By marybethrew, on March 26th, 2013 
i love our home. i love the laundry running on the super-dry cycle by the woodstove. i love the christmas lights twinkling all around the rooms. i love the enormous trees surrounding our home like they are the world’s tallest sentries standing guard. i love the moss on the roof. i love the long gravel driveway, where fedex fears to tread. i love that our mailbox is a mile from our house, in a line with 15 other mailboxes. i love the newts peeking out from under the duckweed in their little pond haven. i love the kale that overwintered and is growing new lovely vitamin-rich leaves by the armload. i love the night air that is thick with the sound of peeping frogs. i love the lichen-covered tree limbs, the daffodils, the hummingbirds zooming around with each other at the feeders.
we have been watching a busy male rufous hummingbird as he dominates the social scene around our feeders and backyard. rich nicknamed him flash, due to his iridescent red throat coloring that looks dark brown or black from the side but if you catch him at just the right angle, in just the right amount of sunlight, he blinds you with shimmering red.
i’ve burned through two rolls of film trying to catch his flashy red throat, and eked out one or two representatives.
i used the heart bokeh trick that i talked about a while back, because sunny spring mornings with last night’s rain dripping off the trees particularly lend themselves to this photography technique. you need something in your background that catches enough light to make your hearts twinkle a bit, like the wet leaves of the trees catching sunlight in your own wooded paradise, if you are lucky enough to live in one, too.
the ups driver has no qualms about leaving a sticky note on the door indicating “woodshed” which is a natural location to leave packages around here, in my opinion. sure, the road has bumps you can lose an axle in and we have some curmudgeonly neighbors with big dogs… but it’s lovely out here. i’m not sure what fedex is worried about. perhaps they are just borrowing trouble.
borrowing trouble is the newest phrase i’ve introduced quinn (aka mr. literal-pants) to. we were driving and he was fretting about things in the backseat that will never happen and could never happen and clearly had his undies in a bunch. wanting to gently encourage him to de-stress a bit, i explained that he was borrowing trouble, to which he giggled his “i have no idea what you mean” giggle. when i spelled it out, however, he embraced it, and now will come up to me and say, “i was just borrowing trouble accidentally about….” and i give myself a psychic high five for helping him do a little less worrying – or at least, identify it as worrying when he is.
the joys of coparenting have continued to be… anything but joyous. however, there seems to be a local, less-intense means of obtaining an asperger’s evaluation (but still with highly qualified neuro-developmental-peditrician folk running it) and it seems like both parents are on board with that. there is also funding for it, which is the only way it was going to happen. not only that, but if occupational therapy is indicated by anyone with an m.d., that will be covered by state health insurance, too. because that’s how we roll in our backwoods state of oregon.
meanwhile we are dipping our toes into the curriculum pool (gasp!) and it seems to be empowering for quinn. i did choose things based on wanting structure that would help him feel contained and successful, and both the bob books for reading and jump math workbooks are proving to be what they claim to be in the area of helping bolster self-confidence.
still, even curriculum can’t hem in our unschooling-ness, and when he read me frog sat (book 8 in the kindergarten sight words bob series) the other day, we didn’t just read it, we acted out each page in our living room. also, when i commented to quinn after he blew through the first 13 pages of the first grade jump book that, “math is fun, huh?” he replied, “yeah! ‘cause you can do it in bed!”
in other homeschool kindergarten news, ewok technology is still a very hot topic.
just enough curriculum to promote self-confidence but not enough to take the simple poetry out of the boy. such as when i turned on the car after picking him up the other day and the intro to the beatles’ happy birthday came on the stereo. he had been tilting his head looking at something out his window, and then he excitedly exclaimed, “that was the perfect song for a seagull flying down the street!”
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 22nd, 2013 
~a friday ritual~
a photo capturing a moment from the week.
a simple, special moment.
a moment i want to pause, savor and remember.
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 18th, 2013 we spent st. patrick’s day with our local adopted family for corned beef and cabbage and cheesecake and fun. quinn looked like quite the leprechaun, especially once he had matched his shirt and hat with a green punch mustache.
today i took the leprechaun to the beach on our way into town, and flew his shark kite. sometimes our days feel fragmented into such tiny slivers of time, and the quality of the sliver improves vastly when i can remember to focus on being present for hte moment at hand. i loved the metaphor i heard in some song on the radio over the weekend of paying attention to that one grain of sand that is falling between the two bulbs of the hourglass- the future and the past.
 
even twenty minutes can be made into a quality sliver, with a teensy bit of forethought to chuck the kite in the car. i can tell it’s been quality when quinn starts making up games on the spot, like, “pretend i’m a diver, and i’m playing with the shark!” as he chases the kite’s shadow around the sand and dives onto it knees first.
i hope you and all your wee leprechauns had a wonderful weekend!
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 15th, 2013 i burst into tears yesterday over a passage (no, actually, it was a list in the sidebar) in the book i’m reading on asperger’s and parenting. the heading of the sidebar was behavioral manifestations of anxiety. all sixteen of the listed items applied to quinn. i hadn’t fully understood all sixteen of them as manifestations of anxiety, though, until i saw them all listed in one place like that. it has me experiencing a little anxiety myself, but i’m going to keep breathing and keep reading and see what i can learn. come along with me as i process…
one of the bits i keep hearing from professionals and books is that aspies engage in a lot of black-and-white thinking, and that abstract concepts are hard for them. quinn has his moments of being able to hang with abstract concepts, but he does often take things quite literally, he does often see only either/or options and fail to see the many alternative solutions to a problem, and he expects to be perfect at what he does, which is yet another form of black-and-white thinking. this book (parenting your asperger child, by sohn and grayson) is saying that the black-and-white thinking arises from anxiety, especially that caused by difficulty with understanding the world around him.
the book approaches things from a different parenting paradigm than the one i inhabit. trying to find a frame of reference for what we are experiencing compared to neurotypical children, to determine if quinn is other than neurotypical, i can find very little in the book to help me. when there is a list of motivations behind the behaviors of an asperger child, the afterthought is that these anxiety-driven motivations set the behaviors apart from those that are merely attention-seeking or “just plain misbehavior”; is that what the authors believe is more likely the motivation behind neurotypical children’s problem behaviors? that has never been my worldview. i’m more aligned with a ya-ya sisterhood view of children:
just what if god didn’t intend for everything to be perfect? what if he knew it was going to be a holy mess, and he loved us anyway? what if adam and eve weren’t sinning? what if that prenatal original sin stain on our souls is not even there?
…when my boys were born, i looked at each one of them and said NO to that original sin shit. i looked at my babies and thought, you are pure, holy, perfect, complete and undefiled. and nobody can tell me different, not the pope his royal self. believe it now.
i’m reading ya-yas in bloom, by rebecca wells, to balance out my asperger parenting manual. i believe that children are innately good, that they want to belong and behave and thrive and are driven to do so by their own fully intact inner nature. i have never been a believer in “he’s just doing that to get attention” or rather, when children seek attention, i think they should be given attention. and i couldn’t resist the timeliness of the quote about the pope.
and i wouldn’t be doing my worldview justice if i didn’t mention ani:
when i was four years old
they tried to test my i.q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong
the only other line (back to the non-fiction title now – sorry to jump around) that gives a frame of reference so far briefly mentions that the behaviors in an aspie might be more of the same you’d see with any other child, the difference being a matter of degree, intensity, or frequency. leaving me still searching for a frame of reference, alas.
i have been mindful of eliminating expectations from my life in an effort to reduce my own tendency to be uptight and resentful when things don’t turn out to match my search image. it helps me go with the flow to show up with a blank slate and discover the boy who is in front of me. if i had a real clear expectation in my mind of what a six year old boy was supposed to be like, and could clearly see how we deviated from that set of expectations, i might have a better grasp of this label business. i have a grasp of who quinn is, but not how he compares. i have a really deep sense of what makes him tick, and when i read lists of reasons for rigidity in an aspergian child, and can check off every single one of them for things i see quinn reacting to, i turn the page looking for how this is a deviation from a neurotypical approach. are nt kids never rigid? if they are sometimes rigid, is it because of the same motivating factors like fearing change and not understanding intuitively how a certain interaction is usually done? is it the same as nt behavioral motivations, only more intense? am i just over in some other city in italy, or am i way over in holland? i guess i am looking for the authors to state what must to them be the obvious.
i still think the book has something to offer in terms of strategies for introducing more flexibility when a child becomes rigid, and showing him how to see more middle ground, more gray areas.
let’s say, for example, that you have a list of guiding principles that you have developed together and discussed over time:
- safe
- gentle
- honest (this is a newer one we’ve recently added to the list)
- golden rule- treat others as you would like them to treat you.
and say you are working pretty hard on helping your son remember to be honest: even when you think we want to hear “yes” when we ask if you brushed your teeth, we want you to tell us “no” if no is the true answer. however (****gray area alert!!!****), there are things people keep in their head and are not technically honest about, like when you like the store waffles better than your mama’s homemade ones.
the one thing that really hits home for me in the published strategies for handling skill-teaching with asperger’s children is the need to take things step by step and explain even things that seem obvious. the idea is, there are things that are obvious to many of us that are a complete mystery to someone with asperger’s. quinn often needs things spelled out. there are many messages we receive that are subtly implied, things we just “take in”, that an aspergian is not “taking in”- they are not reading between the lines the same way that most of us are. if that makes him sound slow on the uptake then i am doing him a disservice with my words- quite the contrary, he can be told once and have something memorized for life, but if it’s delivered in the wrong packaging, he may never receive it, even if he is told a thousand times.
of course, there are things all children need to be told a thousand times.
it’s working out well for us because one of my conclusions about parenting early on was that it always seemed to help to state the obvious with quinn. i began doing this when he was very young and experiencing strong emotions, and whenever he did cry or get angry, i would name the feeling he was having out loud. “you’re feeling sad. you didn’t want to stop playing with that.” i think this is helpful in building any child’s emotional intelligence, but with quinn, in retrospect, it might be the reason he has an emotional iq at all. it is one of the many ways he doesn’t fit the aspergian mold: he can name his feelings. he still has a hard time understanding what other people are feeling. are there are lot of six year old boys who are experts at this?
sometimes i think maybe he is an aspergian with a lot of neurotypical quirks he has developed from having a quirky mama.
thanks for reading along while i process. i’m so grateful for all the thought-provoking comments and emails i’ve gotten about all of this, and as always would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, further reading recommendations, etc. have a great weekend!
p.s. experiencing driftwood block envy? go here.
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 14th, 2013 
(easter 2011 wheatgrass, half-grown)
the wheatgrass easter basket idea has made the blog rounds for years and i don’t know whose original idea it was or i’d give credit. we are a week into our easter grass growth for 2013, but believe me, there is still plenty of time if you want to do this project. wheatberries are miraculous!
this is what we did. we soaked about 2 tablespoons of wheat berries in a mason jar overnight. the next day, we drained out the water and spread the soaked berries onto the damp soil in our basket (there is a plastic bag lining the basket, but it’s also not a basket we’re super attached to. the thrift store usually has baskets aplenty for cheap, or if you want you can swing by and borrow one of the 47 i’m not currently using for my farmer’s market booth).
then we used a spray bottle to keep the berries moist for the next few days, while they sprouted. (according to quinn’s teacher at ols, spray bottles are great for building up children’s hand strength for skills such as writing.)
the first few days of growth are miraculous to behold. you can walk away for an hour and come back and see they have doubled in size. rich was gone all day monday for work and rehearsal and when he saw them that evening he said, and i quote, “holy cow!”
here’s yesterday morning:
and here’s from this morning:
so what i’m saying is, you still have plenty of time (and we are going to have to mow the lawn.)
~~~
around the rest of the farm, similar signs of miraculous green life are showing themselves.
between the sorrel (a perrenial green, meaning nearly effortless) and the overwintered asian greens, there is plenty of salad right now.
volunteer/weedy greens like miner’s lettuce and chickweed are all around, in case anyone wants to add some earth tones to that salad.
daffodils are everywhere. we have been enjoying the hummingbirds who’ve been visiting our feeder as well as some of the early flowering shrubs.
trying not to get too carried away with planting seeds yet, and where i haven’t been able to help myself, building them little shelters to help them get through any unforeseen inclement weather in the months ahead. it’s hard to remember we can have that this time of year, when it’s as lovely as this!
i know many of you cannot even think about putting any seeds outside just yet, so that’s where sprouting in a jar and growing easter basket grass comes in handy. needing to grow things is a year-round need, regardless of which hardiness zone we may call home.
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By marybethrew, on March 12th, 2013 rich and i take turns leaving each other “reading assignments” from the newspaper. we both follow along with a recent series in the oregonian of “northwest love stories”. the most recent story i happened to catch first, and leave for him, but more often than not i am the one receiving these reading assignments, as he is much more thorough about reading the paper daily. i always tease him when he leaves mushy stories for me to read, or chooses romantic comedy movies for us to watch. he has a thick skin and is impervious to teasing, luckily.
anyway, ambrose and martha, the subjects of the most recent love story article, have been married for 73 years and are both turning 100 this year. they claim their secret to bliss (ambrose “ham” claims it, and martha affirms with smiles and a thumbs-up, as she is nonverbal at this point in her life) is “good eating and good sex.” i think it goes without saying that humor must weigh in as well. from the interview: “both are in wheelchairs. yet during our introductions, ham called martha ‘lover’ and complimented her hair.”
i’m still holding out for us to spend 98 years together, so it gives me hope when i read of couples like martha and ham.
***
how did you learn how to love someone? was it by following someone’s example? your parents? other couples you were close to? was it by trial and error? did you, like me, have a disproportionate amount of error in spite of having really good role models, and feel like you were never going to get there? do you feel like you are now “there”?
***
there’s so much we need to learn in life. i will be curious what the future will hold in store for quinn in the love department. i know all parents think of this. i spent several years going over and over with myself the guilt trip of “i didn’t manage to keep it together with his father” and how that is such an omen of doom for his future love life. but i have laid that to rest, and i know for sure that witnessing a working relationship like mine with rich (and like my parents, and my brothers and sisters-in-law, and other important couples in his life) will be much more beneficial to quinn than was the ill-fated relationship between his two parents.
i wonder what his quirks will look like as a teen, a young adult? it’s so hard to picture, as rachel put very eloquently in her recent post. will his future partner someday have to resort to telling him it’s time for the ewoks to jump in the speeder in order for him to put down what he is doing and get in the car to go someplace? will he still need to be persuaded to change clothes by imagining he is dressing in his hogwarts robes? will he talk their ear off at bedtime about the next lego set he wants to get, completely unaware they are falling asleep and want him to stop listing each individual piece, what each minifigure will be wearing, and what color light-sabre they will carry? when they go for a walk will he cover his ears with his hands and shrink away whenever a dog approaches? when they eat dinner will he insist on hot dogs, mac and cheese, or “skinnies” (his name for thinly sliced quesadillas)? will he, with his own children, assume inaccurately that his child is doing it “on purpose” when they knock something down or bump into him?
this is the stuff that is all so ambiguous and vague that it could all be “normal kids’ stuff” or “age appropriate” and yet, it could also indicate asperger’s, or something else. i am still on the fence whether it matters what we call it. we call him quinn, and these are things we (or at least i) know about him. i am still unsure whether i think his brain is wired differently and we need to approach things differently than one would with a neurotypical child. yet, i already know for damn sure we need to approach things differently with quinn on many occasions; because he is quinn, and there are things about him that just aren’t a factor with other children, wiring aside. but then, this can probably be said for each and every child, can it not?
i’m never sure how severe what we deal with is, compared to other families. i get glimpses, but then i wonder if i am just overthinking things, as i tend to do. and comparison is rarely helpful anyway. yet sometimes i fantasize about this being another situation like the one where my midwife had to sit me down and tell me that no, in fact, i hadn’t been a complainer, “no mary beth, you had an unusual amount of pain.” i fantasize that somebody somewhere will acknowledge and validate that figuring all this out can sometimes be really friggin hard.
one conclusion i’ve come to, given what research i’ve done and what i know of quinn, is that there is definitely some knowledge to be gleaned from the asperger’s literature that does benefit quinn and is well worth delving into, regardless of whether he fits any of the scads of subtypes. there are strategies i am reading that either echo exactly what i already do that works, or are suggestions i am taking very seriously because i think they will also work. he may be simply a quirky, bright individual with sensitivity to loud sounds and anxiety about transition times, who struggles with things getting thrown or given away, who is off in his own head quite often when pragmatic life occurrences come along, who is insistent about being in charge of himself, who is more comfortable at home, whose word of the week is technically, who is a bit of a perfectionist and doesn’t do things until he knows he can do them well, who prefers having a heads up about what is coming next, who doesn’t really get all the jokes and can’t tell one to save his life, who runs a little crooked, who doesn’t seem to realize it stings when he tells me “store waffles taste better than homemade ones,” and who might not always interpret another person’s reactions accurately. or that unique collection of characteristics might be a subtype of asperger’s. does it matter? that unique collection of characteristics is definitely quinn.
to me it seems that what matters is that by the time he thinks about having a partner, he somehow has learned (in whatever way works for him) that even if you think the store waffles are better, when someone you love is making you something homemade, you keep that thought tucked away in your head.
my current read is parenting your asperger child; individualized solutions for teaching your child practical skills by alan sohn and cathy grayson. i liked the title, and consistent with their title, they have already made quite a few mentions in the early chapters of the way in which each and every asperger child will have some traits and not others, and that every child is, bottom line, an individual. no one is classic, everyone is a subtype.
parts of what i’ve read in this book resonate with me, others are making me cringe, but my hunch is that is mostly due to semantic clumsiness. i like their term “defender of reality” as one of the parent’s roles, but one of my things about parenting has always been to question the assumption that the parent is always right and the kid is always wrong. i do not assume i know better than he does in all circumstances (sure there are some…), and i shy away from the idea that i need to make him out to be wrong when his ideas don’t match up to the rest of society’s ideas. i do think it’s important for me to introduce him to what society thinks (that a couple means two and a few means three, instead of the other way around), point out where his ideas depart from those of society, and let him know how to navigate in that society, but i also think that can be done while preserving his self-knowledge. one thing about being a defender of reality, is that i’m aware of the subjectiveness of each of our realities (did i have an unusual amount of pain?), and it is hard to think that my own version of reality should trump his.
aside from the individualized approach, another thing that i find validating in this book is the idea that anticipation of problems is going to help immensely in someone with these traits. “too often, people wait until something goes wrong and then try to do something about it. this is a completely backward approach for an asperger individual. prevention is the key. anticipate problems, plan for them, and implement your plan before a problem arises.” this is where i think we could go very astray by abruptly tossing quinn into another school on his own, without a lot more thought and effort and guidance invested into it. the book emphasizes the anxiety that these kids can feel, and anxiety is a real one for my guy.
last night as he was finding it impossible, yet again, to fall asleep, and i was listening to his long speech about the star wars lego set that has his favorite monster (“which is made from not very many pieces, with two tentacles that you have to put together, and two brown pieces that look like they could be covers to cockpits, except they are just brown and not glowing, which you put together for the monster’s beak…..”) after the puppy relaxation story with backrub, after more hugs and one more trip downstairs to the bathroom and to say goodnight to rich, after more lego talk and after i finally received a stroke of inspiration and told him he needed to take his magic wand and draw all the thoughts out of his head and put them into his pensieve like dumbledore so that he could get some rest… after all of that, he looked at me and said, with such earnestness, “i love you as big as the sky, as big as the ocean, all the way to the moon and back again, um, like, three, to six, to twenty, to fifty, to one hundred, to five hundred years! and that many months! and that many weeks! and that many days! and that many hours! and that many minutes! and that many seconds!!!” at the end of the day, i think he has the love thing figured out already.
***
after i was back downstairs, rich was having some pie and with the big pie-eating grin on his face he told me he had saved his first piece (the one i had packed in his lunch) for right before his play rehearsal that evening. he let me know that store-bought pie has nothing on my homemade pie. (which he also happened to mention is how he feels about waffles.)
maybe all three of us are getting this love thing figured out.
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 8th, 2013 
~a friday ritual~
a photo capturing a moment from the week.
a simple, special moment.
a moment i want to pause, savor and remember.
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 5th, 2013 
here at nanny by the sea, we are serious about taking care of baby k. which is why we will be spending the maximum amount of time possible outside, on the beach. (in case you are wondering, my policy is not to post photos of other peoples’ kids, which is why you only ever see our baby pancakes when they are blurry or not facing the camera, and why baby k is not shown.)
we had glorious weather yesterday for our beach walk. baby k was strapped to my back and quite content- he even cat napped a bit back there, while quinn balanced on logs, climbed on the rocks, and collected limpet shells.
today my big boy helper was not there with me, but yesterday when he was, he was spoon feeding yogurt to baby k, fetching tissues, and playing with the baby. he seems to be in a very good place to be welcoming this new little person into our routine. though the first day, it sort of wore him out.
today i had time alone with baby k, and we took not one, but two beach walks, albeit in the rain. i’m not going to say no when a little boy reaches for the baby carrier and asks me for a walk directly. baby k happens to live a hop, skip and jump from one of the better agate and fossil hunting beaches i know.
(fossil snail with its shell partially agatized- before i put it in my raincoat pocket. i cannot resist spirals.)
while he napped i got on my about page and did a little spiffing up, because at nanny by the sea we have wireless internet, oh yes. i added some fun links back to some older posts, a little sampler of what goes on around here for anyone who is visiting for the first time, or a trip back through old favorites if you have been here for a while. have a look! i will likely add more and maybe rearrange or change them out now and then as the spirit moves me. do feel free to leave comments on any of those older posts, if the spirit moves you. i get email alerts about them all, so do not worry- i won’t ever miss your feedback. and i love hearing from you!
other posts you may enjoy:
By marybethrew, on March 1st, 2013 “it doesn’t feel like i’m six,” quinn informed me, when he returned from his birthday weekend at his dad’s. but he has made “at least 3 or maybe 4” wishes now, having had birthdays every night since saturday. i wish i had captured his wonderful look of hopefulness on camera, his eyes closed, candlelight dancing on his cute face. but i will remember that one in my mama mind.
moments like this help me forget all the concerns i have about him right now. he had such a good time opening his presents, and he said thank you for each one. he played with each one before moving on to opening the next. he’s such a thoughtful, deliberate guy. i love this kid.
he seems to be having a bit of a neural firestorm at the moment. his sleep is erratic, and he has been grumpy upon waking, which is unusual for him, but reminds me of hypoglycemic people i know. he’s also mentioned sneaky pains “on the inside” of his knees and i suspect more rapid growth is about to happen. it might not be that noticeable to him, but six does seem to have its own distinct sensation to this mama.
we have been singing along together to “i want to be your personal penguin,” my finger automatically hitting the back button on the cd player in the car each time quinn said, “again.” sneaking peaks at his joyful little off key singing voice in the rearview mirror, i feel so much love for this person. this kid. who is not a baby. decidedly not. yet he will still reliably try to curl himself into me more than once a day. i ignore the fact that it is a 48 inch long frame with angular skinny limbs and tuck it into myself as best i can, because i know this won’t last forever.
his favorite part of the song: “if i could be yours, and you could be mine, our cozy little world would be twice as nice.”
we have long since outgrown sandra boynton’s board books, but i think personal penguin would have come back around as an early reader if he didn’t already have it memorized. you can download the song on her website, which i did five whole years ago when quinn was one, and you too can listen to davy jones of the monkees as you follow along in the book.
if you were in our car, you would get to hear quinn copying davy’s british accent impeccably, without matching a single note whatsoever.
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By marybethrew, on February 26th, 2013 
the birthday prince.
yoda and the ewoks keeping watch over the pumpkin pie.
traditional birthday balloons, he is now old enough for a full rainbow of six colors!
he got busy right away with his lego presents.
without any help, he whizzed through building the new star wars lego sets. it was strangely quiet for a birthday afternoon…
until my sweetie popped in from taming the salmonberry jungle, and brought me these two lovelies- the first daffodils of the season.
i wish i had captured him closing his eyes to make his wish- precious. may all your wishes come true, my sweet six year old son!
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