What a wonderful blog post. I am doing a photographic project on this exact subject and you have summed it up perfectly. Family is what you make it and not what society tells you it its. Remembering to live and to love.

You’ve grown so much in all the time that I’ve known you, and even though changes have been gradual, they also seem so inevitable that it seems the peace has always been because it always would come to be.

Don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone else.

Alain

Not including the noise and stress that often come with these occasions. Christmas is its own special brand of stressful for just about everyone, but a child’s birthday should be fun by his or her standards. If those standards are a quiet day spinning a wheel on a toy car, then so be it! It’s his or her day after all! Would anyone out there want to be dragged into something they absolutely *hate* doing on their birthday? No. That would be discourteous, wouldn’t it? (Isn’t there some sort of social rule about that? I’m sure there is…)

A kid needs to just be a kid once in a while. From what I’ve seen many autistic children are quite imaginative and don’t often require the props (toys) that most kids need in order to help them imagine things or have fun.

That’s not to say that other children lack imagination: How many kids play with the boxes their toys come in more than the toys? I always think of Calvin from the “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip with his transmogrifier (a big cardboard box). That’s got to say something about kids and imagination!

Which professional set the standard for play anyway?

Life for a kid should not be 24 hours of therapy a day. It should be fun at times… on his terms. Especially birthdays and holidays. Just my thoughts on this one.

I love the quote: “Our children come to us with a deep destiny — here again, some say spirit — that needs to be heard. It must be honored.”

Their personalities, likes and dislikes must also be honoured, IMO. ALL children are human and humanity comes with individuality that must be honoured, nourished and respected if it is to thrive… a fact many people seem to neglect.

Just my thoughts. :^)

I couldn’t agree more. Everyone must find their own pace and their own affinities. Adam and I like to get out, even if we are limited in some ways. We are trying to find our way into the community, which is not so easy. I spend hours every day writing to people, trying to find things for him to do, because he CAN do things and can’t do other things, or the pace at which he can do things needs to be understood.

I don’t think it should be so difficult for autistic people and their families to have to find things to do, and contribute in some way. This may succeed or it may fail. Like all things, we have to try or else we do not know what either we enjoy, or what we are capable of doing.

Adam is also capable of understanding things which other people don’t always believe he understands. All of a sudden, though, he may blurt out something (showing understanding) and people are surprised. He is capable of learning about other people.

Anyway, we are in the process of asking where we are able to volunteer a little. I want to see how it goes. We had one nibble from an org in Toronto. I’m hoping someone will want to give us a chance.

After writing this post, I did two neat things with Adam tonight. I asked him the question in the theatre program, “What is a promise.” Adam typed, “a promise is a very good thing.” Then we worked on Sentence Builder (an ipad app) and i video taped myself doing things that Adam could copy easier than if I was right in front of him. So we had a busy evening. Off to bed…