Social Stories

So we're getting ready to move.  Hopefully Friday.  Any time a major even happens you need to prepare an autistic kid.  A major event is about to happen.   I'm going for the award of "Autistic Mother of the Year" so I'm trying to prepare him.  In the "autism world" preparation comes in the form of a "social story".  A social story is basically a story telling a person what is expected/going to happen/etc.  Before technology this would be quite laborious (how's that for your word-of-the-day?); however, thanks to technology, writing social stories are now quite easy...if you're good at technology...of which I am good enough to be dangerous.

I know I need to prepare The Boy, and the experts say the best way is through a social story.  So I open up Keynote (the Mac version of PowerPoint) and create my genius story.  Visualize this:

Slide 1: A picture of our current house and Aaron's current bedroom with a big red "x" through them and the caption: "Mom and Dad want a bigger house."  (How materialistic is that..but I couldn't think of something better)...what next?  I'd better let him know that we're ALL moving...Slide 2: A picture of the new house..."Mom (I always come first..it flows better), Dad, Cameron, Madison, Aaron, Pippin and Lucy (gotta make sure you include the dogs) are going to move in this house". Then comes Slide 3.  It's a picture of his therapist, McKenzie, and a picture of Chuck E Cheeses with the caption: "On moving day you will go to Chuck E Cheese with McKenzie..."and from that point on he doesn't give a rip about the rest of the story.  It doesn't even matter what comes next, because now all he's doing is looking at the slide with the picture of Chuck E Cheese on it!  He gets his shoes on and tries to drag me out of the house!  I'm trying to explain that he doesn't get to go until Friday.  As a pathetic substitution he scrolls through Google Images looking at different pictures of Chuck E Cheese.  I can only imagine what's going through his head right now--he doesn't care that we're moving, he wants Chuck E Cheese!

The beauty in all of this is that I get out of taking him to Chuck E Cheese!  (Sorry McKenzie) That place is like crack cocaine for kids!!  So in a sick way, I'm thankful that I'll be loading boxes and scrubbing toilets (although I'm trying to figure out a way to have Husband clean them), because that means I won't be at Chuck E Cheese.  McKenzie, if you're reading this...it'll be fine...you have way more patience than I do!  :)