Well, Howdy
Sorry that the posting has been light here. I’ve got lots to talk about….shall we start with an update on the rascals?

Maybe we’ll just stick to rascal #1, my oldest.

Here’s (left to right) rascal #2, me and rascal #1. So y’all can put these words of mine with a face.

Sort of a recap for those who might stumble upon my blog without prior knowledge of him/us: My nearly 13 year old son has autism. For the last couple of years he’s been in public school with lots of support and with really nice folks working with him. He is possibly the most laid back and happy person, autistic or otherwise, to ever walk this green earth. In keeping with this demeanor, he has very little internal motivation to learn or progress his knowledge concerning anything other than his current passion of movies. Oh, and cereal, let us not forget the current fascination with cereals of all kinds.

I have dreams for him, though. Not the dreams that I have for my other boys, necessarily, but dreams for his future. And my dreams don’t center on his being a professional TV or movie watcher. There is much for him to learn. Particularly, I want him to really advance in his reading comprehension skills, basic math and conceptual time understanding, and his social skills need to be more generalized.

This summer, I had growing anxiety about him and his future. He is just so distraction-prone. And so it feels that the time that he has to learn — already limited — is even more precious. I just didn’t want to waste it. I also didn’t want to look back on this time in my life and wish for his sake that I had possessed the courage to shoulder more of the burden for his education. Letting him go to school full time would have been so easy. But I wanted more one-on-one instruction time for him somehow. And, I just couldn’t ask the state of Missouri to do that for me.

So, I decided toward the end of the summer that I wanted to do a dual enrollment with him. Heaven help me, I think that it is going to work out. He goes to school for 180 minutes a week — so a couple of mornings a week for an hour and a half. At school, they are working on conceptual time concepts, reading comprehension and he has some goals that he is working on with the speech and language pathologist. Everything else is up to me.

Right now, we’re working on the Writing With Ease program by Susan Wise Bauer. In math, he is about to move on to multiplication and a review of addition and subtraction. We’re usingTouchMath for that. We’re working on reading comprehension by several different means. He’s started the Spanish program offered by Daniel Tammet on his Optimnem website. (It hit me later that I’ve got to learn Spanish, now that he is. Bonus?) We’re working on spelling and grammar, too, although these are very easy for him. I decided that it would be good to review and to have a few subjects at which he naturally excels. We are working on communication skills such as making inferences, comparing/contrasting, paraphrasing/retelling, social communication and problem solving by completing the No-Glamour Language Cards. Also, we’re working on his being able to sign his name in cursive. I know that sounds crazy, but because of his fine motor, he mainly types everything. Cursive has never been important. But, we do want him to be able to sign his name and it not look like a kindergartner did it. So we’re working on it letter by letter. In the coming weeks, I’m going to add physical exercise and hopefully find some willing volunteers who will participate with conversation training with him.

The conversation training is one of his major goals and, as his mother, it is something that I can prepare him for and something that we can even do social stories about but it isn’t something that I can do with him. Why? Because he communicates very well with me. In fact, he does a great job communicating with all of us who live here. It is great that he can do that, but he really needs to work on being able to talk well with someone who isn’t so well known to him. He just needs tons of practice with that.

So, if you want to come over and talk to my boy….by all means please drop by.

Anyone, anyone? I’m serious, here.

Anyway, that is my long-winded explanation about what I’ve been up to lately. That, and the last month has been the lowest of my life health-wise. Nothing drastic, I just got laid low by an infection followed by a reaction to an antibiotic that took me a few weeks to get over. And now I have another sinus infection….of course. Will I be taking an antibiotic? Not likely. Come on immune system, you can do it!

Have a good weekend, everybody.