An Autism Recovery

Reflection After A Year

A Silly But Important Moment

Sometimes I set my phone’s alarm clock to sound when it’s bath time. Introducing this “third-party impartial” alarm seems to carry some mysterious authority that I don’t and makes it easier for Logan to transition from playtime to bath time more easily.

Seeing that it worked, I also started sometimes setting it for when it’s time to leave the house for school. Well one morning for some reason Logan was just very ready to go to school and we headed out early.

Shortly after I finished playing my daily “merging while accelerating while changing lanes four times” game, we heard the ducks quacking.

We looked right at each other, held it for a second, and then laughed.

I shut the alarm off while thinking what another big moment that was for us. Another moment that I imagine other parents must take for granted, but that we treasure.

Why this time? This was a concrete, no mistaking it, definite instance of what in RDI terms would be called a ‘shared experience’: he was aware of what happened, my reaction, his reaction, my reaction to his reaction, and that we connected in our collective reaction to the event.

When we first learned about ‘shared experience’, the best example we could come up with was when we play poker at the same table, there is often enough some sort of character also playing at the table. Someone really good, really bad, really vocal, really obvious, or something else that stands out to experienced players. I know she notices and she knows I notice.

Such a player might glance down at his chips as soon as the third diamond comes on the board. If we’re both out of the hand all I have to do is glance at her and she knows what I’m thinking.

If either one of us are in the hand, we would certainly check and fold unless we could beat his made diamond flush.

But the point is that we easily and naturally share these experiences and it’s important for Logan to be able to do this easily and naturally with people too. Our moment with the duck alarm on the interstate shows me that he’s on his way there.

Half-A-Kitchen

Logan and I were cutting up catalogs at the kitchen table as scissor practice. I was trying to get him to cut out whole objects and not just making random cuts and ending up with glossy color confetti.

I was having trouble getting this idea through to him.

Welll, today’s catalog was a toy catalog and there was a big play kitchen featured. So he started cutting and did well for three sides of it.
But then he cut it straight in half.

We looked at each other and I pointed to the boy in the picture and said “Hey, he can’t cook in half a kitchen!” Logan found that hilarious. We pasted it onto our posterboard along with some other recent work.

That picture of half-a-kitchen has helped me make the point I originally wanted to ever since, though. I can say, “Hey, cut around the car…that boy can’t drive half a car!”. He’ll laugh, but he’s also getting the idea and getting better at cutting out whole objects, coloring inside the lines, and, I guess, generally thinking inside the box.

All those things that later in life won’t be admired or valued, but I think it is true you have to know the rules to know when it’s important to break them.

Wednesdays Are Tough

So Wednesdays are tough for Logan. It starts Tuesday night as he gets worried about the coming school day, gets anxious, wants to act out and delay going to bed.

Maybe if I stay up all night I won’t have to go to school tomorrow.

But sleepytime comes anyway and he wakes up feeling just fine on Wednesday.

Until he realizes it's Wednesday. He goes into full-on stall mode immediately and pulls all his best tricks out.

Maybe if I make us late enough I won't have to go to school today.

After exhausting the tricks and passive resistance tactics, he moves into the realm of straight-up bad behavior.

Maybe if I stay in timeout all day I won't have to go to school.

Logan generally likes school, so what is making Wednesday different now? Well, I asked him on the way to school, expecting to have to guess, infer, and narrow down with more questions to get to the bottom of it. And really not expecting to figure it out this way anyway.

But I felt a real moment of connection with him when he answered me straightaway: PE scares me.

As so many things do, this gave me mixed emotions, both pleasing and worrying me. The pleasure came from the fact that he was aware enough of his own feelings to know that PE scares him, that he correctly identified the source of his fright, and that he trusted me enough to confide all this in me. I know we say this a lot, but these three things are a big deal for him.

The worry of course was simply that PE class scares him. For such a wild monkey-boy we have at home, it might seem incongruous that a lot of physical activity might bother him at all.

But the difference is the level of activity of others. Everyone is moving fast and loud in all directions. Logan's nature is to observe all this, to take it all in, and understand what everyone is doing. I probed a little bit and he did tell me it was scary because everything moves so fast.

Eavesdropping and Multiprocessing

Have you ever been having a conversation in a restaurant while simultaneously trying to follow another conversation at the next table? Or been on a conference call while also having people stop by in person to ask this or that? Well, take that level of information and multiply it by about twenty, and that's what I imagine Logan feels like when there's so much action to process.

If we don't do anything to help him get involved along a different path, what I would expect to happen naturally is that he will start to pick out patterns of movement and behavior and start to classify them at a higher level of abstraction. So instead of having to process: that boy is moving back and forth in front of the net sometimes, that girl is running toward the net, the boy with the ball is kicking it that way, etc.

I hope he can get to where he just sees the pattern: they're playing soccer, and the blue team has the ball. And then be able to choose where to place his focus instead of having to process it all.

And then at some point, much, much, later than normal, he'll see where he can get involved and get in there and do it. He doesn't lack for physical skills--it's more his reaction time and his ability to process what's important quickly (Dynamic Intelligence in RDI terms) that holds him back today.

One of our Occupational Therapy goals is to work with on reaction time through bouncing tennis balls to him. I think that's probably where I need to spend more playtime with him next.

Being Cute to Cope

I’ve talked before about how Logan is pretty clever about avoiding situations where he doesn’t know exactly what to do. One of the things he is great at is coming up with something cute to distract us. It works often enough that he keeps trying it, but we’re trying to get him to just say “I don’t know” if he’s in that situation so that people can help him when he needs it.

He is saying “I don’t know” *much* more comfortably than we were started this journey, and that’s a big thing for him. Logan can be pretty demanding of himself, and I think he almost expect to be super-competent in every area of his life.

Well, we all know what kind of life that would be if we held ourselves to that standard. You would tend to limit your areas of interest and experience accordingly. I *definitely* have this tendency and it’s hard for me to just be an amateur at something; I tend to want to master it or else ignore it completely.

So there’s nothing wrong with *striving* for competence in many areas, and nothing wrong with limiting your attention to a few primary areas at a time along the way.

I just want him to also be able to ‘float’ along on some things and not have to feel 100% competent in every situation along the way. For some of the most important things in life happen before you can ever be ready for them. A lot of life you can never actually be ready for.

He learns pretty quickly, so we just want to get him to where he trusts that he can be thrust into any situation and figure out what to do to come out of it no worse for wear.

An Impressive Degree of Forethought

The other day while riding his bike, Logan showed some impressive forethought while riding slowly uphill along the East sidewalk in front of our house. You see, he loves to get up to the top of that hill and then fly down it past the house due West all the way to his free-range distance limit before doing it all over again.

Well, on this day there happened to be a neighbor’s newspaper on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up. On the way up the hill, Logan noticed it, realized it would impede his progress on the, much faster, return trip, got off his bike, moved it into the grass, remounted, and went on up the hill.

I didn’t point it out, didn’t say a word, nothing. I had planned on moving it once he got up the hill, actually and was fiddling with my camera or something when I realized what he’d done.

Now, this sounds kind of like a silly little thing to be proud of, but it was a big moment for me because it demonstrated an estimation of events to come, an anticipation of what trouble might lie ahead based on prior experience, and the willingness to act on it independently without explicit or implicit direction. I’ve never told him “watch out for newspapers” or “be careful of stuff on the sidewalk” or anything like that. But he’s had a few spills on the bike and is getting a better feel for the experience, and clearly he’s thinking a little bit ahead.

In RDI terms, I think this demonstrates Dynamic Intelligence (knowing what’s important to pay attention to), and some slight form at least of Episodic Memory.

It may be one of those things that to understand you’d have to know where we’ve been and maybe even had to be there. I was very proud of him, beyond certainly how proud he was of himself, because of course it was no big deal at all to him.

How do you deal with being unsure of yourself?

You know how you can tell when someone is feeling uncomfortable in a situation? Sometimes it’s just painfully obvious, so much so that it can make you uncomfortable too.

One key to success that I’ve heard is that the degree to which you are willing to face up to uncomfortable situations and have uncomfortable but necessary conversations in a lot of ways determines your success.

You can see it in life: a manager who can’t bring himself to talk to one of his crew for being chronically late is doing a disservice to the team and will soon find himself with more problems than would at first seem to be related.

Well, it turns out that Logan has a variety of subtle ways to handle situations where he’s not feeling competent or comfortable. He can be very smooth with it, which I think again is one of those talents that will serve him well later in life, but sometimes we need him to face up directly to the situation and overcome it.

We want him to develop what they call Episodic Memories of moments where he felt less than competent, but stuck with it, overcame that feeling, and then felt successful. This gives him experience that he can draw upon so that when he feels that way again, he knows that it’s not really as daunting as it might seem, and that he can come through it on the other side just fine.

Unfortunately, there’s no other way to get that experience except to push through it. So we don’t push him at every opportunity, but when the moment is right when I know he really can do whatever it is that looks so tough to him if he would put in five or ten minutes of real effort, I will push him to do it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, he can get really frustrated and will amp up and find another way out of the situation—at that moment, even a timeout is preferable to the continued struggle.

But when it works it’s well worth it. And we are seeing his ability to persevere improve through all this, so we think it’s helping.

I try to remember what it was like the first time I had to speak in public. It seemed like a very tough situation, and that’s how Logan must feel a lot of the time. Indeed, I think a lot of kids can feel that way, neurotypical or not. So it gives me empathy for where he’s at and I try to find the right blend of encouragement, quiet confidence in his ability to figure it out, and direct instruction (showing works better than telling with Logan) to get him over the hump.

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.

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.