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Lego On The Roof

July 29, 2012 By

As a person who (a) suffers from social anxiety disorders and (b) is a bit of technogeek, I have very few friends who I have actually met in person, and quite a lot who I have communicated with only through the magic of the Internet. It is always a bit of a thrill when I can actually meet – face to face – one of my online friends.

Yesterday I got that opportunity, when a friend who lives a couple of hours away came to visit with her husband and little boy. We all had a wonderful time. My friend is even more fun in person than she is online, and we already have plans in the works to meet up again.

When this absolutely delightful family left, my husband went off to his factory to admire his latest handiwork, and I settled down in the living room to watch Olympic swimming and weave words into pictures.

The kids wandered onto the deck to play, and I was easily able to keep track of them from where I was sitting. All I had to do was turn my head from time to time to make sure I could still see them, and as long as I heard the thump-thump noise of their feet hitting the wooden deck as they ran around, I knew the status quo was being comfortably maintained.

At one point when I looked around, James seemed to be somewhat taller than usual. Also, he was holding a long stick. I was so comfortable in my seat, though, and since no-one was screaming I decided that it would not be necessary to actually get out of my seat. A verbal reprimand issued at reasonable volume should suffice.

“James, put the stick down!” I called.

“But then George will try to get the Lego off the roof,” he called back.

What???

I went out to the deck, and there was James standing on the table, poking at the roof with the stick. I stepped back a few paces and almost tied my neck in a knot in my efforts to bend it far enough, and sure enough, I just managed to make out the unmistakable bright yellow glint of Lego.

“How did it get there?” I asked, perplexed.

“I threw it there,” said James in a matter-of-fact tone, as if this kind of thing happened every day.

There are times when parenting should operate on a need-to-know basis, and I decided that this was something that I did not need to know. I went into the back yard and lugged the ladder onto the deck. I set it up, and stood there looking at it with growing anxiety.

Here’s the thing. I am absolutely petrified of ladders. I always imagine that something terrible will happen while I’m up on one. The thing will collapse beneath me and I will crack open my skull and break seventeen bones. Or it will fall over and I will be trapped on the roof forever, subsisting on bugs and droplets of water from the rain gutter.

If I didn’t get the Lego, however, George would have a meltdown of epic proportions. The fact that I got up on that ladder and made my shaky way to the top is proof that I love my children more than life itself and would do absolutely anything for them.

At the top of the ladder, I had a bit of a problem. Because of where I had positioned it, I couldn’t see where the Lego was. I had only one shot at this, though. Once I got down from the ladder, there was no way in hell I was getting back up again. So I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and ran my hand along the bit of roof that was within my reach.

My hand made contact with something hard. Hoping to God that it was the Lego, I grabbed it and tossed it down onto the deck. I then made my nervous way down the ladder, only allowing myself to breathe once my feet hit terra firma.

The thing that I had thrown down from the roof was indeed the offending Lego. I breathed a sigh of relief, half-heartedly reprimanded the culprit (James) and in a rare break from the norm, allowed myself a glass of wine before dinner.

My poor shattered nerves deserved it.

 (Photo credit: aloshbennett. This picture  has a creative commons attribution license.)
Filed Under: Children, Fear, Friendship, Ladder, Lego Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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The Mathematics Of Brotherhood

June 28, 2012 By

2012-05-13_17.58.13

I am fortunate enough to have two children who travel well, at least by car. We have not yet experimented with air travel, but I have a feeling that once we got past the airport chaos and onto the plane, they would be fine. We are not quite ready for that, so for now we are sticking to the road trips.

Last weekend, we drove to Elkhart, Indiana. It’s a journey of about eight hours, which does not include time spent on the border crossing and any pit stops. We planned as well as we could, given that we only had a day in which to plan. I packed up stuff for an en route picnic, and made sure the boys had their favourite toys in the car with them. I even had my laptop handy in case I had to calm them down by playing DVD’s for them.

The drive down could not have gone better. The guy at the border cheerfully welcomed us into the United States, despite my six-year-old informing him that “Daddy always be’s crazy.” Shortly after crossing the border, we stopped for our picnic. Everyone had fun, and there were no complaints as we piled the kids back into the car for the remainder of the drive.

The drive home was a different story altogether. I wouldn’t say it was disastrous, exactly, but it was a little fraught with stress. It started with lost Lego. I wrote recently about George’s Lego, and how it can never, ever be lost.

Right before leaving the Elkhart city limits, we stopped for a leisurely dinner. We ate our food, paid and left. When we had been driving for about an hour, George suddenly started asking for his Lego. This surprised us, since we had assumed he had it with him. We pulled over and couldn’t find the Lego anywhere in the car. A phonecall to the restaurant confirmed that George had left it on the table.

There was no way we were going to force our child with autism to do without the object that is a big source of comfort to him – I mean, he sleeps with his Lego – so we drove back to Elkhart and got it. Disaster was averted and peace reigned once again.

But only for a little while.

By the time we embarked on our return journey, the kids were tired, cranky and overstimulated from a packed weekend. It is understandable that they didn’t feel like spending eight hours stuck in the car. I didn’t feel like spending eight hours stuck in the car.

With about five hours of the drive left to go, George started saying, “I want to go home. I want to be home in ten minutes.”

Well, in the absence of rocket launchers on the car, that wasn’t going to happen. We tried to talk George through his increasing anxiety. Even James, in his sweet way, was trying to comfort his brother.

“Don’t worry, George. We’ll be home tonight.”

Instead of calming down, George was getting more and more anxious, so we did what we always do when he needs to be distracted: we started throwing out math questions at him.

George loves numbers. He’s been able to count to 100 in a variety of increments since he was three, and he was doing multiplication in his head long before anyone taught it to him at school. When he’s asked a math question, he cannot resist answering it. It’s a marvellous way to reduce his stress.

James started playing along and pretty much took over. He was asking George one math question after another. What’s 8 plus 8? What’s 32 minus 7? What’s 5 times 5?

The math questions eventually morphed into nonsense questions. What’s cow plus water? What’s house plus airplane? What’s paper plus shoes?

Every time James asked one of these questions, he provided an equally nonsense answer. By the time this had been going on for a while, the kids were in fits of giggles. Come to think of it, me and my husband were too. It was hilarious.

Then James asked the following question: What’s James plus George?

We all looked at James, waiting for the answer. When it came, it brought tears to my eyes.

James plus George equals love.

(Photo credit: Kirsten Doyle)

Filed Under: autism, Brothers, Elkhart, Indiana, Love, Math, Travel Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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Bedtime Toys: Finding The Lost Lego

June 21, 2012 By

Last night, my son George couldn’t find his Lego. This was a potentially disastrous situation: George has to  have certain things with him when he goes to bed, including a subset of his Mr. Potato Head collection and his stack of pink and yellow Legos. Gathering them up and putting into bed is part of the routine, and if anything goes missing, the entire routine – and subsequently everyone’s sleep – goes to hell in a handbasket.

So when the Lego went missing, the entire family embarked on a thorough, systematic search. Anyone looking at us would have thought we were trying to root out Saddam Hussein. The search included all rooms in the house, the backyard, the car, even the garage.

Eventually James found half of the Lego stack caught behind the treadmill. The other half had somehow ended up in the washing machine with some laundry. The crisis was averted, and before long, George was snuggled up in bed with his Lego and his Mr. Potato Heads.

It seems like a strange choice of sleeping companions. I’d always thought that kids liked teddy bears because they were soft and comfortable to hug, and for a long time, I assumed that George’s total lack of interest in plush toys was somehow related to his autism. Since then, I have realized that not all kids are into teddy bears, and that preference has nothing to do with autism or the lack thereof.

James went through a brief phase of having to sleep with every stuffed toy in the house. I would have to arrange them around him, and to an extent, on top of him, and I would always wonder if the furry friends would take up so much space that there would be no room left for the kid. It was an impractical arrangement because James is a restless sleeper, and one by one, the stuffed animals would be displaced. When I went to wake James up in the morning, his room would look like a plush toy factory had exploded in it.

It was at around this time that George started taking his Mr. Potato Heads to bed. He couldn’t possibly fit his whole collection in there, so he would pick out about ten of them, ensure that they had their arms and legs and other bits and pieces, and he would line them up neatly. There was a whole variety of them – plain old Mr. Potato Heads were mixed in with the likes of Darth Tater and Indiana Jones: Taters of the Lost Ark.

Taters of the Lost Ark was an interesting one: if you pushed down on his hat the Indiana Jones theme song would be played. This would happen when George rolled over onto this particular Potato Head in his sleep.

It’s a little disorienting to wake up at three in the morning to the sounds of the Indiana Jones theme song.

George’s choice of sleeping companions has not changed much since then, but James’ has. The stuffed toys have been relegated to a toy box, and James now sleeps with Finn McMissile (of Disney Cars fame), his Megatron (a member of his ever-expanding Transformers family) and a glow-in-the-dark skeleton.

From time to time, I will check on them after bedtime to find the pair of them in George’s bed with their respective toys. They’re hiding under the comforter with a flashlight on, playing companionably alongside each other. I pretend to reprimand them for not sleeping, and then I slip out of the room and let them play. Because really, who am I to interrupt their moments of brotherly togetherness?

Do your kids sleep with stuffed animals, or do they prefer other toys? How strict are you about separating play time from sleep time?

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scazon/4207552952)

Filed Under: Bedtime, Children, sleep, Toys Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Trains Of Autism Thought

February 2, 2011 By

Yesterday was a momentous day because George played with a train set.

Most parents would read this and wonder what the big deal is.  George, after all, is a seven-year-old boy, and isn’t playing with trains a fairly typical activity for a seven-year-old boy?  Well yes, except that George, as we all know, is far from typical.  Because his autism makes his mind work in very different ways, he does not play with toys in the same way that other kids do.  He never has: from the time he was a very tiny baby George didn’t do all of the stuff with toys that all of the books said he would.

On a side note: this is one of the reasons I know that George’s autism has absolutely nothing to do with vaccines.  It might be a factor for some other kids, I’m not saying it’s not – but it isn’t for George.

Anyway, back to the toys.  I remember having a slight feeling in the pit of my stomach, when George was a baby, that something was not quite right.  I just knew.  When he was at the age where other babies track toys with their eyes, George would stare off into the distance.  When he was supposed to be batting at dangling toys with his tiny hands, he would ignore them.  Unless they were shiny – then he would just stare at them.  He never took an interest in teddy bears; quote-unquote “age appropriate” toys never appealed to him.

I remember once surrounding George with toys just to see if he would react to anything, to find out if something, anything, would spark an interest. For a long time, he just sat there, not even acknowledging the toys.  Eventually, he reached out for the train so he could push the button to see the lights.

George in a sea of toys

The train! The train!

When George did start taking an interest in toys, it was not to play with them in any conventional sense.  It was to line them up or to examine bits of them.  He showed a definite preference for Lego – the straight, symmetrical lines of the pieces appealed to him.  He could make perfectly straight lines with them.

Another favourite was a play table that we had picked up at a garage sale.  There were all kinds of things on this table: big buttons that you could push, large beads that you pushed back and forth, little sliding window things that you would move from one side to another to reveal little pictures.  At one point in its life, this table had had a toy telephone attached to it (rotary dial – just shows how old this thing must have been). By the time we got the table, the telephone was gone, but the piece of string that had attached it remained.  George showed no interest whatsoever in the buttons and beads and pictures.  However, he would spend hours examining that piece of string.

I think the first toy that George played with in the manner intended by the manufacturers was Mr. Potato Head.  He was introduced to Mr. Potato Head by his speech therapist, and it was love at first sight.  It was a wonderful tool for developing some basic speech, and it certainly didn’t hurt his play skills either.  Soon we had a large collection of Mr. Potato Heads, and to this day this is a firm favourite with George.  He has been using Mr. Potato Head pieces in increasingly creative ways.

Mr. Pineapple Head!

Yesterday, George played with a train set.  By “play” I don’t mean that he lined up the tracks without putting them together, that he made one dead-straight line of trains for each colour, or that he lay on his back minutely examining the lettering on the trains.  I mean that he actually assembled the tracks (making a pretty nifty figure-of-eight to boot!), and then pushed trains back and forth on the tracks.  He was absorbed in his play for some time, and on a couple of occasions he even made choo-choo noises.

For any outsider looking in, he would have looked like any seven-year-old boy playing with his trains.

But he’s not just any seven-year-old boy.  He’s my George and I am so, so lucky to have him.

Filed Under: autism, Play, postaday2011 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,