ANOTHER Adventure in Autism (4/15) A Taste of What's to Come...

[jcc0621]

Just let me know when/if you want the software.

Who let Buzz Buzz post that picture

 

[Linnie The Pooh]

Just let me know when/if you want the software.

Who let Buzz Buzz post that picture

That was nothing-you should've seen it in real life!!

He made me put the first bandage on it. It was disgusting. I take care of my own owies, I thought he could do the same. Apparently, I was wrong.

 

[Montana Disney Fan]

Personally, my life will not be complete til I see a photo of the 4 geeky/manly jibbitz.

PS: superb bandage job.

You Ask... I deliver...

Left foot: Skull & Crossbones - Buzz Lightyear

Right foot: Pirate Flag - Stitch

Buzz: The "Jethro" from Montana. This is how I normally look

 

[jcc0621]

That was nothing-you should've seen it in real life!!

He made me put the first bandage on it. It was disgusting. I take care of my own owies, I thought he could do the same. Apparently, I was wrong.

Why would be different than any other man

 

[blue_river]

That was nothing-you should've seen it in real life!!

He made me put the first bandage on it. It was disgusting. I take care of my own owies, I thought he could do the same. Apparently, I was wrong.

Is this before or after you were out cutting the grass, making repairs to the house or putting together a barbecue?

 

[blue_river]

You Ask... I deliver...

Cool Jibbitz!!!

Buzz: The "Jethro" from Montana. This is how I normally look

Are those your famous "stretchy" shorts?

 

[KathyRN137]

My profound apologies to those of you unsuspecting readers who were inadvertantly subjected to the questionable humor of our somewhat deranged friend from Montana....

jcc0621: I hope this doesn't count as a parole violation for him...

Marion: Thanks, that's just what this report needs....more footography!

estherhead: If you think you can take it, try pulling up his last completed TR, "The Man Report." It is a masterpiece of modern photojournalism. (And you will get all the backstory on the toe.)

Halloweenqueen: Shhh! Not so loud! (I already ordered some!!)

mrsfamily, praisehisname, & SwansLoveDisney: Never fear, girls, the Chronicles of the Crocs are far from over.... Tune in next time when our heroine discovers Croc socks and jibbitz!

Blue: I am not touching that line about the old underwear; not for all the tea in China!!

Goofster: It' time to de-activate your twin!

MDF: Keep it up! You won't be laughing when I get you in a toe-hold! And I'm sure Linnie will back me up....

and Linnie: My condolences, hon.

And now, we return to our regularly scheduled trip report..... whew!!


Kathy

 

[Montana Disney Fan]

Cool Jibbitz!!!




Are those your famous "stretchy" shorts?

Yes! Yes! Good job Blue!!! I didn't think anyone would notice.

I'm going for a record. I've worn the famous "stretchy" shorts now every single day since we got home from WDW last March. As soon as I get home from work, on go the "stretchy" shorts. I love them.

Linnie almost fell over taking that picture she was laughing so hard. She loves it when I pull those shorts way up. She also thought the Crocs w/ sox was over the top. I'm in full "geek" mode but in a great mood cuz WDW is only 67 days away.

 

[Goofster57]

Buzz: The "Jethro" from Montana. This is how I normally look

Do to circumstance beyond my control (see picture above) it has become necessary for me to start accepting applications for the position of Wonder Twin....


Buzz your are the MAN

Linnie, I thought my better half put up with a lot...you and her need to form a support group.

 

[Linnie The Pooh]

jcc0621-you're right-I lost my sense for a minute there! Men can be such babies. I hope MDF's boy turns out strong like his mom.

blue-it was after!

Kathy, thank you for the sympathy. I appreciate that. I live with these antics everyday.

And I do enjoy your reports. I see the planning report is taking a back seat right now, thanks to MDF. This was an odd side trip to say the least. I do love it when he pulls his shorts way up though. That always makes me laugh. The glasses sideways kill me too. Trey just came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my neck, hugged me and said, "There we go." I love those sweet moments. He's having the best summer of his life-he's making so much progress. I hope Billy is doing well too! Trey has never been happier in his life than he is right now. I just hope it continues.

Good luck with fending off MDF in your PTR-as you can tell, him with a camera is NOT a good thing!

 

[blue_river]

Yes! Yes! Good job Blue!!! I didn't think anyone would notice.

I don't miss much

I'm going for a record. I've worn the famous "stretchy" shorts now every single day since we got home from WDW last March. As soon as I get home from work, on go the "stretchy" shorts. I love them.

Linnie almost fell over taking that picture she was laughing so hard. She loves it when I pull those shorts way up. She also thought the Crocs w/ sox was over the top. I'm in full "geek" mode but in a great mood cuz WDW is only 67 days away.

I bet she did!!

Woohoo for your 67 day count

Linnie, I thought my better half put up with a lot...you and her need to form a support group.

Can I join this support group????

 

[blue_river]

Trey just came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my neck, hugged me and said, "There we go." I love those sweet moments. He's having the best summer of his life-he's making so much progress.

I love hearing this stuff.

 

[Linnie The Pooh]

I love hearing this stuff.

Thanks! It's been such a good summer. I almost hate for it to end.

I think we should start up that support group. When Buzz played online games for years at a time, I wanted to start one up for the "widows of the online gaming world," however that didn't take. Maybe Goof's idea would-I know I'm all for it.

Loud Girl just saw the picture of her dad. I scrolled down, away from it, in a hurry. She said, "Wait a minute-let me see that picture again. So I went back up and she said, "Look at Dad all staring at his computer. Why's he doing that?"

Loaded question if I've ever heard one. Why is he doing that? My answer, "I dunno. He's weird." After some giggling, she agreed with me.

 

[blue_river]

Thanks! It's been such a good summer. I almost hate for it to end.

Hopefully, things will continue the same

Loaded question if I've ever heard one. Why is he doing that? My answer, "I dunno. He's weird." After some giggling, she agreed with me.

 

[KathyRN137]

Well, the Crocks went back and the Baggallini has yet to arrive, so I’ll just fill you in on what else has been happening around the KathyRN home, particularly our latest adventures in autism. Unlike Buzz and Linnie, we've been having some issues with our boy....


Pre-Trip #14: Molar Madness


Teething is a miserable experience. I don’t know if it’s worse for the baby or for the parents. There’s the crying, the fussiness, the diaper rash. (And that’s just dad!) But seriously, if you’ve ever raised a child, you know that everyone in the house suffers when little ones are cutting their first teeth.

This past week, I really missed those days. Yup. Missed ‘em like crazy. It’s been a long time since I had to deal with teething issues; my kids, as you know, are eleven and nine. When I look back on it, it really wasn’t that bad. It was the babies who really had it rough. Imagine being so small and having those aching little gums; and not being able to understand that they wouldn’t hurt forever, just temporarily until the teeth broke through! As for me, all I really lost was a few weeks of sleep and the price of a couple of bottles of baby Tylenol.

This past few weeks, as Billy parted with not one, but two of those baby teeth, I nearly lost my mind! I do believe the coming out was worse than the coming in.

I think that in the past I’ve touched a bit on how, like many autistic children, he can be very rigid and uncompromising; he interprets the world in very concrete way. He does not like change, especially when it comes to how things look and feel physically. For example, I have a very difficult time with him if I want to put my hair up in a ponytail. He doesn’t like Mommy looking different!

“Take off your hair. Take off your hair. Take off your hair….” He will say it over and over, literally a hundred times until the ponytail comes out and Mommy looks like Mommy again. Then, he’s happy and relaxed again.

Another example: Ed had to have emergency laprascopic surgery during the first week of July to remove his gallbladder. (He’s okay now, thanks!) Billy freaked out when he eventually caught site of the tiny incisions, covered with steri-strips, on Daddy’s tummy: “Take them off. Take them off. Take them off….”

Well, I can take my hair out of a ponytail, no problem, but Daddy’s little bandages have to stay! Billy has a ritual now that he performs repeatedly: he holds up his own shirt, looks at his own tummy, then he points to Ed’s. “Look at your body? Look at your body?” He will not let Ed rest until he lifts up his shirt. “There. There. There. There.” He points to the incision sites. “Go to hospital, take them off! Take them off, Daddy!” He obsesses to the point where he cannot let it go. I will be so happy when those darn things finally fall off!

Well, that brings us back to the teeth. The very bothersome, wiggly teeth. The same teeth that 8 ½ years ago, seemed to cause so much difficulty coming in, were wreaking absolute havoc with Billy now that they were coming out. Wiggly teeth feel different. Wiggly teeth must be eliminated. So, naturally, Billy did everything he could to hurry them along….his fingers were constantly in his mouth as he tried to “take them out”. He would even grab my hand and try to put it in his mouth saying…”take them out, Mommy!”

Of course, they just needed to take their time. Molars take a little longer to come out that the front teeth. But just like you cannot explain to an infant that his teething pain will soon be over, you cannot explain to an autistic nine year-old that his loose teeth will soon come out on their own. So in the meantime, Billy’s stress level shot up and it showed in his behavior. He started acting out and got into lots of mischief during the past week….he had quite a few brand-new adventures in autism! After a few of these, I realized that I couldn’t let him out of my sight for a single moment! I felt like I had a three year-old all over again….


**He took a pair of scissors out of the kitchen drawer, sat down and proceeded to give crew cuts to his Ernie and Bert puppets.

**He came across one of his sister’s stuffed bears and decided that she wanted to go swimming…..in the toilet bowl.

**Scripting a portion of one of his Clifford the Big, Red Dog DVDs, he practiced “giving your dog a treat” in his usual repetative way. Happy to cooperate with this exercise, Aimee dutifully ate the twenty-or-so Milk-Bones he gave her, and then promptly threw up on my living room carpet.

**He figured out how to order movies-on-demand using the remote control. About $35 worth of movies-on-demand. Ed, not wanting to put in a parental-control code that he would easily forget, chose 1-2-3-4-5 and figured that that would be the end of that. Next day, guess who’s watching Charlotte's Web on demand? Yep, Billy just pressed the buttons and randomly figured out the code! (And racked up another $25 in movies.) Luckily, the cable company was sympathetic and waived the charges when they heard the story.

**He made a hole in the edge of his comforter one night and pulled out a large amount of the stuffing and chewed on it.

**After watching an episode of Rugrats, he decided that his Curious George monkey was “Tommy” and needed to wear a diaper, so he asked me for one. I gave him a pull-up and thought, “that’s great; he’s playing appropriately.” I even showed him how to “diaper the baby.” Or so I thought. Next thing I knew, he had taken the baby powder from the bathroom, brought it upstairs, and emptied the entire bottle of powder onto George’s bottom. And all over himself, his bed, his toys….


Now, none of these incidents, in themselves, was particularly horrible. Kids do stuff like this all the time. Perhaps not nine year-old kids, but for the most part, there was nothing that a little soap and water, a needle and thread, or a phone call to Comcast couldn’t fix. It was just that they were coming one on top of the other in an unusual wave of remarkable naughtiness.


But the worst one, the scariest one, the one that shocked me the most because he never, ever had done anything like it before: he almost burned down the house.


It had been a hot, humid day and I had done just about all the laundry that I was going to do. Enough! It was time to take the kids to the pool so they could burn off a little energy before dinnertime and I could sit in the shade and relax with a magazine. Ed was away at a training class, so there was no rush to get back to cook a big meal...it would be pizza that night!

We changed into our bathing suits and I filled a tote bag with the beach towels, sunscreen, water bottles, etc., that we would need for a couple of hours at the pool. Grabbed the bag, the kids, the cell phone, the keys and was headed out the front door.

“Oh, wait a second, kids, I just want to grab a magazine.”

Thank God I went back.

I reached down into the basket where we keep all the magazines that come in and I noticed a strange smell. Funny, it smelled like an iron. But I hadn’t been ironing that day!

Then, I saw it. Ed’s travel iron; plugged in and turned on. Steadily burning a triangular wedge into the living room carpet.

I snatched it up quickly and examined the burn, the realization of what might have happened slowly sweeping over me. We would have been gone for a couple of hours, at least. Surely, there would have been a fire with untold smoke and water damage to the house. Aimee would have no way to get out and would probably have been killed by the smoke. I sat down, weakly, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I looked around. When Ed was packing for his trip, he had hastily thrown some of the travel items he had not needed into a pile and left in on the table. The travel iron must have been one of them. But, it had been inside a zippered case! When did this happen? I must have been just as I was running around getting things ready for the pool. I was dumbfounded.

“Mo-om! Are we going?” Tricia called impatiently from the van. I marched them both back inside, my legs still trembling. “Tricia, did you plug in this iron? Were you ironing doll clothes or something?” Her eyes grew large and her answer was an unequivocal “No.” I turned to Billy, who was humming and spinning in a circle.

“Billy, come here.” He came, smiling up at me and laughing.

I held up the iron. “Did you plug this into the wall?” He chuckled all the louder. “Me!” he replied. “Yes!”

Well, he’s truthful, I’ll admit. He may do some inexplicable things, but he has never fibbed to me, ever. Nevertheless, he got a resounding swat on the seat of his pants and we stayed home from the pool. (Tricia and I were both too shaken up to go, anyway.) Tricia was especially upset thinking that Aimee could have died. After we had calmed down a bit and Billy had spent a sufficient amount of time in the “Time Out Corner”, I pulled out some of his handouts from school about fire safety and we went over the dangers of playing with electric outlets.

Afterwards, he kept going over to the burned spot on the carpet and touching it. “Hot-hot, make a fire,” he repeated over and over as he continued to worry the loose teeth with his fingers. Billy is very fearful of candles, matches, and any sort of fire. Hopefully, some of the lesson sunk in. I knew that he realized that he had upset me because he kept cupping my face in his hands and saying, "Mommy...is happy! Mommy is happy!"

Yes, Billly. Mommy is happy; happy that a guardian angel was watching out for our family that day.

Two nights ago, the first wiggly tooth finally came out. Yikes! That was a big tooth! Ed examined it and said, “are you sure that’s a baby tooth?” Sure enough, we looked at the empty space and another tooth was peeking through. And last night, just as he was brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed, the other one finally popped out.

“Hurray!” he shouted. “No more wiggly tooth!”

Boy, you can say that again!

Hopefully this means we’ll get back to normal around here. Well, you know, normal is really such a relative term….

Having stacks and stacks of DVDs all over the house suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.

I need a vacation.

Disney, take me away!!


Kathy

 

[Goofster57]

A well deserved for you.

 

[DisneyMomFanatic]

Kathy,

I am glad for you that your house is still standing and you are still standing. I understand some of what you talk about. You know Alex has PDD so we have some things that are the same but Billy is on a different level than Alex is.
Alex's new thing is that if he doesn't get his way, he says he will get up at 4:30am and run away while we are asleep. Can you imagine my panic? I can't usually sleep on a night he says that and then trying to lock the house so he can't get out incase he really does try. Yikes!

Well, hopefully all these things happened at once and you can have some peace and "quiet". At least our version of quiet.

 

[Linnie The Pooh]

Oh, a big hug for you Kathy.

Actually, we are having issues with our boy, we are never issue-free, but he's making good progress socially and is really happy right now. More progress than he's ever made, actually. And other people are seeing it-not just us. That's why we're so excited. But the issues are always there. The positives just outweight the negatives. For once. I'm just happy Trey is so happy this year. I know it won't last. It never does. We'll see what happens when school starts-he hates school. He's so happy right now b/c he is home all day.

Buzz and I were talking last night about how this summer he hasn't really gotten into too much trouble and last summer we were frantically worried that he would be uncontrollable in a few years once he gets bigger-that we wouldn't be able to manage him. He had such a hard time last year and was so angry, throwing, kicking, hitting, being destructive etc. I was leaving my mom's and he wouldn't get in the car. He weighs about 65 pounds and I'll admit, I'm a very strong woman physically and can easily lift that much. However, Trey is solid as a rock and I could barely get him in the car as he was fighting me really hard. Even my mom said it probably wouldn't be too long and we wouldn't be able to handle him. It was ugly. Sigh... Such a hard summer.

So this summer, it's such a difference from last year that we are just riding this high. We still have many miles to go. If we ever get there at all. That's up to God. After last year, I thought that if Trey's happy, hey, that's enough for me. He is even playing with his toys again. All last school year, he wouldn't play, didn't do anything but mope around the house, wandering around-never engaging in anything.

Last summer, he did plug up all 4 of our toilets taking his toys swimming. Why do they do that???!!! He plugged 3 the first day so I called Roto Rooter and it cost $300, which I'm told was a bargain b/c they unplugged them without having to take the toilets off. The guy asked how old my son was-about 18 mos? Uh no, about 7 years. The next day, he decided to go 4 for 4 and plugged up the other one. I bought an auger and snaked it myself. I couldn't bring myself to pay a plumber the very next day... However, I pushed the toy further into the drain (didn't see that happening) and was on pins & needles until I knew it didn't get lodged in a pipe somewhere....We had to keep the bathroom doors locked all the time until we could trust him again, which is hard when you're trying to teach bathroom independence...

I'm glad your husband is ok. Hopefully he'll heal quickly. That is so scary about the iron. I'm sooo glad you went back in and found it. What a tragedy that would've been. We've had a great summer so far, but as I learned last year, that can change in the blink of an eye. I think we're all just so relieved that this summer is not as stressful as last year that it elevates our already happy, goofy moods. I'm hoping things turn around for you soon.

 

[mvazul]

Kathy,

I want to thank you so much for allowing us into your lives. There was definitely someone watching over you that day. I'm glad Billy's teeth finally came out so your household can get back to normal. I know you say normal is relative and I agree. Honestly, I have never thought normal existed - just different levels of normal for each individul family.

I hope the remaining teeth don't give you and Billy as much trouble coming out.

 

[jcc0621]

Thanks Goodness you "forgot" that one thing!