Christmas 2009: Wow, it really worked this time!

After numerous disasters (Christmas 2007, for example, was the worst day of my entire life), irritations, and disruptions, we finally had a Christmas go right. It went well enough that I no longer officially hate Christmas.

We drove up to Alexandria on the 23rd, set up our tiny hotel tree, and wrapped presents. We took out the boys one at a time on XMAS Eve, Adam first. They opened their presents, then went about their usual Alex routines with us. Next year, we'll take Toby out first. He was very upset when we got to Home Deopt and it was already closed. He took a HD book back to school with him a couple of weeks ago and had me draw a Home Depot, so I suspect he had built up a HD visit in his mind for a while. It crushed him when we couldn't do it. Everything should still be open in the morning next year. We repeated the routines on Christmas Day, though we could only take them to the hotel and not to any of their other places, all of which were closed. After we returned Toby to St. Mary's on XMAS Eve, DW and I bought pizzas for the overnight staff at St. Mary's, delievered the pizzas to the school, then drove to Natchitoches, Louisiana, for that town's spectacular lights display. They've been at it for 83 years, and it's quite a sight--and it's well worth a holiday visit to Louisiana. I'm just saying.

 

The Boy Tree at our house. I gathered up all of the plush toys we've taken from the claw machines at WalMart and used them as ornaments. The crowning touch is having Bat-Man serve as the star, a suggestion DW made.

 

The Girl Tree at our house. It's pretty and elegant, and DW added more color to it this year.

 

DW brought home a little WalMart one day, and shortly thereafter I became attracted to the WalMart Cowboy Christmas village and its saloon, outhouse, and windmill. I'd never put up a village before.

 

DW and I visited Celebration in the Oaks in New Orleans City Park this year. Major fail. The lights looked like they were purchased at WalMart or Target, and half of them didn't work anyway. Celebration in the Oaks used to be a big deal, with fabulous light displays and other seasonal junk. Now it's like a dinky county fair. So sad. Thankfully, we saw Avatar just before we went there, so the evening was a net gain.

 

My best seasonal photo of Toby has him choosing the perfect cereal on Christmas Eve. He bought Cookie Crisp, which I had to eat after he left it at the hotel.

 

Adam opened his own presents this year, for the first time ever. He usually could care less about them, but he kept a few for himself this time around.

 

Adam and I saw this unattended fire engine outside one of the local WalMarts during his post-holiday home visit. He had some fun with it. No, I didn't open the door and turn on the sirens and lights, but that doesn't mean I didn't want to.

Christmas 2008

Last Christmas was one of the worst days of my entire life, for reasons I don't care to revisit. DW and I decided to try something different this year.

We took a hotel room in Alexandria, Louisiana, where we put up a small Christmas tree and laid out the kids' presents underneath it. We brought them over individually on Christmas Eve to open presents and play. That way, T could make his WalMart rounds and A could eat at Subway.

A, as usual, ignored the Christmas tree and the presents underneath.

T got the added bonus of watching DW have a Zen experience with the beanie cranes at WalMart. She became one with the machines and was lifting plush toys left and right--and doing it with her non-dominant hand, to boot. T was jumping up and down with joy.

After we returned T to school, DW and I motored up to Natchitoches, Louisiana (50 miles NW), to view that town's fabulous Christmas lights. When I was a kid, we drove through Natchitoches every year shortly before XMAS on the way to Baton Rouge from our home in Oklahoma, and I could see the lights all set up and ready to go. But it was too far from our grandparents' house for my parents to be bothered with driving us back up to see the lights at night. So I finally got to see them, something I highly recommend.


We went by our kids' mini-group home Christmas morning after they attended mass and opened their Santa Claus presents, which appeared mysteriously while the kids were at church. We had a nice visit, then drove back home. The kids' school provided them with a tasty looking Christmas lunch, but DW and I had our own arrangements fall through. DW made a Christmas dinner of truck stop nachos, and I had a can of Spaghetti-Os with sliced weenies. So much better than a repeat of the same meal we had a month ago.

Boys and Our Toys

I've been viewing photos of my new nephew, Manhattan Sam, on his gentle parents' blog. I see that gentle reader Bill is introducing his son to the computer at a very early age, albeit to watch television. Good job! I was reminded of one of my favorite baby pictures of Toby. Anyhow, will this:

lead to this:
(yes, I really was that slim)
and to this?

Carousel of Nostalgia

My kids love to view, and print, photographs whenever they are at home. We went through hundreds of pictures with T the past few days, dating all the way back to when he was a baby. His favorites this go-around were photos of him at the Alexandria, Louisiana, Zoo. A caught on to T's fascination with photographs when T began returning to St. Mary's with dozens of prints every time he came home. A now has me printing photos, and A has had me drive past his old school and a few other places he used to love but hasn't cared about more recently.



This clip expresses my kids' nostalgia for photographs and drives past the old places better than I ever could. As I've already written, I just finished the first season of this show on DVD this past week. This is one of the final moments of the season, and it was on my mind when T and I were looking at photos. The kids' nostalgia habits were also on my mind when I was watching the scene, and I almost got a little weepy.

A dilemma, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in something or other

It's been a little over two weeks since my mother died, and it's difficult to articulate exactly how I feel about it. I've had some moments of leaden sadness, but, for the most part, I quite honestly don't feel much at all. The ability to deny appropriate emotions, or at least to suppress them deeply, is something I inherited from my mom, so perhaps it's appropriate that I'm having a hard time feeling as though I'm having a hard time. We were estranged--first partially, then entirely--during the last few years of her life, but the lack of emotional response strikes me as a bit odd.

I have had significant interaction with my sister in the past couple of weeks. She contracted a nasty sinus infection that quickly turned into pneumonia, landing her in the hospital. That was pretty crappy, coming right on the heels of the funeral. She is astonishingly better and more in-control than she was a couple of years ago; I hope she is able to maintain her current frame of mind and keep body and soul together on the scant financial resources she will have. I'm going to do what I can to help her set things up. Beyond that, I'll take things very slowly--much slower than she would like, I'm afraid.

Of Families and Frontiers

DW's family reunion last week was a success, as some of the gentle readers of this space can attest. None of the uncomfortable scenarios I feared materialized, and my blood pressure remained normal the entire time. I would like to send all good karma, positive energy, and prayers to the family of one gentle reader whose grandson was struck by a motorcycle shortly after the family returned home.

This was a reunion of DW's parents and siblings and of my FIL and his siblings. My FIL's family on both sides has been in Utah and Idaho since the 1840s. The earliest of those were genuine frontier settlers--ranchers and farmers, mostly--whether they intended to be (in the case of the Mormons) or not (one ancestor's family stopped in Almo, Idaho, on the way to California and just stayed there). Some of DW's relatives currently work the land, and my FIL is an agricultural economist, but DW and her siblings grew up in urbanized settings, with only occasional exposure to the arduous physical labor of ranchwork. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, our yard bordered on a cattle farm, but I knew absolutely nothing about the work that went on back there. Neither of my parents and none of my grandparents were involved with agriculture of livestock, so I have less of a connection to the land than does my DW.

The mythology of the Old West and the westward-shifting American frontier, of course, have always served as part and parcel of the definition of who and what white Americans are, realizing, of course, the violence and injustice in taking much of that frontier from its native inhabitants. Also, the ideal of the American small farmer has been a part of our politics since Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton disputed the nature of our country. The taciturn dirt farmers; the cattle ranchers; the oilmen; the gunsligners; the pious Mormons; the prospectors; the dreamers; the hustling preachers; the evil railroad and mining companies--these all form a part of our collective national self-image, I think, though clearly not part of the reality in the lives of most Americans of my generation. We are reminded of that past by the mythology of the West and by artifacts like the accordion that DW's grandfather took on the trail to pass the time while he tended sheep.

During the reunion of this family with its own roots in what was once a frontier region, and in the days subsequent to that reunion, I just happened to read two fabulous books that address boundaries and frontiers, albeit in very different ways. I liked Cormac McCarthy's The Road so much that I purchased his Border Trilogy, and I finished reading All The Pretty Horses (1992)yesterday. The plot has teenage ranching Texans running away into Mexico, then returning home, in the 1940s. In the Texas these boys knew, property transfers (in this case, horses) were effected with contracts and lawsuits, while in the Mexico they came to know, such transfers were effected with arms and official corruption. The northern Mexico of McCarthy's story somewhat resembles HBO's Deadwood, an outlaw encampment where might made right and life was cheap. All The Pretty Horses ends with our protagonist riding off into the sunset, into an uncertain future in a disappearing frontier.

At the Salt Lake airport, I spotted a copy of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997), a firsthand account of the May 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Ironically, perhaps, I began reading the book over the Wasatch Range and the High Uintahs--tall mountains, for sure--and got through about half of it while flying at an altitude only slightly higher than the summit of Everest. Krakauer--an adventure sports journalist--was a member of one of the ill-fated expeditions that climbed to the highest point on the planet on May 10, 1996. As a hypoxic Krakauer descended, an unexpected storm blew in from the South, stranding several climbers at altitudes where human beings are not naturally equipped to be. Krakauer and his fellow climbers found themselves at the frontier of human survival; there were nine deaths, including the leaders of both expeditions. The clouds, viewed from above, appeared innocent enough, but they brought a thunderstorm/blizzard with hurricane-force winds. A series of bad decisions delayed for several hours the final ascent of the two expedition parties at the center of the story, most notably the failure of the leaders of those parties to ensure that ropes were set up at a potential bottleneck very near the summit. The leaders also failed to set a firm turnaround time to ensure that climbers would not run out of supplemental oxygen, whether or not they reached the summit. However, a few climbers assumed a reasonable turnaround time, turned around short of the summit, and survived. The highest peak I've ever hiked is 10,000 feet, and, after reading this book, that may be the highest this lowlander ever hikes.

Notes on a Road Trip

Your humble correspondent's in-laws are holding a family reunion in Logan, Utah, this week. It's been quite nice thus far, with none of the dueling banjoes or visits from the sheriff's office that would not be surprising in an any meeting of your humble correspondent's own maternal family.

I had a surprise! sneeze Wednesday morning in the airport garage--I'll spare you the gory details, gentle reader--but the end result was that I flew from Baton Rouge to Salt Lake City a la commando.

The flight from BR to Dallas was uneventful and so boring that I composed some bad political haiku.

president barack
springtime for america
allergy season

arizona john
eternal desert summer
sincerely, george bush

Your humble correspondent played golf for the first time in his life yesterday, and actually enjoyed it. Thanks to gentle reader Bill and my other brothers-in-law for talking me into going.

Mystery

It's a mystery to me why I'm trying to track down my birthparents, aside from wanting health information and genetic history. I think I might have dropped it by now but for my irritation at the notion that I am legally barred from just calling up and getting my birth records like anybody else could. There's an adoptee rights rally scheduled for July 22, in the park directly across the street from my office. The National Conference of State Legislators will be in town, and there's a big push on in several states for open-records laws. Maybe I'll go; it's certainly more pragmatic to walk across the street than to march on Washington or Austin.

Yesterday, as we were preparing to check out of our hotel so we could pick up A. for a weekend visit at home, I suddenly contemplated all the disappointment my kids have experienced over the years. I briefly sobbed. They've had a great deal of joy also, and they enjoy their day-to-day lives. I wonder whether my deal yesterday had anything to do with my search for my own origins or my profound disappointment in my own family of origin the past decade or so.

Family Foto

A rare photograph of my little family.

Home Improvement?

I've been vexed by the small garden bed between our front window and walkway ever since we moved into this house eight years ago. It's difficult to grow much of anything in there, and we aren't around here enough on weekends to work too hard on keeping it clean of the weeds that have tended to fill up the area. We've talked for a couple or three years about creating a rock garden in the area, and, yesterday, I went to Home Depot and bought edging, red lava rocks, and marble chips. I pulled out the scraggly plants that had managed to survive the past few years, put down a anti-weed cloth, and filled up the area with rocks. We placed a couple of plaster statues representing our two sons in the area; DW has been wanting to put those in the front yard for several years. BTW, you can see from my shadow in the photo that I'm really, really tall.

Grandparents' visit

DW's parents, having just completed a busy wedding season, flew into Alexandria for a visit with DW, our kids, and me. On the way up, I purchased a new digital camera, one that works much better than our old one--hopefully, I won't need to take 10 pictures to get one good one. Anyhow, back to the in-laws' visit. We were concerned that the kids might not take well to having extra people in the picture during their routines. The kids have seen DW's parents several times before, but they hadn't seen them in a couple of years before yesterday, and they hadn't seen them during an Alexandria routine.

Is this my son A. or one of the gentle readers of this blog? The likeness still amazes me. A. was in a particularly good mood yesterday. It took him a few minutes to warm up to his grandmother, who sat in the back with him. Once we got to WalMart, he was peachy keen with things. He even allowed DW's mom to push the cart, with him using his body and head to direct her around the store. A. also was happy to have his grandparents play with him in the swimming pool, in our hotel room,and at the park.

A. looooves the ice cream at his favorite local restaurant.

T. also enjoyed the visit, though he was a little high-strung, especially after a hotel housekeeper inadvertently reinforced T.'s vacuum cleaner phobia. At one point, DW accidentally referred to her mother as "grandma," something that made T. look a little uneasy, but that confirmed my theory that he really didn't much like my mother by the time we parted ways. Once we referred to DW's parents by their first names again, he was perfectly happy about the situation.

T. wasn't angry or upset, but he sure looks like it in this picture. IIRC, he was shouting, "the CAR!" while I was checking him out for the day.

It was nice for both of our boys to get reacquainted with their maternal grandparents, and it was a relief that the boys didn't object at all to having them here during their routines. DW's father commented about how astonished he was at the boys' progress since the last time he saw them, and at A.'s improvement in particular. The visit was good for all of us. DW and I both want our boys to know they have a family that loves them, most importantly, the family members who are named as their guardians in our wills. That's a little difficult when most of that family lives 2000 miles away, but it's certainly not impossible. We prepped the kids for this visit with telephone calls and pictures, and, in T's case, teaching him his grandparents' first names. It all seemed to work pretty well.

Day by the Sea

Yesterday saw us at Gulf Shores, Alabama, for the first time in several years. We used to go there freqently, as it's only about 3 hours from our house. It's something I highly recommend. We had a wonderfully lazy day in the Sun.

I took along some reading material, and I read an article about the railroad from inland China to Lhasa, Tibet. The train is controversial for political reasons, but the engineering is brilliant. It was ironic, I suppose, to sit on a warm beach and read about a train that runs across permafrost at an altitude of up to 16,000 ft. Also ironic in the article itself--China's ongoing effort to settle more Han Chinese in Tibet has resulted in Tibetan Buddhism becoming cool in other parts of China. I also got to the midway point of Doris Kearns Goodwins' Lincoln biography, which I hope to finish in the coming week. I'll write up a review of this excellent book when I'm done with it.

Oh, yeah, the beach. With middle age has come the wisdom to recognize that I'm a very white guy. Heavens, I'm pasty. I've resorted to using my kids' Water Babies sunscreen. My skin turns only one color in the Sun, and it ain't tan. Also, I have a mess of freckles on my back and upper arms--more than I used to--which gets DW a little concerned about my Sun exposure.

There are a few things that mid-40s, overweight men really should know better than to do. Posing on the beach appears to be one of them. But then, I am a Poser, after all.

Rough Audience of One

My youngest son, A., didn't much care for our new backyard swimming pool this past weekend. He played in it for a little while Sunday night, then again Saturday morning, but he had another place in mind for water play. Because A. is nonverbal, and because he employed trickery in an attempt to manipulate us, it took us a few minutes to catch on. He picked up swim suits and pointed out back, then, once he had a suit on, he ran to the front door, dropped to the floor and threw a tantrum. He wanted the beach, dammit, and that swimming pool was an inadequate substitute. This happened twice. And some people say children with autism are incapable of manipulating people . . . I would have just taken him, but he'll only let himself be driven around in our older car, which was making some odd noises, and which is in the shop today.

On Saturday morning, I took A. on a 4-hour walking tour of WalMart and the local mall. A. loves to watch the automatic doors open and close at WalMart, and he enjoys watching other kids at play in the video arcade and stuffed-bear "factory" at the mall. He also loves the lettering on the outside of Dillard's department stores. The local mall has two separate Dillard's stores, and there's another Dillard's sign at another mall entrance, so we essentially circumnavigated the mall, on foot, at a running clip. Moreover, the food court sells pizza and ice cream, and I had to make two pizza purchases and two ice cream purchases. Saturday evening saw us back at WalMart and the local park; Sunday morning had us at WalMart once again, making a circular route from one bank of doors to the other, both inside and outside the store.

A. was jealously possessive of your humble host over the weekend, and he demanded my undivided attention. When I wrote out some bills, he misbehaved to get me back into his room. He was in such a daddy mood that he wanted nothing to do with DW all weekend, though he usually is perfectly willing to include her in his play. Not this time. It stung her, and it took us a while to figure out what was going on with him on that issue.

A. was upset when we got back to St. Mary's yesterday, and I was exhausted from the weekend and the drive up. The nurse and one of the other parents commented that I looked like I was about to cry. Actually, no, I wasn't, but DW and I both frequently feel that way when we take our kids back to school, and we both have been teary in the car on the way home. Those moments of separation are emotionally tough for all four of us, though A. and T. are amazingly courageous and tough, and, by all accounts, get past the separations rapidly.

Yesterday, however, I did not get past the moement of separation very quickly. Last night, I lay awake thinking about how odd our family situation really is and how difficult it is on all of us--especially the boys, who can't understand why things are the way they are, or that they are progressing much better at St. Mary's than they ever did in the chaos of our home before they went there. I thought about DW's expectations of motherhood, which were shattered by her difficult pregnancies, then by A. and T.'s brain disorders. I thought about the contemptable people who make up what used to be my family of origin (I cut off all contact last year), and how much I still despise them for their ignorant, judgmental disapproval of, well, damn near all of our parenting decisions from day one. They can all go to hell. I had a very hard time getting to sleep, and I'm thoroughly exhausted today.

I'm reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" at the moment. Last night, I read about Edwin Stanton's deep love for his family. After his first wife died, the future Secretary of War was concerned that his then 2-year-old son would grow up with no memory of his mother. Stanton spent his free time writing a 100-page letter to the boy, explaining how much both of his parents loved him. I can't speak for DW, but that struck me as something I might want to do. I know A. and T. feel loved--by us and by most of the staff at their school--but I'd really like to them to understand how deeply I feel about them. If, sometime after DW and I are dead and buried, my kids' conditions are cured and they are capable of deeper understanding of the world around them (and I see more and more signs that their understanding is expanding, despite their limitations), I would like for them to know how deeply DW and I adore both of them. I suppose I could have such a letter placed in our estate planning papers.

Utah Wedding Epic

My recent trip out west had a vaguely Eastern flavor to it, beginning over Provo, Utah, when I noticed the members of the family across the aisle craning their necks to view the campus of BYU from the air. I placed my hands in gassho and bowed to Happy Valley in a little salute. DW thought it was mildly funny, so the gassho/bow thing was a little joke of mine the whole trip; it's not something I do regularly, as there's a certain pretentious quality about using the zen gesture of respect in public these days, and, to quote Fawlty Towers, "pretentious? moi?" Anyhow, it seemed like it might be fun to write about gentle reader Bill's wedding to his amazingly gracious K. as a travelogue in the style of Matsuo Basho's "Narrow Road to the Interior," mixing narrative and poetry. Actually, I was bored on the flight home and decided to try my hand at haiku once again--and Basho I ain't.

DW and I arrived in Utah on Thursday and had dinner with gentle reader Jeremy.

asian flavor--yum!
good conversation; nothing
more clever to say

Friday afternoon, we made our way to the reception, which was held the night before the wedding.

reversed order? just
how radical dothey get
at this country club?

Saturday afternoon saw the big event itself. DW and I made our way from the hotel to Temple Square, evidently as the ceremony was getting underway. I am thoroughly unqualified to enter the temple itself, so we missed the sealing ceremony. It was fun walking around the grounds, watching the necessarily organized chaos of Saturday weddings at the Salt Lake Temple. I also noticed, for the first time, that Temple Square has some pretty funky landscaping. Evidently, one of my MIL's distant relatives was a landscape architect there way back when, and he made a point of importing interesting plants that could thrive in Utah.

cold stone edifice
golden angel watching o'er--
playing on the grass

Everywhere we looked, there were wedding parties, having pictures taken or waiting to have pictures taken. Speaking from personal experience, I can safely say that the bride and groom have more than pictures on their minds.

soon-to-be lovers
every staircase, photographs
anticipation

DW was appalled at what she saw as lowered dress standards for Mormon weddings. There was a gal in a very off-white dress that would have been verboten back when we were wed. Hilariously, there was a group of 20-something women seated outside the Temple, ample cleavage on display. One bystander broke out laughing when I blurted out, "well, it's certainly a more liberal Mormon Church than I remember!"

different wedding
different staircase, not ours
bridesmaids showing boobs

my wife, scandalized
told me to look; no, really!
implants on parade

Alas, no photographs.

After pictures, I hauled DW and one of her sisters-in-law to WalMart to purchase the fixings for a goody basket for the happy couple. We made it back to downtown Salt Lake just in time for the wedding dinner, inside the LDS Church's Joesph Smith Memorial Building. After the dinner, we took a stroll around the Main Street Plaza, which was controversial a few years ago because of some very bad lawyering on the part of the City and the Church. The legal issue was resolved, but the controversy brought up the long-standing tension between the Church and non-Mormon interests in Utah. I posed on the edge of a fountain.

We enjoyed our trip and, again, Puddle of Nothing extends congratulations to gentle reader Bill.

Indulgent parenting?

I had to wonder this past weekend whether I've been overly indulgent with my kids over the years. A. and T. both threw tantrums when things didn't go just as they wanted, and I always wonder how much of that is autism and how much is just bad juvenile behavior. I can understand how T. was pissed off that his Alexandria routine was changed due to our exigent circumstances--kids with autism tend to be very rigid about their routines--but his explosion inside Target about not buying french fries before going to the store struck me as just plain bad behavior. We always go to the store first. But it could be that he was angry that it was the Alexandria Target and not the Slidell one, where he now likes to shop for swimsuits for trips to the beach. Again, that would be bad behavior, not necessarily autistic behavior. It's always hard to tell.

I can't say that there aren't parenting manuals for people in my situation; there are some pretty good behavioral psychology texts out there. However, I pretty much decided to put those aside for a while after a brief, painful, terribly failed attempt to get applied behavior analysis (ABA) underway with T. I pushed for help with the formal educational programming from the school system and the state disabilities system, with mixed results. The schools took a while, but they finally got on the same page with us, and our kids had a couple of good years at school. However, as to an in-home behavior program, the state people managed to piss on everything we had going on with our kids, even the things that were working. I had to restrain myself from overturning a conference table at our last meeting with those people, but I digress.

My instincts told me that T. and A. needed a parent/friend who would accept them unconditionally more than they needed a parent/behavior trainer who was determined to change everything about them. My reading, and my observations of my kids' interactions with other children, made it clear that they would have a very hard time forming friendships with their peers, so I made it part of my job to become their peer and to interact with them on their own level. I'm no flower-power, be your kids' best friend kinda guy, but it just seemed obvious that I needed to do that. I tried my hand at mild ABA techniques over the years, but never at the intensity that is recommended for success, as I pushed for systematic help with that kind of programming, which they are finally getting at St. Mary's, albeit in limited doses. My hope was that I could build a strong enough friendship bond with my children that could be used to pull them along developmentally.

I suppose that part of my instinct was a projection from my own childhood. It's a cliche that you model your parenting on you own parents, but I was determined not to do that. My dad never hid his disappointment in me for not being his idea of what a boy should be; I was, and I remain, determined that my children will never feel as though they are disappointments to me. Also, even before we had kids, I resolved that any kids of mine would be encouraged to develop their own individual personalities and interests, and that my function was to help them along the way. There would be no value judgments based on preconceived notions of what boys or girls should be. After the kids were diagnosed with developmental disabilities, I resolved that I would give them exposure to as many activities and experiences as possible, and that I would do whatever I could to help them enjoy their preferred activities, even if that meant jumping for joy at the sight of water pouring through the storm drain down the street. There have been many public tantrums, but, fortunately, most of the people around here are kindhearted and quick to size up the situation. It amazed me how people offered help when things were really, really bad, with the notable exception of a certain local congregation.

We've been told that our kids are unusually aware of each other and of us. They now play with each other on a regular basis, after several years of T. deliberately ignoring A. I hope that my conscious efforts had something to do with all of that.

However, friendship/parenting has its obvious drawbacks, the most obvious being an inherently mixed message about whether you are a playmate or a disciplinarian. It is damn difficult to be both. Additionally, in my role as friend/playmate, I have tended to take my kids wherever they want to go and to buy them way too much junk at the store. I've also overlooked more bad behavior than I probably should--behavior that sometimes has nothing to do with autism. Part of that was necessary to keep an always volatile, unpredictable home situation from exploding. I don't care what the strict behaviorists say, two kids with autism means that the kids get away with away with more than you'd like them to. That's just life.

Now that I can view some of this with a bit of perspective, I'm left wondering how to integrate something of a disciplinarian piece into the equation. I'm naturally very tolerant and indulgent with children to begin with, so it's not something that comes easy to me. I've been working on it, mostly with T., as he nears the horrors of puberty, so we'll see how it goes.

Poetry Thursday

About a week ago, I decided to try out Poetry Thursday, something I noticed on gentle reader Sideon's blog. This week's assignment was based on the color red, something I had a few disjointed ideas on, but, alas, wasn't able to put together. Also, I was a little depressed on Thursday, so writing about an un-depressed color like red didn't seem right.

We have A. at home this weekend. He woke us up at 2:00 a.m. today, which is very unusual for him. A few years ago, however, sleepless nights were routine for him, and your humble correspondent generally was "it."

One of the gentle readers of this space is getting married on March 17. This is one of the very finest people I know, so congratulations are in order. Your humble correspondent will be on-hand for most of the festivities. One problem--anybody who has ever seen my tie collection would know that all of them are hilariously inappropriate for the requested dress for photos at this event. If Craig the Filosopher is reading, he can vouch for me here. I wear really loud ties to compensate for my introverted personality--and because I happen to like them. I came home from Target last night with a tie that I thought might do, but DW questioned that. It's a funny problem to have, actually--a lawyer who cannot dress conservatively to save his life.

Autism Conference

We attended the second annual St. Mary's Autism Conference in Alexandria, LA, this week, and spent some quality time with A and T. The conference was organized into small "break-out" sessions this year, and those sessions were more practical and less theoretical than last year. However, I spent most of last year's conference working the parents' group table, so I didn't see all that much of it. I got some hope renewed this year, seeing the miraculous results achieved by a couple of intensive autism programs with which some of the presenters were affiliated. We also received some affirmation that some of the things we've been doing intuitively actually have scientific support. It's astonishing how far applied behavioral psychology has come; it's infuriating how difficult it is for parents to afford the best of these programs. Fortunately for us, St. Mary's is moving in the right direction with its programming, but the autism center there is still in its infancy.

Meta-blogging note--Blogger finally allowed me to switch to the new version, so I can label and organize my posts. Yay!

Birthday and the Beach

T. turned 10 years old last weekend.




It was 75 and sunny on Sunday, so I took him to his very favorite place in the world, the beach! However, DW had hid his swimsuit too well before Christmas, when it was too cold for waterplay, so I took T. out in search of one. Academy Sports had no swim suits of any kind, and T. was hitting and kicking me over the fact that we were there instead of at Target, at the other end of that strip mall. I was griping out loud about how dare they hold themselves out as a sporting goods store, etc., when they don't even have something so basic as a swimsuit. Having a kid with you is fabulous when you need to vent about a store like that. Or about people who write checks in the express line instead of using debit cards. Or people who wait until its time to pay to root through their purses or wallets to find their cards or checkbooks. Grrrr! Anyhow, Target had a boatload of swimsuits, and we were picking one out when DW called to say that she had found T's swimsuit at home. To avoid a tantrum, I went ahead and purchased one at Target. Problem is, now he knows where they keep the swimsuits, and a swimsuit is a communication object for the beach, even though he can say "beach." So we went to Waveland, Miss., and had some fun in the water.

Anniversary

Today is my 13th wedding anniversary. We celebrated it a day early. DW and I probably are more in love than we were when we got married. Like most couples, we've had our ups and downs and we've helped each other through some very hard times. We still miscommunicate on occasion, but who doesn't? Working on communication has been one of the most important components of our relationship--DW and I have different forms of communication, and getting each other's modes down took time. Oddly, perhaps, another extremely important component for us as a couple is to give each other whatever emotional and mental space we need to work out our own issues. Anyhow, I can't believe I ever looked like this:

Christmas 2006

A little water never stopped my kids. I really need to watch my mouth, however, especially when I'm tired and grumpy. The boys woke me up around 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve, and T didn't want to get out of the car on this park run because there was a guy in a particular area of the park with a metal detector. "Look," I blurted out, "just because there's some idiot looking for buried treasure under the swingset doesn't mean you don't get out of the car." I don't know whether the guy heard me, but I really need to be a little nicer sometimes.

A was incredibly happy all weekend long. T was paying attention to him, which is something A has wanted his entire life. T was extremely grumpy during our Christmas Eve car ride to the city, but otherwise he did just fine. He also desparately wanted a solo outing with me, something that would have hurt A emotionally more than it would have helped T, so it didn't happen. He'll get plenty of one-on-one time on his next trip home.