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2012: My Year In A Nutshell

December 28, 2012 By

2012 was an eventful year for me. It featured some highlights, and some definite lowlights.

January… I receive a new training plan from my friend Phaedra, who I have enlisted as my coach for the coming year. My training does not start well, though: on the day I am supposed to do my first run in the schedule, I come down with the mother of all stomach bugs.

February… I receive a devastating phone call: my beloved aunt Ann has died in a freak accident. I fly to South Africa to lend support to my mom and say my farewells to Ann. It is intensely emotional. I cannot believe that someone who has been such a big part of my life since I was born is no more.

March… I am back from South Africa, and my training can finally get underway properly. I feel like I am back on track, and ready for my first race of the season.

April… I run two races and make personal best times in both of them. On the same day as the Toronto Yonge Street 10K, another person dear to my heart passes away. Margaret, who was a phenomenal actress – a far better Shirley Valentine than the original Shirley Valentine –  has succumbed to cancer.

May… I survive a major organizational restructuring at work. I am shuffled to a new manager, but in an environment where people I know well and work closely with are being let go, I manage to keep my job.

June… I am admitted to the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC). This is a big, big deal for me. I want to get into the freelance writing business, and this affiliation will help me enormously.

July… The kids are done with school. James has finished Grade 1 and George has completed Grade 3. We find a rare gem: a reliable and dedicated respite worker. The boys take to her quickly. They respond well to her kindness and natural intuition with kids.

August… I run the Midsummer Nights Run 15K on a course that has been my personal nemesis. Instead of crashing and burning like I have in every other race along the Leslie Street spit, I find that thing known to runners as The Zone. I run a great race and beat my previous best time by 14 minutes.

September… The kids go back to school, and although I worry about the transition for both of them, they adjust well to being back. At work, I manage my first implementation since being assigned as Implementation Lead for my project. There are some glitches but it goes well. It counts as a big virtual checkmark against my career. George turns nine. Where has the time gone?

October… This is an eventful month. I run my fourth annual autism run, raising a personal record amount for the Geneva Centre for Autism and running a personal best half-marathon time. The following weekend, I attend my first Blissdom conference and make many, many new writer friends. And the week after that, I attend the Geneva Centre for Autism symposium, and learn a ton of new things.

November… I meet with both of the boys’ teachers. George is progressing as well as he can at school, considering that he is a child with autism adjusting to a completely new school environment. James is struggling with his reading, and a plan is put in place to help him.

December… I celebrate completing my 43rd orbit around the sun on the same day we throw a birthday party for James. I run my final race of the season – the Tannenbaum 10K – and have a great deal of fun. I get all teary-eyed as I watch live-streaming of my friend Margie’s graduation that she worked so hard to accomplish. The world fails to end. James turns seven. Where has the time gone?

Some big things are in store for 2013. I have some lofty goals and I am quite excited to get started on them. I was going to make them a part of this post, but decided that 2013 deserves a post all of its own.

Watch this space to see what’s afoot for the New Year…

(Photo credit: Carlos Van Vegas. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: 2012 Year in Review, Children, running, Work, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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Lucky Number Six

July 12, 2011 By

Being a parent is hard. You have to deal with conflicts, challenges, lack of sleep, lack of privacy, loss of self-identity, turmoil, guilt, worry, heartache, tears, and the reality of never being able to eat a full meal without interruption. And that’s just with a regular kid.

When you add autism into the mix, you also add the sensory challenges, meltdowns, communication issues, various other autism-related challenges, guilt piled on you by the media and other parents because you chose to vaccinate your child, and uncomfortable stares and rude comments from strangers in grocery stores.

All parents need a break sometimes. Especially parents of children with autism or other special needs. We love our kids, and recognize that in order to be better for them, we need to take care of ourselves.

This is why God created respite workers, and for some lucky parents, the funding to pay for them.

Our respite worker adventures are in their fourth year. In that time, we have gone through five workers, and we have just started on our sixth.

Our first worker was fantastic. We found her at the daycare George went to. She was his favourite teacher there. And so, when she left the daycare and asked us if we would like her to do respite work with George, we jumped at it. Both of the kids loved her, and George eagerly anticipated his times with her. After two years with us, she called me with the news that she had suffered a relapse of breast cancer and needed to take time out to focus on her health. We were sad to see her go, but we completely understood.

After a search of about three months, we found a new respite worker. George took to her right away. She was organized but creative, firm but kindly. She engaged George in a very positive way. She was a lovely, lovely person, and we could tell that she had a gift for working with special needs children. Unfortunately for us, one of the therapy centres recognized the same gift in her, and hired her full-time as an instructor/therapist. She gave us plenty of notice, so that we could find a replacement before she left.

Respite worker #3 was easy enough to find. On paper she looked great. Lots of experience with special needs kids, working towards an early childhood education qualification, and sister to someone with autism. We thought this woman had it all, right down to the personal experience with her own brother.

She turned out to be spiteful and vindictive. She lasted for precisely two sessions, one of which had been a handover session with Respite worker #2.

On to Respite worker #4. We found her through an ad we placed in a local newspaper. She came for an interview, and seemed to interact well with George. We liked her, we hired her, and she agreed to start the following week. Unbeknownst to us, though, she had been actively seeking full-time employment and got offered a job a couple of days before she was due to start with us.

At this point, I was ready to throw up my hands in despair. Good respite workers – the ones who are good at what they do, are nice people, and stick around for longer than it takes to make a cup of coffee – are like gold dust.

I placed another ad, and got a number of responses. We settled on a very nice, down-to-earth lady. When she came for the interview, she produced a binder containing her resume, police clearance, references, and various CPR and First Aid certificates. The details that impressed me on her resume were that she had been with one of her respite families for about ten years, and the other one for even longer. This woman had a history of staying with her families, and she even spoke about the benefits of building a long-term relationship with the child. We liked her, we hired her. She started the following week.

And then, as fate would have it, a close family member of hers was seriously injured in an accident, and another close family member had a heart attack and needed bypass surgery. Our new respite worker had to temporarily suspend work so she could take care of her family. After a break of a month or so, she came back, but that only lasted for two weeks. One of her family members relapsed, and she had to take time off again. She stopped replying to my texts and returning calls, and as nice and all as she was, I had to make the decision to cut her loose.

And now, as of yesterday, we have started with Respite worker #6. I am hesitant to make any sweeping statements at this point, but she seems to have been dropped into our laps by the smiling gods of fate. She has been a student volunteer in George’s classroom for the last two years. She knows him, and she seems to like him. He seems to like her.

I am really hoping she will be our Lucky Number Six.

Filed Under: autism, parenting, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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A Life Hanging In The Balance

April 20, 2011 By

About three weeks ago, we hired a new respite worker for George. It has been a long, frustrating process – anyone who has ever had a need for a respite worker will know that the good ones are like gold dust. They are very hard to find, and even harder to keep.

When our new worker, F, walked into our home for an interview, I liked her immediately. Perhaps more tellingly, both of the kids took to her immediately. In a very short time, she has wormed her way into the hearts of the entire family.

Sadly, as she becomes an important part of our family, a crisis is happening in her own. A couple of weeks ago, the car that her sister and sister-in-law were traveling in was hit by a car making an illegal turn. The driver of the other car drove away at speed, but not before a witness snapped a picture of him with a cell phone. Police have since found the vehicle and identified the driver, who is currently hiding out in the United States.

F’s sister is OK. She has a broken leg and some nasty bruising. The sister-in-law, on the other hand, is in very serious condition. She was pregnant at the time of the collision, and the baby did not survive. And now her own body is gradually shutting down. She is not responding to medication, her lungs are filling up with fluids, and doctors are saying that there is nothing they can do.

She has been moved to palliative care. There have been conversations about DNR’s.

My heart goes out to F, who is very close to her sister-in-law. I think of the anguish she is going through, and the pain of the man who is likely going to be widowed very soon. I think of a two-year-old child whose mother is dying. And it just breaks my heart.

Anyone reading this – please send out positive thoughts of strength and healing to a family who really needs it. The doctors say that a miracle is still possible. Let’s try to bend the will of the Universe to make that miracle happen.

Filed Under: Bereavement, Injury, life, positive thoughts Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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To sleep, perchance to dream

April 16, 2010 By

On Monday night, George had one of his stay-awake-for-half-the-night nights. It happens once every two weeks or so.  He goes to sleep easily enough, aided by the melatonin we give him with his bedtime milk, but then he wakes up in the early hours of the morning – anywhere from midnight to 3:00 a.m. – and he stays awake for about three hours.  He is not upset, he does not cry.  Apart from occasional bursts of laughter (which, to be honest, are a bit creepy at four in the morning when nothing is funny), he is actually very quiet.  He is not still, though.  He gets up and wanders around, or he climbs into bed beside me and starts playing with my hair, or he sits on the end of my bed rocking back and forth.  It is a level of activity that leaves me in an uncomfortable state of consciousness: he is not active enough to force me to just get up and do something useful, and he is not still enough for me to be able to drift back to sleep.  So I lie there in bed in a state of exhaustion, trying to settle him and get him to go back to sleep.  Experience has taught me that I cannot really force this.  When he has these nights, the best thing for me to do is just lie as still as I can, ignore George as much as possible, and wait for him to go back to sleep.

As long as he sticks to his regular schedule – about once every two weeks – I can handle it.  I always feel like the undead the following day, but at least I know that I’ll be getting relatively normal sleep for the next two weeks.  This is just part of his autism that I’ve kind of learned to live with.  Autism and sleep disorders frequently go together, and I reckon that once every two weeks isn’t too bad considering what some parents have to go through.

This time he did not stick to the schedule.  Instead of waiting for two weeks, we were treated to another one of those nights after a mere two days.  On Wednesday afternoon Catherine came.  Catherine is the new respite worker, and this was the first time she was working with George.  For a first encounter, they did OK with each other, but George was definitely stressed out by this change to his day.  After Catherine left, he was prowling around with a mood that could have gone either way at a moment’s notice.  At bedtime he was narky, unsettled, and uncooperative.  We were patient: knowing that changes in his daily routine do tend to reflect on his sleeping patterns, we had kind of expected this.  George eventually settled down in my bed and went to sleep.

At about 1:00 a.m. he woke up in a mood.  He was crying, he was angry, and he was noisily rooting around in his box of alphabetic fridge magnets announcing to the world that he wanted “small letter a”.  Much to his chagrin, we removed his access to the box of fridge magnets, and with some soothing, he settled down with his dad.  To give him more space, I abandoned my spot on the bed and went to sleep on the sofa-bed.  Predictably, George followed.  When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he goes into full-on “Mommy mode”.

For three hours, he was playing with my hair, sitting up on the bed, lying down again, demanding that I scratch his back, telling me he wanted popcorn, getting up to wander around and look for his box.  I was mostly ignoring him, occasionally telling him to lie down, moving his hand away from my hair (the way he constantly plays with my hair sometimes drives me crazy, especially in the middle of the night).  I was watching the clock, and at about 3:30 a.m. I ruefully accepted that I would not be going for my planned early morning run.

George eventually fell asleep at about 4:00, and I fell asleep shortly thereafter.  I woke up just over two hours later, almost weeping with exhaustion.  Somehow I got through the day, helped no doubt by the knowledge that I would be leaving early due to a medical appointment. Throughout the day I was filled with anxiety: Catherine was coming again.  Were we in for another tumultuous night?

George and catherine had a successful session.  When Catherine left George gave her a hug; he was happy and smiling for the rest of the day.  He was contentedly playing with his box of magnets, which had been restored to him.  Although I felt pitifully tired, I went for a run (it was a good one too – I well and truly flounced my target pace).  At bedtime, George was relaxed and cooperative, and he went to sleep right away.  There was a brief moment of anxiety in the middle of the night when we heard him digging through his box.  Once more, I removed the box – this time, George went back to sleep immediately, and I spent the rest of the night in glorious oblivion.

Having had two virtually sleepless nights over the course of three days, I still feel exhausted.  Sometimes a single good night of sleep is not sufficient to wipe out the sleep deficit.  I am looking forward to another night of good slumber and a restful weekend.

Filed Under: autism, sleep Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,