Conscious living...

Yesterday, while driving home from an afterschool visit to Starbucks (a weekly treat for Brendan & myself) I had to hit the breaks because a driver in front of me was doing something funky. Brendan commented that he wished the driver would practise conscious driving... we skipped a beat & then burst out laughing. Brendan, giggling madly, asked me why what he'd said was so funny, so I asked him what the opposite of "conscious" is. We both had taken the mental leap to the idea that the driver had been driving "unconsciously" (therefore, asleep). (In restrospect, I think he meant "conscientious".) So, we came up with the slogan:

Conscious driving: it's not just a good idea, it's the law!!

Being a conscious parent (most of the time) as well as driver, I have noticed that we seem to be achieving a sense of equilibrium in the new year, at least where it concerns Brendan's new, heightened level of anxiety. We've been tracking his anxiety using a "tic log" & I just began a new one yesterday (I've been making little books out of a stack of computer paper cut in half & bound with crochet thread :), which caused me to reflect a bit on how he's been doing. The homework re-organisation has gone very well, & we're all less anxious because we know what to expect. Monday night was math, which meant that it was Charlie's night to coach & Brendan & I didn't have to rush right into homework after we got home (from a quick visit to the pediatrician to look at a rash & then a longer visit to the grocery store to fill a prescription & our tummies with sushi while we waited :). Last night he had language arts homework- my area of expertise- so I scribed his spanish homework for him, which made him very happy (& kept the anxiety level very low).

The anxiety lately has taken the form of an increase in "fleas" interfering with everything from dressing to homework to what activities he can do (when not on the computer). Although he's not been specific, the clothing issues seem to change from day to day, & sometimes it's colour that's the problem & sometimes it's the order in which they've been placed in the drawer. Some mornings he continually puts things back in the drawer & hauls others out. Others he needs me to put the shirt over his head because the "flea" is preventing him from finishing the job. I have learned that challenging him at these times does not improve things or lessen the anxiety, so I do what seems necessary- or what he asks me to do. Any time he can be pro-active & tell me what he needs is great, in my opinion, even if he needs me to dress him. (Note: being a self-conscious preteen, he always gets his undies on unsupervised & in private!) One of the biggest cognitive leaps we've noticed in Brendan is his growing ability to analyse what's going on & tell us what he needs. I am going to encourage this behaviour where ever I see it! Another way that we've been encouraging him to be pro-active is when he needs to yell or scream... he's been pretty good about warning us. We've been discouraging long screaming episodes, since they hurt his throat, & problem-solving other ways to get the feelings out. He's been pretty good about telling us when's about to get loud (particularly appreciated when I'm setting the laptop down or carrying food...) so that we aren't startled... We've also been trying to be aware of how sensory strategies can help him- everything from burning incense or spraying lavender scent to deep pressure can help, if we can just remember to offer (or he to ask...).

The hardest line to walk with Brendan's anxiety is to know how much to accomodate it & how much to challenge it. What I'm learning is that sometimes we need to go with his flow, to keep the anxiety from increasing, to keep things moving (in the morning before school in particular). When his anxiety is lower, then we can revisit things, brainstorm alternatives, point out ways he can be pro-active, look for what's causing the anxiety... The risk is that he'll become anxious discussing these things, but he also responds well to being consulted & treated like the intelligent person that he is. An interesting fallout of recent dances with anxiety is that he's been able to go back to playing some computer games that were a bit too challenging & frustrating for him when he first got them last month. We made a deal with him that he could play them if he self-monitored for increased frustration, or if he would listen to us if we pointed out that he seemed to be getting upset. I had to do just that last night & I was so pleased when he realised what he was feeling & de-escalated things on his own. Whew!! Hooray!!!

Brendan & I are also in the early planning stages of a new & exciting project. I took my precious savings & bought a new macbook a few weeks ago, mainly because my nearly 3-year-old laptop's hard drive was maxxed-out & really slow, & with the help of a friend (thanks Lee!) got it all set up very quickly. This new laptop came with the newest version of Garageband, which means that Brendan & I can now create our own podcasts :) The idea hit me a couple of nights ago, in the shower (of course), & when I proposed it to Brendan yesterday morning he just lit up... because, as he puts it, his greatest talent is talking... :) We have another friend, Santosha, on board to help us figure out how to actually create podcasts (this is the friend who interviewed me a year ago for the UU radio show). Then I'll need to figure out how to get the podcasts on the internet... but anyway, we are on our way to creating a venue for Brendan to talk about himself & autism (& OCD, & Tourettes... :) and how he thinks & feels about lots of things. We are really psyched. He wants to read some of his stories & sing his parody songs, too (the latest is called "Lucy in the Sky with Daggers"...). I am pretty excited about finally finding a way to get my kid's own perspective onto the 'net. It'll probably take us a month or so to get it up & working, so stay tuned... :)

Moving back into the groove...

Hi All...

Sorry for such a long hiatus! We really are doing well, & I'll elabourate further in a moment... Things just became busier than they've been in a long, long time, hence the blogging break. Right before we left for Japan (last June) I agreed to be on the search team at my church that is going through the process of finding a new minister, ours having left in May to become an army chaplain. The way we Unitarian Universalists do things is to find & call ministers ourselves, the process being facilitated by the denomination with guidelines & an online matching service. I've been a member of my church for nearly 30 years & have observed this process 3 times before, but never been in a life stage where I could participate actively, so I'm really psyched to finally be part of it. It's intense, though. Like having a part-time job... I'm actually anticipating an imminent OS upgrade (like, this evening, I hope...) so that I can use iworks (which I plan to purchase tomorrow) to create & publish the packet we'll be sending to prospective ministers- that's my main responsibility right now (nothing big- ha, ha, ha)... outside of my other church & school activities &, of course, being Jedi mom to Brendan :)

Ahhhh, Brendan! He grew 1 1/2 inches over the summer!!! He's also grown internally in so many ways that are not visible, but are truly wonderful. The school year's gotten off to a great start. He's now one of the 6th graders in his mixed 5th & 6th grade class, & is taking his responsibilty for being one of the "big kids" very seriously. The anxiety management that he learned while in Japan & over the summer have led to a much calmer Brendan, & when the "fleas" do "attack" he can explain them clearly & often requires no intervention in handling them- not even a kekkai (ki) barrier. It's amazing to see him doing it on his own... We've been able to talk through many of his long-time tic-triggers & he's finding creative ways of managing them, such a using imagery, burning incense (we light it for him) to "smudge" the thoughts away, or just burying himself in a book for a while. He's been reading voraciously we've been enjoying discussing the books with him so much! He's worked his way through all of the Charlie Bone books published to date (6 so far) & is on the second of Rick Riordan's series about demi-god kids (it starts with "The Lightning Thief"). I've been pre-reading them so I can really discuss them with him, & enjoying them all very much myself. I also decided to allow him to start reading the manga "Naruto", which was a bit borderline in terms of violence (but no worse than anything you'd see in the LoTR movies- which Brendan has not seen- or even in InuYasha) but is a manga I've been enjoying for a while. I'm so glad I decided to allow him to read Naruto! The basic story is about kids who are training to be ninjas, the protectors of their village & country, & the main character, Naruto, has a very powerful demon sealed within him- a good metaphor for adolescence if there ever was one :) One of the things I like about the story is that the values- looking out for others, finding family in unlikely places, doing your best no matter what- are consistent with my own, & through the manga Brendan is getting these values from yet another source. Also, we've had some interesting discussions about lots of things brought up in the manga, about stereotypes & how they play around with them in Naruto (one of the most powerful ninjas around looks rather like a bimbo...), about how people in the manga feel about fighting (there's quite a lot of ambivalence), about how you can tell how they're feeling by looking at their faces... which is one reason we've been concentrating on reading the manga rather than watching the anime, since the illustrations are static & more easily interpreted by my aspie boy :) One of our more interesting conversations occurred because he was consistantly referring to male characters with long hair as "she"... turns out that he didn't know where to look in order to figure out the gender of the characters, so we talked about the general physical differences between men & women, & how they usually show up in illustrations. A great "teaching moment" :) It probably goes without saying that Brendan will be a ninja for Halloween- he chose the fabric & approved the pattern, so I just have to make it (this week, I fervently hope...).

The bottom line these days is that I have a wholly different kid on my hands! He's clearly moving into adolescence, & doing a fairly graceful job of it (at the moment, at least :). He & Charlie have been spending more & more time together, too, doing dad & son stuff... Brendan re-discovered his interest in sailing about mid-August & took over crewing for Charlie for Sunday racing, even helping him go on to win the summer series. He was dad's only crew for the fall series & they won that one, too :) For the first few weeks of sailing I was having to go down to the club about the time they'd be coming into shore to help "catch" the boat & hold it while Charlie took down the sails & stuff. Brendan just wasn't strong enough to do it... but after about 3 weeks Charlie decided that Brendan could do it- & he did! His hand & arm strength has increased quite a bit & even though he's gotten banged-up a few times (which is just what happens when you race a sailboat, I can testify!) he's hung-in there with it & really enjoys not only the sailing but chatting with the other sailors before & after races. Pretty neat...

I hope to start posting more often, now that we've settled into a routine & I'm getting used to the stress of having the church work on top of the mom work (& figuring out where the Jedi work fits into it all... :). I have started meditating again regularly, which has been a huge help... Mostly it's Brendan's moving to "the next level" that's making life so much fun these days, in spite of the stress. We are getting such a kick out of his insights & his excitement with his accomplishments. Life is very full- I look forward to continuing to share it!

There's a Dragon in the house...

All the pieces have finally arrived &, with some help, we have put them together... Brendan has begun working with the Dragon voice-recognition software!

We ordered the software through the university that Charlie's affiliated with, but they didn't carry the laptop we wanted (after consulting Consumer reports). We ended-up ordering the laptop directly from Toshiba (after consulting the Dragon trainer Charlie had worked with when they got it at work & discovering that it needed a gigabyte of memory to work (!)) & it arrived on Monday. Brendan's best friend's dad, a computer software & hardware designer & guru to many, was able to come over last evening to add the laptop to our home wireless network, which he's configured so that it can't be accessed by any computers but those we specify. (I was amazed to discover that the new laptop can detect 3 other wireless systems, presumably belonging to neighbours, from our living room...) It was not a particularly easy thing to do, mostly because of how the machine itself was configured from the factory (made me sooooo glad that we have chosen to be, primarily, mac people), & while attempting to disable the bits that were repeatedly preventing the laptop from accessing the wireless system, the wireless drivers were inadvertantly disabled... I learn so much when I watch this friend problem-solve computer problems. He ended-up turing it off, removing the battery, reinstalling it, & doing a reboot which resulted in the little orange light going back on (indicating that the laptop had re-discovered that it had a wireless system installed- crazy thing!). We decided to begin downloading the Dragon cd's while he was there- good thing. I had intuited that internet connexion would be necessary, so hadn't tried to do it yet, & as it turns out the Windows Vista operating system wouldn't run the discs we bought, but Charlie happened to notice the sticker on the box that gave the web address for Vista support... Our friend got us logged-on & registered & left while the updated software was downloading, after having showed me how to re-access the internet connexion should we lose it again. Happily, I was able to finish the download successfully on my own (whee!) & get it registered. I also found some of Brendan's favourite web sites & bookmarked them before going to bed.

Charlie had decided that, having recently been trained on Dragon himself, he could/would do the training with Brendan & after school today they got started... There was a bit of frustration while they accustomed themselves to the headset & got it working properly so that the sound check could be done. The real fun began when Brendan did some reading to start training the system. They chose a funny essay by Dave Barry (which Brendan kept pronouncing "bar-ry" rather than "bear-ry". Then, Brendan kept making side comments on what had been written, plus adding words, which confused the computer... perhaps having "oh crap!" yelled at it so many times was making it woozy. Then Brendan simply started to giggle & we did too. Ok, it was a very funny essay about cyberspace (of course), & Charlie kept having to pause it until Brendan stopped laughing. There followed some frustration about it getting hung-up on certain words, & finally Charlie suggested taking a break & Brendan agreed that was a GOOD idea :) They took off on the first bike ride of the season & although it's not nearly as warm as yesterday, the sun is shining gorgeously & the sky is blue. Brendan's back at it now, with dad checking-in occasionally (he's up to highlighting & punctuation!). Charlie has suggested celebrating by Brendan dictating a story this evening, after going out for pizza. Looks like Brendan's story-blog will become a reality very soon- stay tuned!!

This whole involved process, I know, will soon become a memory, & having the Dragon will definitely change Brendan's life (& ours). I am left shaking my head at how complicated getting all the pieces to work together can be. We are very fortunate to have a knowledgable friend!! Our on-site computer count is now up to an almost obscene 5... each one acquired for a specific purpose (like the new laptop) which simply couldn't be done by the others. Which says a heck of a lot about the state of computers in this day & age!