An Autism Recovery

A Well Done Browser

Some friends sent us a link to a story about the ZAC Browser (ZAC == Zone for Autistic Children), and I checked it out.

Logan is pretty much a whiz on the computer and doesn't get frustrated using typical software. But the cool thing about this software is that it has a bunch of kid-friendly links to games and stories and such.

The user interface is very well done, and this is coming from a harsh critic. I would recommend this browser to anyone with a young child.

And it's free.

Check it out here.

Play Park

Logan had finished his tree-climbing part of the day at Play Park and was going back to his bicycle. By now, another little boy had arrived with his bike in tow. Jermaine rode up to Logan and talked to him. I couldn’t tell what he said but Logan didn’t seem to be talking back. Hmmm.

Logan rode off and Jermaine followed him. Sometimes his apparent aloofness makes the other kids want to play with him all the more.

The playground engineers did a smart thing with a sinkhole on the property and built a large sort of raised deck all the way around it. It’s kind of oblong shaped and the material they used is comfortable to walk or ride on and is quite durable. They made the space usable instead of just fencing out people from the dangerous area.

Anyway, Logan and Jermaine had begun riding on the playground sidewalk and ended up riding on this deck. They both stopped when they came upon me and talked for a minute. This time Jermaine rode off first and Logan took to the chase.

They would slow down, speed up, stop, start, and chase. It was not entirely the most natural interaction of two kids on bicycles because Logan was slower to warm up to Jermaine than what I imagine normal looks like, but by the end of it we didn’t get home until 8:00PM because they were playing *together* so well.

Clearly there was co-regulation going on between the two of them, which means that all this work we are doing is improving Logan’s ability to interact with others and not just us.

We didn’t get to have dinner or go to bed until much later than normal, but it was a good day.

Greenway

Logan loves riding his bicycle. His bike had been having some mechanical difficulties, which, amazingly, I managed to fix. Unamazingly, my various fixes had made the bike much harder to pedal uphill and he was growing frustrated with it.

It was probably time for a bigger bike anyway, so Corinne took him to the bike shop and got him fixed up. He loves his new bike.

On a recent weekend after Corinne put me through an unpleasant arm workout leaving me unable to heft my laptop with one hand for the rest of the week, the three of us ventured out onto the greenway for a stroll/ride. I’m walking alongside Logan when he asks me the question about what that sign says. About 90% of the time Logan already knows what it says and means, so sometimes I tell him and ask him a situational question about it, or sometimes I just flip the question back around to him and he tells me.

In this case, it was a new sign for us so I read it: Bicycles must yield to pedestrians. And that seemed a satisfactory explanation for the moment so we went along.

It wasn’t long before Logan raced his new bike on the greenway, leaving me to run alongside. Did I mention this bike was bigger? With larger tires? Which means Logan can cover more ground per revolution now? So I have to stretch out my stride and really run to keep up with him. Boy, did I pick the wrong morning to workout with Corinne!

I was not in a good state to be running alongside Logan...get this, for his safety. What a joke that must’ve looked like to any passersby. Fortunately there weren’t any.

And then Logan brought his bike to a stop. Thankfully, and out of breath, I wondered why he’d stopped short of the bridge we’d been eyeing.

Pedestrians.

I laughed when it hit me. Logan of course understood what the sign had said and was simply following its instruction. I’m not sure why it caught me off guard—I know he understands what a pedestrian is and what yield means and so on.

I think maybe it was just that I didn’t have to do any prodding to get it to happen. I didn’t reiterate anything. I didn’t remind him of anything along the way. I didn’t tell him to stop his bike. But he saw the situation, decided what the best thing to do was, and acted, with no apparent hesitation.

This is probably no big deal for anyone but us. Autistic kids characteristically have a deficit in being able to sort out what the most important things to pay attention to in any given moment in any given situation are. They call it Dynamic Intelligence.

Some kids can’t pay attention to their grandparents walking in the door if their toys are not lined up in a particular order. Or can’t sort out amongst their feeling of overwhelm in a crowded situation with lots of noise and people and lots of different people trying to talk to them at once what’s important and to just let the rest flow by. I can see how these kids must be frustrated so often and it’s hard for others to get why.

But in Logan’s case, on this day, he was in a relatively new situation and reacted well. That’s all we can really ask for.

Vitamin E (continued)

Ah, the high gamma tocopherol is apparently preferred because it is the form closest to the vitamin E found naturally in food (http://www.antiaging.com/white_papers/vitamin_e_jana.html).

Certainly he gets some in his diet (almonds, peanut butter, maybe his gluten-free cereal, tomato sauce all are apparently good sources of vitamin E), but he’s probably light on this vitamin compared to where we would like him to be.

So...where to get some of this stuff? Kirkman? Hmm. Softgels. Would really prefer a liquid to mix into the Painless Vitamin Shot.

Yasoo Health seems to have a handle on this. Interesting products that are optimized for delivery of antioxidative goodness despite serious digestive barriers. Also they use some of the same nutrition delivery ideas from the world of body building, which, as we’ve learned, is a community that really understands nutrition and nutrition delivery. That should give Corinne some confidence in this product.

Along the way I found www.nutritiongeeks.com and www.caoh.org which both offered (at first glance, anyway) some good information, so I’m adding them to the list of sites I’ll visit when looking for product like this in the future.

We’ll let you know how we fare adding some E into the mix...

Vitamin E

E works in concert with C & D (er, the vitamins, not the musical notes. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure that C, D, and E together form a secundal chord of major seconds...in other words, sounds like a train wreck :-)).

Anyway, so C, D, and E work together as antioxidants to fight free radicals that can among other things destroy brain cells. Many, most, maybe all, autistic children’s bodies are under what the doctors call “oxidative stress”, which is another way of saying there’s a bunch of those free radicals roaming around doing damage.

Vitamin E does antioxidant work and if you’ve ever played Gauntlet, you know how important it is to not just fight the bad guys but to stop new bad guys from being produced, and vitamin E does that as well. E also helps the body take in vitamin D and calcium. Sounds like a winner, so how much do we take in?

As usual, it’s according the size of the child and somewhere between 200 and 600 IU per day. There’s also an age guideline (you know how I feel about those, but here goes anyway) that says 200IU/day under five years old, and 400IU/day for over five years old.

Vitamin E is a fat-soluable vitamin, which means that it’s stored in the liver and in fat cells, so theoretically you could overaccumulate E and have some kind of toxic reaction. Hmm.

A note as to form: for reasons I don’t understand yet, the high gamma tocopherol form of E is to be preferred.

So let’s see where Logan is at on his vitamin E supplemental intake...well, not so good. He’s getting 30 IU/day of a different form (d-alpha tocopheryl acetate). According to this, what he’s taking now is a naturally sourced form of the alpha-tocopherol (not synthetic). The “acetate” is supposed to make it more “stable”, but I don’t know if that means more stable for its shelf-life or for doing its job once ingested.

More to come...

Historic Moments in Co-Regulation History

For me, anyway...

We’ve been playing a game of giving each other particular high-fives and jumping on the bed as a form of co-regulation. It’s turned into a richer game with a lot of nice variations we can introduce.

One form is that I lead by holding my hands up and he gives me five (well, ten...we play with both hands). Then it’s his turn to hold his hands up and I give him five.

And then on my turn to hold up my hands, I will usually move them to one side, spread them apart, hold them down low, or whatever. He is free to improvise when it’s his turn, and I credit him for inventing the crossed-wrists maneuver, in fact. :-)

Another part of the game is that I will give him five once, twice, or even three times on any given turn. He replicates the pattern on my hands, which don’t move until he does. Me not moving my hands at first was waiting until he figured out what the next step was to mirror what I had done, but it’s fluid now—conversational, if you will.

The round is over when I hold my hands for a low-five, and given the relative position of his body standing on the bed and my arms outstretched somewhat just above the bed, it’s a natural invitation for him to jump onto my arms, whereupon it is my job to swing him around and up and down and, eventually back onto the bed.

The next round he leads, holding his hands up first. And when it’s my turn, I put mine in the same position that his were in during the same turn. These rounds tend to end quickly as by the second or third turn he moves his hands down for a low-five, which means mine are soon in a low-five position to follow, and then seconds afterward he is giggling as I swing him up and down again.

But something happened the other day while playing that has never happened before, and it’s something I will treasure forever.

We were playing high-fives, jumping around on the bed, swinging up in the air and just generally having a good time. He had just landed on the bed, jumped up and grabbed my neck. I put my arms around him anticipating the next move to be that he would let go and fall backwards onto the bed (another favorite maneuver).

But instead he held there. And said I love you.

I think, I’m pretty sure, this is the first time this has ever happened spontaneously. I’m counting on it not being the last.

Playtime is Arriving Soon!

Logan has somehow gone from boy to monkey in the past couple of weeks. I caught him almost on top of the fridge yesterday as he was calling it the "black rock wall." Uhhh...time to get a new playset!

Today I went to Lowe's and ordered him a pretty sweet system for the backyard. It should be here in a couple or three weeks. It will give us a good place to play and do stuff in the evenings. I'm going to think on it, but I'm hoping we can do some turn taking games for therapy sessions. I'll post those when I come up with them. It will be something along the lines of "tell me three ways to describe this wall and then you climb up." Then I'll describe how he's climbing with different words.

My turn will be "three things I feel when I go across the monkey bars." Bascially, do a lot of describing and allow him to talk about it without asking him too many questions. My hope is that he will describe how I am climbing a different way than what I say.

Logan also just got back from an extended stay with Nonna and Poppa. He came back great this time. We haven't had one behavioral session since he came home Friday. This weekend he had moments that "could" get out of control but we worked through it with choices of you can throw a fit or you can do this. He always made a good choice. We also allowed him to have some wins and a little control. The key was keeping a balance. We had the control most of the time and we also allowed him to make choices and decisions giving him the competent feeling. I'm proud of him. :)

Tomorrow we start our therapies again. I'm anxious to see how he does after such a long break. Seems like things are going great so I'm hoping he'll be excited to learn new stuff with his teachers.

I also made lots of healthy stuff for the toot this weekend. One new recipe was a big hit with him and Daddy.

1, 1/2 box of GF Penne Pasta cooked
1lb of chicken breast tenders sauteed in EVOO
2 tbsp of GFCF butter or Ghee
1 tsp of cinnamon
1.5 tsp of turmeric
2 tbsp of brown sugar
pinch of salt
1 small box of raisins
1 handful of honey roasted cashews

Cook your noodles and sautee the chicken strips. Cut the strips into small bite size pieces. Return to pan with the oil.

After draining your noodles, toss while hot with the butter, cinnamon, turmeric, brown sugar, and salt. Pour into chicken pan, add small box of raisins, cashews, and cook on low together for 3 -5 minutes to blend.

I served this with green peas but any green veggie would be a great addition. Logan just happens to love green peas. It was delicious and Chris ate it up. Logan did too! You could probably sub in any meat of choice like ground turkey, beef, pork, etc., for variety. 

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)