Autism- its all around us

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of this post, I wanted to share something I noticed- Autism. It's everywhere. One of my favorite things to watch is the Daily Show with Jon Stewart- I heart some irreverent, politically incorrect humor. I was listening to the show from Tuesday night, when low and behold, Autism came up. More specifically, Dennis Leary was a guest star on the show and was discussing his recent book and the chapter called Autism Schautism which incensed the whole community. He went on to defend himself stating that the paragraph was taken out of context. What he really meant is that there are parents who get their children diagnosed with ASD or ADD or any other number of syndromes so that they can get free help. Right, because that belief is so aptly expressed by calling people with Autism stupid and lazy. The mind reels.

Anyway, lets talk about Little Bug. He had a pretty good night last night. Only 1 meltdown, which is great. He had a school field trip to Odyssey yesterday- think Chuckee Cheese and McDonald's Play Place and bounce houses all rolled into one glorious sensory experience. He had a blast for the most part. He was able to deal for about an hour and half and things slowly went down hill from there. A friend recommended beefing up Little Bug's sensory diet and Nick and I think this is a great way to do it. They have slides that look a lot like the squeeze machine Temple Grandin came up with and another one that has a series of rolling pins. Basically when you slide down, the rolling pins run over your body and apply some good pressure. Little Bug loved these and had the route from the bottom of the slide to these slides mapped in his little brain after one trip.

As Nick and I journey down this path together, we realize more and more about Little Bug every day. We realize that his limit for commotion or newness is about 2 hours. After that, all bets are off. This is something that we are trying to get Nick's parents to understand, but there has been some resistance. For Thanksgiving, we told them that because there are going to be people there that Little Bug doesn't see often, we will come for three hours and then leave. We also created the boundary that if Little Bug has a meltdown, we would leave as there isn't a safe place for him there and you can't really escape people. So of course, they called and told us that dinner would be at 2:00 PM but to come down in the morning. *exasperated head shake*

Anyway, Little Bug has quite a few new signs-
Rainbow
Carrot
Pear
Grapes
Fruit
Lettuce
White

and five new words-
Ca-cat
No- nose
Juice
Dorie
Daddee

All said, he has 53 spoken words and 101 signs! This is amazing!!!!! Finally, Little Bug will begin OT today and Nick is going to push our OT L about the self injury and routines as we don't believe these have anything to do with speech, but his need for certain kinds of sensory input. More on that later.