Aspie Dad

We had AspieBoy’s first annual review for his IEP this morning. More on that later (I’ll add things to this post). But first I need to work…

[later:] All in all, the meeting went well. Or as well as any encounter with a large entrenched bureaucracy goes. Here are a few late night tidbits from today’s meeting.

Some background: AspieBoy is three weeks past the cutoff for Kindergarten and there has been some recurring discussion -mostly from the school district- concerning getting him into K this upcoming year because of his size (almost 48″ at 4 and a half) and academics. If his social skills were on a par with those, I think we would be enthusiastic. As it stands he would be the youngest and likely largest in his class with (cough) poor social skills.

So we did a ‘kill -9′ on that notion. Fortunately both of our outside advocates that we brought into the process, (a Ph.D. psychologist and a M.Ed. educator who runs his day care) were right on board with that. He can skip a year of two of High School if that is appropriate and he wants to do that.

Some of the ‘cookie-cutter’ process of the District showed, but by and large, the IEP was tailored to AspieBoy. He was assessed as knowing all the letters and their sounds, most of the compound letter sounds and counting to somewhere around 30.

So, it was confusing to me when the first objective of next year’s IEP was ‘learn letter sounds.’ I said something I thought was clever and pertinent, but which Aspie(?)Mom informed me that, in fact, ‘no, it wasn’t.’

Some social recovery was made by suggesting that AspieAdults still need social training. And, they will remove the ‘learning letters’ goal and replace it with some fine motor skill work. Ultimately, thats what we wanted, so that is progress. And who says Aspies can’t learn social skills? We can be instructed, but that doesn’t mean we understand how NTs think.

And they wonder why I do research instead of public relations…

All in all the speech path said things were going well. AspieBoy is now doing complete sentence non-sequiturs (”there’s a bug on the sidewalk!”) rather than some sort of linguistic white noise when he seeks an interrupt. This is a big improvement over biting the kid next to him to get your attention.

Both of his parents are liable to insert Monty Python (or other popular culture) non-sequiturs into conversations, so we may be shoveling against the tide here. Or, he will come to see us as sad, sad social misfits over and above typical teen angst as we babble about ‘bring me a shrubbery!’ within earshot of his friends.

(yet another aside–I dimly remember being this way and how awkward and painful it was. I wish I knew how to reach him earlier than waiting for him to realize that it is not working and he better ask for some help. sigh.)

must go. tired. it’s 12:40am.

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First, welcome to Jannalou, a new member of the Autism Hub. One of the first post of her’s I read was Life as “Other” where she wrote:

I sometimes feel less than qualified to speak (or write) about disability; I mean, if I was able to grow up and turn out relatively well-adjusted without a diagnosis, am I really all that disabled?

Now, I just loved that because it resonates so completely… She continues:

All my life, I have known I was different. I used to come home from school and cry because I felt that I had no friends, I felt that nobody liked me (though I have realised that many people did actually like me when I was young), and I didn’t understand why I was so separate and cut off from the world I was a part of.

When you grow up “other”, as I did, you learn that “difficult” is just another word for “life”. And at first, you don’t realise that other people don’t have the same problems you do.

Life is just harder for those who are different. We think, for some reason, that it’s this hard for everyone. Except it isn’t. And when we realise that our lives are more difficult, that hurts. It hurts a lot. Because difficulties cost us opportunities and friendships and relationships and jobs.

Which is so true. But, when ‘different’ is all you know, it’s all that exists. But, we try, and when we realize that we have a voice, we begin to speak…

[FWIW: The title of this post comes from a John Hartford song]

A couple of days ago I could not believe it when I read that a recruiter knowingly signed this young man up. I’m glad this has been righted. This would have likely been a disaster.

During one of my bouts of depression (I think I was 19) I decided to drop out of college and enlist in the military. It seemed like a good idea to me. Vietnam was over. There were no troops ‘in harms way.’ Sounded good to me. I would pick up some much needed structure and end up with the G.I. Bill for college after several years.

My father was much wiser. He was a couple of states away — they had moved the summer I graduated from High School. He got in the car after we had hung up (I had called to tell them of my intentions one night) and drove overnight to be there to knock on my door at 8am the next day.

See, I had thought this was a step towards taking responsibility for my self and ‘being a man.’ (Note: my Dad never used that term on me. That was coming from elsewhere.) He had a differing opinion and came up to prevent me from enlisting.

I couldn’t see it at the time, but he knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep my mouth shut during basic training and would end up in the brig, probably getting an ‘unsuitable’ discharge. I’m pretty sure my Dad knew what he was talking about, he was a member of the local American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts.

[Sorry, the only link I saw was a javascript video link off of CNN which won't work here]

We should be listed on the Autism Assembly site soon.

This website is part of the autism-assembly, this is a coalition of members of the autistic community who share the common goal of seeking acceptance for those on the autistic spectrum, who aim to educate about autism, and who are not seeking a cure for autism. This is part of the global autism rights movement.

I can not emphasize the “not seeking a cure” part enough…

It was just great. We left Aspie(?) Mom to work on her dissertation in relative peace several times this weekend. We went to a couple of different parks where Aspie Boy and I did the usual round of swings, slides and rides, plus a little soccer ball kicking. Not one meltdown! [Aspie Boy did OK as well (joke!).]

No, really, I was really proud of him, he is learning to manage his expectations pretty well. Especially the dreaded “no, don’t do that” and “it will be time to go soon.”

What I find truly humbling, is when I recognize a reaction that I have that can only be directly derivative of my own upbringing. There are so many things that I remember that my parents did that I now realize I only saw the last part of because I was off being Aspie. It’s quite interesting…