All over the place

It's been an interesting week.  I'm still not sure what to do with J and his mood swings, or with Z and whether his OCD is just the Autism or if it's a side effect of medication.  That being said we had a great week with the boys.  J played outside several times and continues to show himself as a fun, quirky child.  Z is acting more and more like a 9yo typical boy by getting into dirt and insisting on bringing all kinds of bugs and creatures into the house to examine more closely.  

I think, for me, I struggle with being too much in the "moment".  When we are in the midst of J running away from home and being worried about the "nosy" neighbor calling the cops about the child being attacked by two grown men I tend to go into fix-it mode.  Planning out how we are going to keep this from happening again.  The reality is that that was a moment.  It was one moment.  There were a few moments at various times of the week, a couple at school and a couple at home but they were all that, just moments.  I think for me I need to realize that until the moments become more hours or days I need to realize that they need to be dealt with, not necessarily fixed.  By focusing on the moments I'm possibly missing the big picture and treating minutia when, in reality, things are going pretty good.

Since it's Sunday, I'm going to wax spiritual for a moment.  I think this is what I do spiritually as well.  I get caught up in the moments of this life.  I focus on what is happening here in this life and how to fix it and how hard it is and allow it to swallow me up sometimes.  The reality is that this life is but a moment in the span of eternity, LOL, and for that I am grateful.

MAMA vs the Mouse....this means war

Alright.  I've had it.  I have been more than patient with these mice.  I've tried to trap them humanely and have approached them in the most PETA sensitive way possible.  That is now officially over.

This mama is mad.

You know what this mouse did?  He chewed one of my Vera Bradley bags!!  Can you believe it???!!!???  The audacity!!  The little @#$%#@ thinks he can come in here, eat my food, poop on my floors and eat my VERA bags???  He's got another think coming!!

I admit, this was one of my bags that I got from the thrift store and I did leave it on the floor with some crackers I had not finished from the day before open inside it......BUT, it's VERA!!!!!

Where can I buy dynamite?

What a week!

Sometimes things are really going great and sometimes things are really a challenge, and sometimes they are really great and really a challenge all at the same time.  Well, we are in the middle of one of those times.  This is my get real time and that was why I started this blog.  To let people see the real side of being a family dealing with autism and for other families of kids with autism to see that they are not alone, so here's where we get real.

We have had a week.  It seems like both boys have hit the wall this week and I'm still reeling.  I have to preface this statement with the disclaimer that this type of thing happens for us typically once or possibly twice a year.  It almost seems to cycle for the boys, but prior to this they have been on different cycles.  Z's cycle has been to be more difficult in the fall and J's has been pretty much during this time but they have typically been over their issues by the time the other child hits their cycle so we just go from one cycle to the other.  Tiring but not overwhelming.  All that to say, we have been here before.  This time, however, both boys suddenly seem to be on the same cycle.  They both seem to suddenly be not handling things very well and we are struggling to figure out what is the underlying cause.  

The biggest issue is that they are both, at the same time as they are struggling, having huge advances with social awareness, interaction, communication, etc.  We see the amazing things we saw last week where they played together but this week where J wanted to kill himself because I had him get off the computer and Z kept getting into the garage and climbing onto the minivan because he could not stop obsessing over going to Toys R Us.  What is this?  What craziness takes over my poor kids minds?  Are the medications causing this or do I need to increase their doses to help them cope?  Do we lose the interaction and communication if we lose the obsession and mood swings?  

My greatest fear is that we will spend another summer like last summer where we had so much of the summer spent with J in the hospital and I'm worried that Z is going that same path.  I feel so much like I am in a constant battle with a huge dark monster that is Autism that sometimes is amazing and beautiful and smart and funny and cute.  Do I fight it?  Do I embrace it?  Do I mimic it?  Do I ignore it?  And the biggest question of all, when is "it" Autism and when is "it" my wonderful, beautiful, amazing, child?

Why would a faithful God?  Tonight I think I'm going to have to just sit quietly and wait for the answer.

Little Miracles

We had something really fun and exciting happen the other day.  For many of you this may seem like a very everyday thing but for us it was very exciting!

We had taken a walk to our local Dairy Queen (I love Buster Bars, YUM!) for an after dinner treat.  Z loves to ride in his wagon so we walk over as a family.  When we were sitting and eating our treats J decided to take a run down the front of the strip mall.  Z noticed him doing this and immediately put his ice cream cone down on the table and ran after his brother giggling and laughing.  Both boys ran the full length of the strip mall and back again.  Z got back in his wagon and began to eat his cone.  J decided to run again so Z, once again, put down his cone and ran after his brother laughing and giggling again.  Both boys did this several times until J got tired and started walking instead of running.  Z wanted to run again and kept saying "running".

Again, this seems like just your plain old run of the mill brothers playing together, however, our boys have NEVER played together.  Up until this point in our families life the boys have played next to each other or in the same room (sometimes) but not doing the same thing and interacting with each other.  This is a brand new thing and has just started this week!!

So, this momma is really excited for the amazing Mother's Day gift her boys have her that they spent years making.

Thank you!

Crushing Blows

Many people believe that children with Autism don't have feelings.  The thing is they do, they just struggle with other people's feelings and sometimes understanding their own.  Take J, for instance, he has intense feelings.  He feels things so deeply (thus his empathy for the impending death of the mice haunting our house) that he struggles with how to process those feelings.  Sometimes those feelings burst out of him in very loud laughter, screams, yelling, etc.  The interesting thing is that J struggles with identifying his feelings.  We can see him looking anxious and ask if he's feeling anxious.  He will tell us no. In fact he may be incredibly anxious but not be able to recognize that that is what he is feeling.  Sometimes it may take him a day or more to realize that he was feeling anxious at that time 24 or more hours before.

J also struggles with understanding what other people are feeling.  Most likely because he doesn't have a clue what he is feeling so how in the world can he figure out what someone else may feel like.  Besides, he's not them, how should he know what they would feel like?  It's an amazing train of thought but it does make for some difficult situations.  This is one of the issues that led us to placing J in Giant Steps which is a specialized school for children with Autism specifically.  We realized that he struggled so much with both identifying his own feelings and imagining what someone else would do/feel/think, that we needed some pretty intense intervention.  This was after several meltdowns at our previous public school when J melted down after being asked to write a letter to a dead president.  He still melts down when asked to imagine what someone else would think but the school he is in now is better able to manage these meltdowns and get him back focused on the rest of the day.  Whew.

So all this leads me to the news of the day.  Maurice Sendak has passed away.  I remember him from his writing of Where The Wild Things Are.  We knew J can take these things to heart and we wanted to make sure he knew so we told him tonight about Maruice's passing.  J's immediate response was, "He also write Little Bear.  I liked Little Bear much better."  I had forgotten that Sendak had also penned the Little Bear series that J still watches on Nick Jr.  J processes this for a while and talks about some favorite episodes he has.  At this time Brandon mentions that many times people die in threes.  I have to admit.  My heart sank.  I started to panic, where was Brandon going with this?  I held me breath as Brandon went on to express to J that Moose A Moose and Z had already died so therefore Sendak was the third death.

For those of you who don't know the Moose and Z story Nick Jr had these two characters narrating their daytime programming for many years.  Recently they stopped using them and have started using Bob the Builder and Dora instead.  There has been a huge outpouring of rage on the part of many parents about this and the parents are calling for the return of Moose and Z.

When J found out that Moose and Z were gone it was a crushing blow to him.  He could not believe that Nick Jr would do this to him!  Oh the humanity.  I sat in the front seat of our van and rolled my eyes.  I have to admit.  Part of me is so proud of him for having such strong emotions, especially for these two maligned cartoon characters.

I advised J to write a strongly worded letter to Nickelodeon expressing his outrage at their unfortunate treatment of his beloved characters.  He looked at me very confused and said, "Um, if it's ok with you I think I'll just go watch SpongeBob."

Crushing blow.

The Haircut

Ever since Z was little he has hated having his hair cut.  I thought, at first, that is was because of the sensory overload with clippers and people touching his head.  I'm wondering now if it's because he just doesn't like change and having his hair cut off is a pretty big change.  Take tonight for example.

I walked in the door from work and was met with Z asking for Popeye's Chicken.  Now let's go off on a rabbit trail for a minute.  Z LOVES Popeye's Chicken with his whole heart.  I've tried very hard to make chicken that was close to tasting like Popeye's but no luck.  We've even had to drive to Popeye's early in the morning to show Z that the restaurant was closed to get him to stop asking for it, over, and over, and over...well, you get the idea.  So, when I heard Z asking for Popeye's Chicken and knowing that I had no formal plan other than Brandon working on tenderizing some ribs in the slow cooker I thought this was a good opportunity to get something.

Z's hair was getting too long!  It was starting to curl on the ends and with the weather turning hotter I thought it was high time for a summer buzz cut.  Thus, my inspired idea.  Z gets Popeye's Chicken after he gets a haircut. Being the cheap people we are and learning from experience that people do not take kindly to screams in the salon they are getting their hair cut in, we have hair clippers of our own.  The big trick is getting Z to sit for a haircut.

Let me give you some background.  We found this fantastic place that cuts hair in Schaumburg.  Love it!!  They have cute cars for the kids to sit in and a play area for them to play in.  They even have people who will watch your kids in the play area so YOU can get a haircut.  Inspired!  So we took Z there.  Magically, the first trip went rather well.  The second trip, not so much.  We pulled into the parking lot and Z immediately started to scream.  I opened the door to the minivan and had to wrestle him out of the car.  It took us about 15 minutes of wrestling him towards the door (we are still outside at this point) before I finally gave up.  The shag look is in, right?  So we left it alone for a while until the poor kid could barely see past his bangs.  This time we once again pulled into the parking lot and, once again, huge meltdown.  So at that point we bought the clippers.

Now, you would think that having Z in his home with all his favorite people and things around him would make him much happier about getting his hair cut.  Nope.  Z's haircuts look one of two ways.  Either I swoop and cut in the bathtub (don't even think about looking to see if it's an even haircut, poor kid looks like he cut his own hair but hey, he can see!) or one of us wrestles him while the other one buzzes the kids head. The second approach is especially dangerous since you never know when you may get whacked either by Z or the clippers.  I do tend to get a bit crazy when cutting hair.  Either way the hair gets cut we end up with a mess, someone (or everyone) ends up really sweaty, and/or we swear we will never do this again.

So tonight was the night where I decided to cut Z's hair, dangling the promise of Popeye's Chicken as a carrot in front of him ( you would have thought it was a carrot for all the good it did).  We found out that bribes do not work with our son.  I swooped and cut to get the longer pieces cut and then we finished up with a buzz cut.  I think we made progress.  Z actually sat still for most of the swoop and cut and once the clippers started doing their job he settled down for that part too.  Brandon got a bit beat up and I was on the floor wrestling with Z at one point but the end result is that Z got his summer haircut.  Whew.

I think the best part, for me, was afterwards where he made a point of looking at himself in the mirror to see what his new haircut looked like.  He's never done that before.

So, what are we left with?  Well, Z still hates haircuts and I still give him as short a haircut as I can so we can go as long as possible between cuts, however, he sat still for more than he usually does and actually wanted to see what he looked like afterwards.  I consider that progress.  Sometimes you have to celebrate the little things.  They really do add up.

Here's to slow hair growth!!

(Anyone want a haircut?)