Archives for August 2011

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Running In The Rain

August 3, 2011 By

This morning I woke up to the gentle pitter-patter of rain against the window.

Actually, that’s a lie. I woke up to the alarm on my phone going off, making a blaring, raucous noise that set every single one of my nerve endings on edge.

Once my central nervous system had gotten over the initial shock of being awake, then I heard the gentle pitter-patter of rain against the window.

Damn.

I wanted to go running, and I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to run in the rain. Thanks to all of the dental goings-on of the last few days, it had been about a week since I had run at all. I was not in the mood for dodging puddles and having rain drip into my eyes. I was in the mood for a nice, uncomplicated run that didn’t require any actual thinking.

Who’s in any fit state to think at five in the morning, anyway?

I had a choice to make. Don’t run at all, run in the rain, or run on the treadmill.

I knew that not running at all would lead to a day filled with angst and guilt, and I had no desire to see the inside of a gym (almost a month of showering in the gym due to our dearth of hot water at home has left me a little gym-weary). So that left me with no choice but to run in the rain.

I threw on my running clothes and added a hat as a measure against the rain. Music cued, training watch set, and off I went. Following the logic that the faster I went, the sooner I’d have this over and done with, I set off at a hearty pace.

The run went surprisingly well. Not only did I find the rain to be refreshing and soothing, I actually managed to maintain the pace that I set at the beginning. Usually when I charge out of the starting blocks like a racehorse on steroids, I kind of peter out after three kilometres or so. Today, though, I finished my 5.65km in just a touch over 31 minutes, at a very respectable pace of around 5:42 minutes per kilometre.

I really should wake up more often feeling half-hearted about running. These runs always turn out to be the best ones.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/angee09/2264408983/. This photo has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: Early Morning Running, Half-Heartedness, Rain, running, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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Letting Go Of The Old

August 2, 2011 By

Yesterday afternoon, I found my living room floor. It had been missing for several years, buried beneath layers of toys that the kids have, over the years, played with and outgrown.

On several occasions, I have made efforts to organize the toys, painstakingly separating them into categories and storing like with like. But these toy organization systems that I have spent hours creating have lasted, on average, for about an hour. My older son sometimes copes with his autism meltdowns by picking up boxes of toys and dumping out the contents. Even as I wistfully watch my hours of work come to naught, I recognize that I would rather see my son throw toys around than bang his head against the wall hard enough to put holes in the drywall.

Quite apart from the side effects of autism, kids under the age of six don’t really get that the cars should go with the other cars, or that the Legos should be in the same container, or that the gazillion Mr. Potato Head parts are meant to stay together.

This weekend, me and my husband – ably assisted by our five-year-old son, took another crack at organizing the toys. But there was a difference in the way we did it this time.

A big difference.

This time, we actually got rid of stuff.

I thought getting rid of toys would be a nightmare, but once we had the buy-in of our younger son, it was actually quite easy. It was never going to be a problem where our firstborn was concerned. As long as he has his Lego, his gazillion Mr. Potato Heads, his measuring tapes, his alphabetic fridge magnets, and his math workbooks, he’s happy.

After a day of sorting, storing, and being bossed around by our five-year-old, we had reduced the volume of toys by a staggering amount. All of a sudden, we had enough toy boxes to contain all of the toys that we kept, without them spilling over onto the carpet. We rediscovered the concept of walking from one end of the living room to the other without getting Lego-shaped dents in the soles of our feet. It was an incredibly liberating experience.

There’s just one thing…

These are the toys that my kids played with when they were babies. The little teddy bears. The Winnie the Pooh ride-on toy. The blocks, the nesting cups, the First Words books. Getting rid of these remnants of my kids’ babyhood was like saying goodbye to a phase of my life, and acknowledging that my babies are no longer babies, that they are little boys.

As sentimental as I felt about the toys, what really made my breath catch in my throat was sorting through the little shoes that my kids wore as babies. It was the shoes that served as a physical reminder of how tiny they once were. As I held the shoes in my hands, the memories washed over me.

My older son’s very first pair of baby slippers, given to him by my Dad when he was just a few days old (no way am I getting rid of those).

Feeling my boy’s fingers grasp my hand with absolute trust as he tentatively walked in shoes for the first time.

My younger son’s face, alive with excitement, as he wore the shoes that were a miniature version of the ones his Dad wore.

My two boys laughing together as they splashed in rain puddles, wearing their new galoshes.

Their joyful oblivion as they tramped snow into the house in winter, leaving tiny wet footprints all over the floor.

The memories fade out and I reluctantly come back to reality, sitting there on the floor holding these tiny shoes in my hands. All but a couple of extra-special pairs must go. It is time to allow to the old to make way for the new, as my boys enter new and exciting phases of their lives.

Just because it has to be done though, that doesn’t make it easy.

It represents a letting go, and that is a bittersweet pill for any Mom to swallow.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ophilos/2564467134/ This photo has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: Childhood, Children, Getting organized, Letting Go, life, Nostalgia, parenting, Shoes, Toys Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Autism And Adolescence: Preparing For The Storm

August 1, 2011 By

I was educated in the 80’s at a girls-only Catholic school that was run by nuns. The school was high on academic excellence, and a high percentage of its graduates went on to achieve some pretty impressive things. At the same time, though, the school fell flat where it came to life skills training, and many of those people who wound up in noteworthy careers also struggled in various areas of their personal lives.

Throughout high school, I frequently found myself being summonsed to the principal’s office. The principal was a mean old nun named Sister Elizabeth, and she hated me simply because I was not a clone of my cousin, who she had taught at a different school several years previously. Every visit to her office was the same, regardless of what alleged infraction had sent me there. First, Sister Elizabeth would ask me why I couldn’t be like my cousin, and then she would put on a grave face and say, “Whether you throw a teaspoonful of mud or a bucketful of mud, you’re still throwing mud.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

I mean, I was the shy, socially awkward kid in my peer group. I wasn’t exactly a trouble-maker, and when I did hit a difficult patch in eleventh grade, my troubles were directed towards myself, and barely caused a ripple beyond my immediate group of peers. I was never caught smoking under the bleachers, I never swore at a teacher, and I never had a pack of condoms fall out of my pocket while running down the hall. Interestingly enough, the person who all of this did happen to was never, to my knowledge, sent to see the dreaded Sister Elizabeth.

What the school laughably called “sex education” happened in the form of a couple of talks given to us by outside counselors when I was somewhere around tenth grade. The talks had the following central theme: if you have sex before marriage, you will undoubtedly go through teen pregnancy and a life of poverty and deprivation, and your child will be a juvenile delinquent addicted to drugs, and when you die you will go to hell.

We were given some very basic information about the different forms of contraception, and then told not to use any of them on the grounds that they were a sin. The only acceptable forms of birth control, we were told, were abstinence and the Rhythm Method (which, of course, was reserved strictly for marriage, because of the whole going-to-hell thing associated with sex).

In retrospect, the timing and the subject matter of these sex education talks was kind of funny. By the time we had to listen to them, most of my peers had been sexually active for at least a year and probably knew more about contraception than the people delivering the talks. To my knowledge, there was only one teen pregnancy in my peer group, and it happened after we had all graduated high school.

Things today are very different. Kids are maturing physically at a younger age than my generation did, and for the most part, society seems to have let go of the notion that teens just shouldn’t have sex. There is an acceptance that they are going to do it anyway, so we may as well equip them with the tools and knowledge to do it safely. I am all for that, although I certainly wouldn’t want my boys to be experimenting with sex until they have reached  a certain level of emotional maturity.

The question that is plaguing me is this: how do I deal with this topic where my son with autism is concerned? He may only be turning eight in September, but time flies, and before we know it he will be entering the world of pre-adolescence. His physical maturation will far outpace his social development, and I worry about the time when he will have physical drives that he will not be emotionally equipped to deal with.

And so I have decided to start seeking out resources and advice on this topic now.

That way, when the storm of adolescence hits, I may have a fighting chance of helping my son navigate his way through it all.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alamosbasement/3661120171)

Filed Under: Adolescence, autism, High School, life, parenting, School, Sex, Sex Education, Social Development, Teenage Years Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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