Creature of Habit

Little Bug is a creature of habit, routine, and structure. He likes everything to have a place. He is generally a mess maker who likes to have things clean at the end of the day. He is also big on lining things up- cars, cups, applesauce, whatever he can get his hands on. For him, order seems to be extremely calming and the act of creating order through lines is a way he calms himself down.
He hasn’t done this in a while. I was holding my breath, waiting to see if it had gone away for good.

I realized last night as we were playing, it has simply changed. Now, he needs to line things up and have the same order of events when playing. For example, he lines up his cars on his garage, then he has to send the cars down in a specific order- Lightening, Sally, and Thomas. I wasn’t paying attention and disrupted this cycle. I don’t think I have ever seen such a look on his face. He looked as though he had been hurt.

I have to admit, I am not sure what to do about this. In the grand scheme of things, I am not sure how big of a deal this is. When playing with his cars, does it really make a difference? I get that the root of the problem- scripted play and a strict adherence to order- is what matters. What I am unsure of, is how much do we change it?

Everyone goes on about curing Autism. I am not sure there needs to be a cure. Instead of a cure, I think we need to help people reach their highest potential and realize that there is place for diversity. This is a careful line and different for everyone. For Little Bug, we need to work on unprompted speech and sign. He may have 100 words, but he can only say 10 and sign 20 unprompted. Other than those, his speech is scripted. I agree that in that case, we need to intervene and get him to become unscripted in his speech.

When it comes to things like order, calming activities- “stimming”, etc. I am not sure how much it matters. We all have our little quirks and he may have more than others, but that doesn’t make it bad. It just means there is diversity and place for it in our world.

In other news, we received our paperwork to apply for a financial hardship in order to have Little Bug's OT and ST covered. We are crossing our fingers and hoping that it works out. It was kinda difficult to do- they wanted to know our medical expenses for the last 12 months. Which is like asking how many grains of sand are on the beach? Little Bug has had 1 surgery, 2 CT scans, 1 set of x rays, three visits to his surgeon at Children's hospital, three visits to the ER in Tacoma, several Urgent Care visits, and innumerable visits to his PCP. They wanted to know what we paid for them and what they actually cost. I didn't realize until yesterday how much we have spent on medical care- its astronomical! Wish us luck.