor is my coping mechanism. So is talking to friends, asking them to unload (because if I'm listening to their problems, I'm not thinking of mine), and chocolate.

Now I'm going to go in the kitchen, finish dinner, and sing.

 Logan sounds better than me.  Trust me.

Dinosaurs in the Backyard

When Logan was six years old, a child psychiatrist told us that he did not engage in pretend play, and that he had no imagination.

Logan is nine years old now.  Today he ran into the house from the backyard, breathless and excited.  He came up to me and said, "Dinosaurs in the backyard!"

"Really?" I said.  "Dinosaurs?"

"Dinosaurs get you!" he proclaimed.

"Well, be careful out there, " I cautioned, and he was gone.

A little while later he came into the kitchen with a plastic container that I had just washed and the bread pan from my bread machine.  Both had remnants of grass and dirt in them.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"This dinosaur's food, this dinosaur's water," he said.

"Okay.  Put it in the sink."

And he did, and then he disappeared again.  I didn't care about the dishes.  Dishes can be washed.  This is what I cared about:

A boy playing outside, pretending things that little boys pretend.  Of course, it's a few years behind what a normal nine year old is into...but I cannot describe the happiness and satisfaction I feel, watching him come into the house, talking about his "dinosaurs" that he "fed".  And I think that the more I discover of Logan's little world, the more I love it.  These are the days that make the other days worth it.  The days when he's hard to deal with or won't sleep...dinosaurs make up for it.

Comfort Food

Yesterday, because we were going to get a lot of ice, I decided to make some good old fashioned comfort food.  One or two people have asked for the recipe.  I have to say this is not my recipe, I got it off of Pinterest, but it turned out really well.  I would suggest pairing it with some baked beans or a green salad.


Chicken and Dumpling Casserole

2 chicken breasts, cooked and shredded (You can use a rotisserie chicken to save time, or do like I did and steam two chicken breasts in your steamer with some veggies).
2 cups chicken broth
1/2 stick butter
2 cups Bisquick (or generic baking mix)
2 cups whole milk
1 can cream of chicken soup (cream of chicken with herbs is better, or do like me and mix it with some Kick'n Chick'n spice)
3 tsp chicken bouillon granules (I used Wyler's, and I only used  1 1/2 tsp because I don't like the salt content)
1/2 tsp dried sage (I used 1 tsp)
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt or more to taste

DIRECTIONS:  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Layer 1:  9x13 in casserole dish:  melt 1 stick butter .  Spread shredded chicken over butter and sprinkle black pepper and sage over this layer.  DO NOT STIR.
Layer 2:  In a small bowl, whisk milk and Bisquick.  Slowly pour over chicken.  DO NOT STIR.  Layer 3:  In a medium bowl, whisk together chicken broth and cream of chicken soup, and bouillon.  Once blended, slowly pour over Bisquick layer.  Again, DO NOT STIR.  Bake casserole for 30-40 minutes or until the top is golden brown.


Vegetarian Modification:  I do have friends who are vegetarians and welcome their suggestions on modifying this dish.  I suggest substituting the chicken with salmon, the chicken broth, cream of chicken soup, and chicken bouillon with vegetable broth, cream of potato or other favorite vegetable cream soup, and vegetable bouillon.  Substitute the sage with dill and the pepper with lemon pepper.  Then follow the directions as needed.