Snow! Really, quite a lot of it.

[walkitout]

R. took the snowblower to it, so our guests showed up anyway. M & M are expecting (altho not until August). This is convenient because we really like M & M so it's a no-brainer to unload on them all our precious but no longer needed baby artifacts. Currently, that's way too many books about birth and so forth, but eventually it will be clothing and strollers and similar.

A good time was had by all. M is a licensed social worker who actually knows a thing or two about autism and ASD. She's quite unimpressed by the idea that T. has any particular issues. Ha! We're still going to try to get some speech therapy, however.

We all have colds around here, which is a bummer. A. is the least ill; T. the most ill with the adults somewhere in between. I'm a bit sicker than R. T.'s appetite dropped a bit last week, but has mostly recovered. His energy levels have not dropped much at any point. He coughs himself awake sometimes at night and has trouble getting back to sleep which is a huge bummer for R. Other than that, the biggest problem is he keeps running around and jumping and all that activity causes him to hack and hack and hack (he threw up the other day he coughed so much, something I am prone to do). R. finally pinned him down to get him to stop. It helped.

I'm reading the last of the Merrimack books by Meluch. I'll try to remember to post a group review of numbers 2-4 when I finish.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I agree with the licensed social worker -- I haven't seen T. do anything that seemed to me to be any sort of red flag for anything except (a) being quite bright and (b) being somewhat speech-delayed. Naturally my evidence is limited by my small number of T.-hours, but for what it's worth and all that. It's probably too early for this book, therefore, but just in case: you might look at _Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults_, by James T. Webb et al. (see http://www.amazon.com/Misdiagnosis-Diagnoses-Gifted-Children-Adults/dp/0910707642). It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember it having some quite reasonable insights. Doesn't have much of anything on hyperlexia, though, which is one thing you'd probably want to rule out. Same goes for _The Mislabeled Child_, by Fernette and Brock Eide.

hyperlexia?

[walkitout]

I just did a little digging; I wasn't at all familiar with it. That actually sounds like a much better match than any of the other ASD stuff I've seen, including Asperger's. The thing that's killing me right now is the wh- questions part, because that's what has been frustrating me most with T.

T. really likes the garage door openers. We have two: one has a red light in its button, the other has a green. He really wants us to open and close the doors for him. We don't let him do it any more because the motors overheat and shut down which is a bit worrisome; we sort of ration the opens and closes and try to transition him to other activities.

He has a preferred arrangement for the doors (the door behind the van open, and the door behind the car closed), but likes to have them opened and closed upon request. No one has devised a definitive system for identifying which door, so unless he wants open and only one is open, you really need to know _which_ door. I've tried red button/green button, this/that (with pointing), car/van (if present) and probably something else. Red button/green button took a while for him to understand, but is now very reliable -- if you ask Red button or Green button. If you ask which button, you get nothing. Total silence, or a repeat to open. OTOH, it took a while for him to understand the red/green choice, and longer still on the this/that choice, and he gets those now. I've been treating each of his little routines (bouncing on the couch, listening to On My Rocketship, opening and closing garage doors, doing laundry, running the dishwasher, playing stairway catch, blah, blah, bleeping blah) as an opportunity to drill in another piece of language. It seems to be working, slowly, but it is cumulative. And he's actually in a better mood more consistently, other than a few days at the beginning of this cold we've all gotten.

This makes me optimistic that speech therapy (with someone good) might really help.

Oh, and best of all, he's actually using language to ask for a wider variety of things. Today, when R. came home and we'd hung out for a little while, he asked, "Go ride?", which R. mistook for "Go outside!" which is the usual demand. No outing had been planned, so this is an example of T. using words to ask for what he wants. Which is awesome. It's really weird tho when he repeats a long, involved sentence that one of us uses. Today's example was something like "Now put it back in there, T.", which is part of the dishwasher routine (the part where I ask him to put the box of dishwasher soap back into the cabinet). He's still hard enough to understand that if you don't know what he's saying, you probably won't be able to figure it out.

It all reminds me a lot of the way I learn foreign languages: written form first, then verbally by memorizing exchanges and never really getting to fluency.

Re: hyperlexia?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's interesting about the wh- questions. I've been looking around, and it does seem that lots of kids have trouble with those (presumably a lot more than have hyperlexia, which is not a common diagnosis as far as I know). One thing I saw pointed out that I'd never thought of before: yes/no questions typically have a rising inflection, as in "Do you want another CRACKER?", whereas wh- questions are more flatly or downwardly inflected. So maybe it confuses kids to get something that's a question that doesn't sound like a question? It doesn't seem all that hard, but sometimes people get stopped in their tracks by surprisingly small misconceptions.

I think it sounds like the kind of problem that speech pathologists have a pretty good handle on and can really help with -- better, perhaps, than their track record with the kind of stuttering my son does (for which there seems to be almost nothing you can do except practice talking slowly -- he has improved, but it's really hard to know if it's due to the therapy or just maturing).