Gross (I have no other words)

Kiddos with autism can get fixated on particular objects--carrying them around with them all of the time.  Aaron's current object of his affection is....the....plunger.  Gross.  As if it's not bad enough that he's walking around with a plunger, it's HOW he's walking around with the plunger.  Apparently the suction of the plunging part feels good against his mouth.  Yes, I said it.  My kid walks around with a plunger stuck to his mouth.  NASTY!!!  I couldn't bring myself to taking a picture of it.  Make sure you're not eating right now because it keeps getting worse...the plunger has been used for it's intended purpose.  Did you just throw up in your mouth a little?  I chase this kid around constantly (and by constantly, I mean constantly), continuing to take his "toy" away from him.  I can't believe I want this kid to kiss me!

Solutions

"Necessity breeds solution" is a quote by an author named Anne McCaffrey.  I have no clue who that is, but that doesn't matter when you quote someone!  Aaron comes up with numerous creative solutions to his problems; however, a few of them (or perhaps most of them) don't fit under the "Safety First" category.  Saturday night Necessity Bred Solution without any thought of personal safety.  This story is another reason why Aaron can't be left unsupervised. 

So we're at my niece's birthday party on Saturday night.  Instead of a big cake, she wanted to do build-your-own cupcakes.  My sister had TONS of candy on the table to put parents and children into sugar shock.  Of course Aaron helped himself to his favorites that were on the table (starting before he ate his dinner).  Who am I to judge though as I was uncontrollably shoving my face with Good and Plenty's.  Which, by the way, DO NOT go well with red wine.  Just a helpful tip for you.  Anyhow.  Aaron comes up to me with his finger in his mouth, and he's irritated.  I see a piece of some sort of gummy candy stuck between his molars.  Nothing is more irritating than food stuck between your teeth (scratch that. I can think of a few other things that are more irritating, but am not going to bring those up...) So, I'm trying to dig this thing out with my fingers-with no success.  So Aaron decides to pick up a butter knife from the table to try to get it out.  Of course I tell him that's not a good idea.  He keeps trying, and I keep taking it away.  Mean mom.  He's not getting anywhere with me, so he decides he's going to walk over to the KNIFE BLOCK and grab a STEAK KNIFE to see if he can get it out with something a little sharper.  It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.  I was right there to run over and stop him.  I figured that he really wanted that out (and I didn't want to deal with a cavity) so the search for dental floss ensued.  This proved to be a safer, more effective way to remove the candy chunk.  With the candy gone he was able to enjoy more sugar.  Problem solved.

Markers and Memories

You expect 2 year-olds to suck on markers--heck I might even expect a 3 year-old to suck on markers.  At some point though, you've gotta stop.  I would have thought at 10 we would be past this stage, but apparently we're not.  I'm trying to decide if the feelings of disgust in myself are warranted though.  Here's why: if I wasn't so lazy I probably could have prevented it.  I'm going to confess--I walked by the pile of markers for days (yes, that's a plural) thinking to myself, "I should pick those up or Aaron is going to draw all over _______" (and every time I walked by I thought of a different object that he would write on).   Did I ever exert the 20 calories it would have taken to walk over to the markers and pick them up?  Nope.  Well actually, in the end I did because I got to clean up the markers AND his face.  The good news to this story is that the only casualties were Aaron's mouth and a few markers.  The computer made it out unscathed (which in the past hasn't always been the case), and the carpet fared well too.  Whew!

Now for an "awe how cute" story.  Aaron loves Disneyland.  Husband has videos of our last trip on his computer, and apparently Aaron went looking through the computer for something fun to look at.  When I walked in, he had moved the office chair into the kitchen where the computer was, unplugged the iPhone that was syncing (ha ha ha--I'm laughing only because it wasn't my phone), and was watching a video of himself riding the Buzz Lightyear ride.  He was doing this while playing with a Buzz Lightyear light up toy.  It was so precious.  It made me want to grab his headphones and head off to the most magical place on Earth.  Even if that did mean I had to ride the stupid steamboat 400 times!

"Meyyows"

As a kid did you ever take a marshmallow and squish it between your fingers to make it like taffy?  Aaron has somehow figured out the speedy way to do this.  I'm not sure how he figured it out (it must have been one of his siblings--it's always their fault), but he likes to microwave marshmallows.  So I went to the store yesterday and they had these HUGE marshmallows on sale for 99¢.  Daughter had just had braces put on, so I was a sucker to get them for her (even though she can't eat them...didn't really see the logic in that one).  So the Little Monster saw the "meyyows" (as he calls them), and he wanted one.  He got a plate out and brought me the bag.

I must have been in a delusional state of mind, because I knew how this was going to end--which was messy.  He had eaten his dinner (in just shy of 45 minutes...yay), so what the heck.  He takes the gigantic meyyow over to the microwave and wants me to start it.  At this point I'm more than willing to do it myself because it would be a total disaster if he started working the microwave to cook his own marshmallow.  Can you imagine the clean up on an exploded marshmallow?  Anyhow I carefully watch the meyyow and pop it out when it's almost ready (no need to take any risks), and hand it over to him.  He goes running through the kitchen with it, and starts to play.  In my wishful thinking I hand him a wet washcloth hoping that this time he'll use it instead of his pants.  Nope.  Gotta use the pants.  Meyyow eating has to be 100% supervised because, well...duh.

Aaron has strategically placed himself so that he can see his reflection in the sliding glass door while he's eating his meyyow. So there he sits for the next half an hour, making funny faces at himself in the door, stretching the meyyow and smearing it all over his pants and the table.  Awesome.  Because I made him stay sitting down while he at his meyyow, the mess was contained, and a quick strip of the pants and a LONG time with his hands under hot water to dissolve the sugar, he was on his way, leaving me to scrub down the table!

Slamming doors

In our house slamming doors is a good thing and a bad thing.  Side note--it's ALWAYS a bad thing when your typically developing teenage does it (not that two of mine would EVER think of doing that).  While a slamming door may indicate the mood of most people (including my other children), when done by Aaron, it's a different story.  To every door-slam there is a silver lining--so the good news first: the best part about Aaron slamming a door is you know either he is in a room or he has just left a room (which is also good because you know he's in the house).  The bad news is: he is either in a room or has just left a room--which generally means there is trouble brewing.  Which brings me to this evening.

A door slammed.  Of course it was an upstairs door and I was downstairs.  I knew Aaron had just gone upstairs, so I ran up there to see where he was (by the way--I hate having stairs--I was hoping I would get in shape, but no dice--turns out if you send your kids up and down the stairs to do things for you the whole exercise thing doesn't work).  His bedroom door was open and he wasn't in it (bad news).  My bedroom door was closed (potential bad news), but after a quick sweep of my bedroom, bathroom and closet (because he now thinks is fun to hang out in there) I determined he wasn't in my room (more bad news--but good news at the same time because that means he wasn't ruining MY stuff).  I start questioning myself that he did in fact go upstairs, and thinking that I'm hoping I'm not going crazy--which despite my denial, I think most people know the truth.  Anyhow, just as I'm determining that I may be crazy, the little monster walks out of his sister's room with three pieces of candy.  I said, "where did you get that candy?" At that point his selective-hearing-sister comes running out of the room she was in and swipes it out of his hands so fast he didn't have time to put a death grip on it.  She's irritated because he stole it, I'm irritated because I didn't know she had it (otherwise I would have gotten to it first), and Aaron is irritated because she ripped it out of his hands.  I'm laughing on the inside because this incident solves a mystery that I've been facing the past couple of days.  There have been candy wrappers on the floor around Aaron's computer, and I couldn't figure out where they came from.  Now I know.  The next time my daughter is out of the house Aaron and I are going to take a field trip into the abyss also known as her bedroom.

Moving update and funny story

Well, Aaron made it through the move.  I have to say I was very concerned about how he would do because the last time we moved it was a disaster.  With him being older, and his parents knowing how to prepare him better, I think he ended up being okay.  He's been sleeping through the night and didn't start looking for ways to escape out of the backyard until today...Today he paced the backyard fence looking for the best way to get outta here!  Luckily we've become friends with the people who bought our old house, so if he shows up there they know how to get a hold of us!  :)

Anyhow--the funny story.  One of the reasons we moved was to spare our neighbors from a frequently naked 10 year-old (sparing them from the naked part that is).  Well new neighbors, here we are!  One of the things that drew us to our current house is there are no neighbors behind us, none on one side of us, and a rambler on the other side of us--theoretically no one can see in our backyard (and if I catch them, then I can report them).  HOWEVER...apparently windows are a different story.  Let me leave this part of the story, give you another story, and then I'll connect the two.

One of Aaron's favorite things about the new house is the master bathroom.  It has (in the words of a friend) "a party tub"--a nice, big corner soaking tub.  Aaron is a bath-taker.  That was the first thing he wanted to do, so he enjoyed the tub before anyone else.  The next night I told him it was time for bed and he ran into my bathroom and stripped down really fast.  I said, "do you want to take a shower?" (because I really didn't feel like sitting there while he took a bath) and he said, "bath".  Fine.  Well tonight I decide that I was going to try the "party tub" for the first time.  I get the candles lit, the bubbles in, and my Pure Moods music going when I hear "the boy" running down the hall to come into my bathroom.  I lock the door as fast as I can as I see him round the corner--selfish--I know--but it was MY TURN.  He could have his turn after I was done.

This is where the two pieces of information collide.  (Remember we were trying to get away from neighbors seeing a naked kid all the time).  There is a window on each side of the bathtub.  In the corner of the tub (between the two windows) is a seat.  Aaron doesn't want to step into the tub from the side, so he has to get to the corner so he can step down onto the seat.  There he is, standing on the side of the tub with his naked butt pressed up against the window as he slowly inches his way across the side to get to the corner of the tub--his rear end sliding across the window--a "full moon" for all of the neighbors to see.  I'm not sure how many neighbors were looking out their windows at that particular moment, but those who did....well...sorry for the unexpected show!!!  I just threw my hands in the air and gave a big "oh well"--welcome to the neighborhood!

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!  :)