An Autism Recovery

Making A Painless Shot of Vitamins

Here's the current vitamin mix lineup.

As mentioned before, we're using the children's liquid multi from the Vitamin Shoppe. That's it on the left there.

Next is the Added Attention, followed by the Cal/Mag/Zinc formulation from Trace Minerals Research.

I take 1.5 teaspoons of the multi. 1.5 teaspoons of the Cal/Mag/Zinc. And then 1 tablespoon of Added Attention. Stir and serve.

All these need to be refrigerated after opening, so it's a cold shot of vitamins. Logan takes one shot in the morning and another in the early evening (usually before dinner, sometimes with).

Vitamin Content

For your (and my) reference, here are shots of the labels of each.

Multi

• Front
• Back, part 1 (very large) (extremely large)
• Back, part 2 (very large) (extremely large)

Cal/Mag/Zinc

• Front
• Back, part 1 (very large) (extremely large)
• Back, part 2 (very large) (extremely large)

Added Attention

• Front
• Back, part 1 (very large) (extremely large)
• Back, part 2 (very large) (extremely large)

A Painless Shot of Vitamins

Giving liquid vitamins with a spoon can be challenging and messy. If you fill the spoon, you’re more likely to spill. If you don’t fill the spoon, then you have to give more spoonfuls. Lose/lose.

So at the point where we had two different liquid vitamins going, I hit upon the idea of using a shot glass and asking Logan to simply drink his vitamins.
No muss. No fuss.It works very well.

A bit later I started using the coffee stir/straw to mix it all up as the liquid calcium/magnesium supplement tended to settle to the bottom.

Now Logan drinks his vitamins from the shot glass, sometimes through the little stir/straw, sometimes straight up. Twice a day, no problem.

More to come on what I actually put in the shot...

March & Sneak

Another co-regulatory game that just sort of happened, we started playing Marching & Sneaking as a way to transition out of the backyard and into the house again for dinner.

I led the way and began marching. Here I didn’t give any verbal instructions per se, but I would say aloud “March! March! March!” and then I would change it up with a quiet “sneak. sneak. sneak.” I didn’t stick to threepeat stanzas, either, so Logan had to keep checking in with me to participate. He seemed to enjoy it: we laughed and smiled at each other on the way up “the hill”, particularly as we sneaked.

The next phase was going to be letting him lead March  & Sneak, but we were at the dinner table before we knew it, so we haven’t tried that yet. I’m sure he’ll be up for it.

Therapy Updates

Tuesdays have become a super busy day at the Crabtree house. We start our day with Ms. Jennifer bright and early at 8:30 a.m. for an hour and a half of drills, sprints, and work. Then we eat a snack, brush our teeth, pack up a cooler FULL of food (I have my three to four meals and then Logan has his lunch and snacks) and we head out to Ms. Courtney's for speech therapy. Afterward, it's lunch at Mammy's, Bounce Factory with Lexi (our cousin), and home for some time with Daddy.

Today we are throwing a haircut into the mix. It should prove to be a real test of how far we've come with leaving somewhere fun. I mean, we're at the playground of all playgrounds and we're going to leave to get a haircut which can be a nightmare to an autistic child.

I have prepped Logan though. We've talked today about how we should leave places if we want to be able to go back to them. He's been answering me with big boy good behaviors and then telling me what those behaviors ARE. I think that's important for people to note with any kid. Too often, myself included, I've heard parents say, "How are you supposed to act?" They kid says, "good" without really describing what "good" is. I have found that since we started defining the behaviors we want versus just talking about the labels Logan is responding well.

That leads me to updates on therapy. I've been really sweating the fact that we aren't sitting in the "behavioral study room" enough and that he is falling behind. But, he keeps progressing. It dawned on me that I do a ton of informal therapy. I do the eye contact thing - look at me or I don't hear you - and that has improved 100%. We have quit answering obvious questions and they are going down. So today we got a new set of things to work on and I'm going to get these things going to. For our family members, take note so that you can reinforce these with Loggie when he's with you:

1. Changing subjects. Often Logan changes the topic of a conversation before one ends for a couple of reasons:

     a. He's not sure of the answers or where he's going with the topic so changing it to something else takes the pressure off of "thinking" about it.

     b. He just doesn't understand flow of conversation.

It's important that when he/we start talking about a subject that it comes to a close. He needs to understand this fundamental skill so that he can talk on the playground and make friends. He also needs to challenge his skills at focusing on one topic and holding a secondary, underlying thought to come back to. Momma stinks at this one so call it genetics or autism it's something we can all practice. :)

2. Grammar - gone are the days of poor grammar being cute. It's going to just get him low marks in school. We need to really focus on using good grammar skills for his conversation, lessening the baby type talk, and understanding how language works. Basically, when he says it wrong just say, "Say xyz." He picks up stuff so fast that he's already lessening a lot of cute things.

3. Describing things. Let's all start overly describing things using adjectives. Logan has a low grasp of how to describe things and such. For example, when I put a plate on the table I can say, "Logan here's your plate. Wow this table is so hard that the glass plate made a clanky noice when I placed it on top of the surface." That's not all adjectives, but it's more than, "Here's your dinner, enjoy!"

4. Quickness in answering. We REALLY have to work on this one. When you ask him something, give him three seconds and then ask again with a different inflection. Another three seconds, another inflection. After this, start prompting for an answer even if you have to tell him what to say. He is still taking too long in most of his standard drills. We want conversation and answers to come up naturally and not always have him searching for the answer. Just takes practice.

5. Working on what doesn't belong. We want to move to telling Logan three to four things and asking what doesn't belong. He's gotten the picture part down; now we want him to get the picturing an object in his mind down.

6. Building conversation about things he's NOT interested in. Sometimes we need to prompt Logan to ask us questions about a topic he's clearly disinterested in and that's important in making friends. Your friends aren't always going to be captivating but you still have to listen and feign interest if you want to keep them. Just like I know some of my friends could care less about PNP stories but they act interested because they know it means a lot to me.

For example, Ms. Jennifer was leaving today and she said I have to see another kid. Logan just looked off and stood there while she stared at him. She repeated she had to go study with someone else. Eventually she prompted Logan to say, "Who are you going to see today?" She told him and they moved on to saying goodbye. She demonstrated that sometimes we ask questions and talk about things to please another person in conversation. Basic but important.

7. Sequencing. Logan now understands how to sequence events which is great. Now we move to the next step. I show him a picture of the end result and have him describe to me what took place to get there. That's a huge step and one that will take a little while because it uses lots of good skills...imagination, sequencing, assumption, describing, guesstimation, etc. It also appreciates the fact that there isn't always a "right" answer. That's something Logan doesn't get too much. His safety zone when talking about things is more static.

He was re-tested with Ms. Courtney and he's moved up on almost everything but grammar. I figure that will come in time. Something is working and I'm proud of all the hard work he demonstrates. She always says that he is her little worker bee because he can do an hour like no other.

His sessions with Ms. Jennifer go well too. He tends to act out a tad more with her but I think it's because he's at home, I'm there, and he just feels like he can test the waters more in his own environment. I give it to Ms. J, though. She gets his little butt back on track with the quickness. Both Ms. J and Ms. C will be EXCELLENT mommies one day.

Well, as I said, I'm working on lots of things with him. My major improvements happen more with Logan in the informal setting. I like to use our everyday to make an impression. We are still doing some sit down therapy and I do plan to get more done; I just sneak it on him when we cook, eat, play, and rest before bed. Momma is sneaky but she is getting the job done.

Promises And Tears

In a previous post, I mentioned that “I nearly cried”. The situation clearly warranted a good cry, so why the “nearly”?

Well, I kind of made a silly promise to myself. I cried twice the day Logan was diagnosed. And I promised myself the next day that I would not cry again until he had recovered. The idea was that I would be too determined to achieve the goal to be crying along the way. Crying would be a sign of feeling sorry for myself instead of staying focused on the work we needed to do.

But it’s kind of silly. There are so many ups-and-downs along the path that I have given myself permission to break the promise. But every time something has happened along the way, that thought creeps back into my mind. Maybe it’s just a guy thing.

I don’t know, but if you see me crying, it’s probably a really, really big deal.

Interesting Behavioral Moments

Logan came home from his grandparents Monday and here we are Wednesday having a big ole behavioral moment before school. I told Logan he had 1, 2, 3 and then he would go to the chair.

He looked at me and first pushed his breakfast away (like he wanted to throw in the floor away). That was one.

Next, he stood up and put his hands on the walls behind him. That was two because we're trying to stop this. We have plenty of handprints back there, thank you.

Finally, he screamed and banged on the table "no." OK, that's three mister and time to get in the chair. Kicking and screaming I calmly carry him in there. He didn't like it. He immediately started scrolling through all the behaviors: I peed in my pants (we still had the overnight on...haha little man), screaming no, slap in the face, bite on the leg, etc. None of it hurt mind you, but he's only five so I can handle it.

I first took him out of the chair after the hit and put him in the floor where I could hold his hands down. I calmly say, "we don't hit momma...it's not nice." Next I hold the legs down when biting and kicking ensue. At this point he's working up a good lather here with the tears. I say, "say Mercury" because until he says it calmly and looking at me the hands and feet aren't going anywhere. Well, each time he yells at me and acts out of control we get another planet added to the list.

By this time, Logan is totally lost. He's so mad that he can't figure out what I want him to do. So I say, "planets, booty, bowling pins, chair" over and over again reminding him with limited words how to get back to calm. This means we will say our planets in a calm voice to get to sit on our booty and have our limbs back. Then we can pick up the bowling pins (tiny ones we use to redirect and calm his attention - he does them slowly one at a time or he starts over), then we can sit in the chair and talk about why we are in here and how mommy feels about getting smacked in the face first thing in the morning. :)

Finally, the waterworks stop as quickly as they started and he says his planets, does his bowling pins without having to start over, gets in the chair and tells me why he's there and how it makes momma feel to be hit. I use lots of facial animation and he's looking at me intently. We finish, he goes to eat his breakfast and we talk about going to speech tonight and then Chic-Fil-A to play.

I thought about this experience a long time and talked with Chris about it. I'm proud of him. You know, he is getting more neurotypical by the day. He just returned from his grandparents house where the rules are different than our house. Part of the grandparent role in life is to make a child feel special and loved unconditionally. I learned this from my own grandparents and still thank them to this day for that loving lesson. :)

This morning was an example of him testing the waters to see if the "rules" have changed since his visit. Nope, sir, they haven't but we love you enough to teach you the difference between being at home and being on "vacay" with Nonna and Poppa. It's important for Logan to learn how to change environment quickly and by running through a little road bump like this morning he figures out that world is a dynamic, changing environment.

I'm proud of him for being a butt this morning. Not that I want him doing it every morning, but today showed me that he is learning to find the differences in the world around him versus sticking to familiar patterns.

From Co-Regulation To Conversation

The idea is that by having those co-regulatory experiences of back-and-forth action & reaction, paying attention to and modifying one’s response based on what the other person is doing, you learn to care about what the other person is doing because you need to know what they are doing to inform your :next move:, so to speak.

In neurotypical children, this just happens without explicitly enabling it. It happens playing with parents, with kids on the playground, and so forth. They are learning to refine their responses based on ever more subtle criteria. They are also learning how subtle they can be in their responses such that the other party can recognize it.

Notice how differently a five year old girl interacts with you versus how that girl interacts with a baby, for example. To some extent she’s learned to offer different “language” to best suit her audience.

Well, with autistic children, it seems you often have to set up these co-regulating experiences and let them more explicitly learn these lessons. I think of it like this: some people are gifted at math. They can easily visualize a math problem geometrically and get very close to the right answer without having to figure out what formulas to apply, in what sequence, etc. And other people have to be taught explicitly to distinguish a math problem of Type P from a math problem of Type Q, and what to do differently to approach each type. The gifted math folks have had some key insights along the way that makes it more natural for them to sort out what’s going on.

So from the autistic point of view, neurotypical kids are all “gifted” at co-regulation and conversation. ASD kids have to be put in situations explicitly where they can practice recognizing certain depths of meaning in co-regulation and kind of have to be led along the way.

One approach is to try to force conclusions upon them: when someone asks you a “why” question, you answer starting with “because”. This is tantamount to saying when someone gives you a Type P math problem to solve, you start by grouping all the terms on the left side of the equation or whatever. While both are fair starting points, they really assume too much.

The other approach is to just reset and go back through the typical development steps and let the ASD child develop his own insights naturally, but certainly on his own delayed schedule. This is certainly more likely to lead to a true comfort level with the process.

I guess we’re trying to blend things a little bit. Logan learns pattern responses very, very, well, but of course it’s not entirely natural to him. So to use the math analogy it’s like we’re telling him: this is how you tell it’s a Type Q problem, and so you do this to solve it. But we’re also going back and showing how the symbols come from the geometry, showing what it means to square a number geometrically and all the other ‘natural’ insights that a ‘gifted’ person might have.

So the pattern responses help him in conversation today and we’re also redressing the deficiencies in co-regulation he missed along the way. And then he can kind of gradually become more fully developed in conversation in this way without being maybe too different among his new classmates in the fall.
I have some hope this approach will work: it wasn’t until my third year in college that I realized trigonometry was based entirely on the unit circle. I had gotten along fine until then (math minor—not very talented algebraically, but I could handle most of the concepts okay) but it was always just memorization and it was taxing. Then once I learned this fundamental truth of trigonometry, I could not believe 1) how simple it all became, and 2) that no one and no textbook up until that point had ever, ever taught it in that fashion.

Anyway, I guess we are both leading him with some answers and also trying to fill in some fundamental gaps in his development experience. We’ve seen video clips of ASD kids who have been taught the pattern responses and it is painfully obvious that they are not flowing in conversation but that they are reciting canned answers to recognized stimuli.

With Logan, maybe his patterns are just really sophisticated, but they often do not feel like recitals. He has enough instances now of decent bursts of flowing conversation that we are very encouraged.

On another note, I absolutely cannot wait until he is old enough to encounter trigonometry in school: "they" will not succeed in keeping the secret from him!

The Heartbreak of Water Day

On summertime Fridays, Logan’s preschool has water day. Basically, their morning playground time is accompanied by a water sprinkler. The kids wear their swim gear and sunblock and then after water time, they get changed into regular clothes.

Logan enjoys a good time around a water sprinkler at home in our backyard. But he absolutely hates it at school. He always chooses to just watch the other kids play in the water. I really don’t know what that’s about, but he’s been very consistent with it. At this point, he doesn’t even want to consider wearing any swim clothes to school, even “just in case” he changes his mind. And we don’t fight him on that point, which I sometimes wonder about being a mistake, since...well, “just in case” he changes his mind once he gets there.

Anyway, so last Friday I take him to school and the kids in his class are already outside playing in the water. He of course is not dressed to do the same. We walk through the empty classroom together...sort of. I’m more dragging him along toward the outside door so he can join his classmates.

Noting his hesitation, I ask him if he wants to swing instead of playing in the water. He says “Yes. Can I swing the other way?”. I told him he could if he wanted to and we said our goodbyes. Once he had made his first steps onto the playground, I went back through the building to my car.

As I drove away, I saw him swinging, his back to me, the playground, and all the other kids, facing the fence, and all alone. Autism.

My heart broke, and I nearly cried on the way to the office.

I wish I had taken a picture of that scene. I would keep it to remind me what we were fighting to change. And I could use it to visually explain Logan’s particular point on the spectrum to anyone who might ask.

I picked him up early that day and we played hard. I wasn’t worried about therapy, co-regulation, resilience, episodic memory, vitamins, or anything else. That day, I just made sure he had fun.

More Swinging Therapy

Today we played on the swing for a little while and I mixed it up by pushing him from the front for a little bit. His shoes would come up and I would tap them and push them back with my hands.

We did that for a bit and then I changed it up by bringing my right hand back and up as if I was about to bowl a five-pound ball as fast as I possibly could. And then I would come up from underneath and hit the heel of his shoe with my hand. His leg would bounce up a little bit when I did this.

So I would do that once and then go back to pushing straight on. Every once in a while I would give his shoe “the uppercut”. After about the fourth time doing this, whenever I would draw my hand back, he would fold his legs up under the swing and giggle in anticipation of me swinging and missing.

Simple co-regulation, to be sure, but I counted its value nonetheless. We were interacting in a certain way (pushing shoes from the front), I introduced a new variation (the uppercut), he responded to that variation (the avoidance), and then I had a new and different variation in response (the swing and the miss).

And I didn’t verbally tell him or ask him to do anything along the way.

When we finished playing with the final swing and miss, I made a big deal of how much fun I was having playing this way with him. Following up, I told him that night as I tucked him in bed that he could be proud of our swing play if he wanted to be. I wanted him to know how much I especially enjoyed our interactive play. This is all groundwork for easily having fluid conversation. Hopefully spotlighting the interaction in this way will help us get there sooner.

Small Victories

Lately I've been really working on Logan saying good bye, waving when someone waves to you, and such. So many parents take advantage of their kids picking this up early on in development. For us this is a big deal because when he does "spontaneously" it's a sign that he wants to and isn't just doing a robotic response to another stimulus...which is often the case even though he's a grinning and smiling when doing it.

This morning my baby is off to see his grandparents for a few days while I have the Phit-N-Phat girls in town. I'm standing in the hallway and Logan is just chatting away at Daddy about what he's going to do with Nonna and Poppa's computer. Computers are VERY IMPORTANT to Logan and he loves being able to logoff, sign on, switch user, and find his sites.

I'm saying "bye Logan" and waiting for him to acknowledge me. Rattle, rattle about computers. "Bye-bye Logan...I love you." Rattle, rattle again. Waving this time, "bye Logan" and he's still engrossed in his story. Daddy stops walking at the door and says, "Say bye to Mommy." Logan looks at him still talking and turns. I'm waving and he pauses just slightly then has a big smile, LOOKING RIGHT INTO MY EYES, and says bye momma. Then, turn rattle, ratlle. LOL.

Probably doesn't seem like that big a deal, but there was some cool stuff happening here. He didn't just say bye because daddy said to. He gave me the big facial expression and then said bye because he saw my gesture and recognized that we have been doing it. I think he also enjoyed saying bye because he went from a serious, conversation face to a sweet, see ya later momma face.

It's the little things that make your day.