Fair Weather Friends

When Little A was just born, and I would take him to the playground to get some sun, there was a toddling little girl often there who refused to wear shoes. She walked unassisted at 9 months, and was a bundle of energy.

I never forgot this little girl, even though I stopped seeing her around, because my son too walked early, and also hated to wear shoes.

As the only mum on the playground amidst a sea of nannies, I never got this little girl's contact details, but presumed she had moved away, as many families do in our building.

Recently though, she was back for an afternoon, and she and Little A enjoyed each other's company at the pool.

Now seven and at big school, the little girl's nanny told our Au Pair that she only started speaking at age three or so, after therapy. With Little A, though, she was chatty and very sociable. At first my son ignored her and did his own thing as he tends to do, but she was insistent and kept bugging him to interact with her, until he discovered he enjoyed it. It was heartwarming to watch, as this is may be only the second time ever that any child has made an effort to play with my son.

While I was away, they swam together once more. Unfortunately, I still wasn't able to meet her mum or get her contact details. I would love to invite her over regularly, as this is the type of friend Little A really needs, one who is insistent and slightly forceful. There is a Filipino term for this that is perfect. Little A needs a friend who is makulit, someone who will pester him without giving up into interacting and sustaining interaction.

I look out at the pool every afternoon and hope to see her there. With a little bit of luck, she will come visit again before the year is out. 

Playing School

Little A has had a couple of tummy upsets in the past few weeks, causing him to miss two days of school. And then there are the national holidays and storms that cause classes to be cancelled.

Since this is his first year of 7 hour per weekday school, I don't push him to do academic-related work when he's home. But clearly, he does enjoy the school routine and miss it when he's home. Just the other night, I found that he spelled out IEP Room. They have 3 such rooms in school, where small group sessions are conducted in Literacy, Numeracy and Science.

Another day, he grouped items in threes in several parts of our flat. I'm not sure if they do multiple choice questions, but took this to mean that his "answer" was B) 3 animals.

The first round of parent-teacher conferences last week indicated that all seems to be well at school. I only hope things continue to move this way - onward and upward. 

Mummy Break

My eldest niece turned 18 this year. Ah, the memories.  My 18th birthday was spent at boarding school, where I was gifted with a bottle of booze and a few condoms (marking the legal age for alcohol consumption and consensual sex), as well as other, less memorable, presents.

That was the year I came home to enrol at university, as well as embarking on a professional ballet career. Most of my schoolmates went on to do the final year of school, filled with auditions and teacher training certificate courses, while others moved on to university as well.

As the years passed, I kept in touch with these friends through letters sent in the mail and visits every other year or so to London, until I started working and had less time for travel.

My last trip to Europe was in 2001, to visit my sister who was then doing a degree in Public Art, and to see my old friends. Big A and I had started dating a few months before this, and he was in France and Spain with a friend to run with the bulls and drink plenty of wine at the same time I was in that part of the world. We met up in Paris, and then he spent a week or so with us in London.

In the intervening twelve years, my sisters and their families, and my parents, have been back to the UK countless times, but I've not managed to make another trip there, for budget or timing reasons. Until now. 

My parents decided to gift their eldest granddaughter with an overseas trip, and London was the location of choice, since she'd been to Paris and Germany over the summer, and my folks normally visit  the UK in October to celebrate my mum's birthday.

Last month though, they decided it might be more fun for an 18 year old not to travel with two people over 60. So I was elected to take my dad's place. In two weeks, my mum, my niece and I go off to London for eight days. It's hard to tell who is the most excited.

My mum had grown used to spending weeks in London visiting a daughter at school. My parents usually travelled separately unless the entire family was together, as the other would need to look after the kids at home, but since my dad retired, they have always travelled together. Not the best thing for my mum's shopping habit. Since opening her little shop, their European trips have been scheduled around the spring and autumn buying fairs, so none of these have been "proper" vacations.

This will be the first one in a long time - mum can browse the shops to her heart's content, I can see West End shows and visit art galleries, and my niece can come with either of us or go meet her godparents in London.

Naturally, I'm apprehensive about leaving Big A and Little A to their own devices, and have warned them both not to overload the Au Pair with too much responsibility.  I will be doing all the laundry and buying an excess of groceries before leaving, and will be gone over Little A's half-term break, so there will be no school.

I pray there will be no medical emergencies or accidents, and that all goes well. It will be Little A's longest time to go without my putting him to sleep since he was born. I hope we both manage the separation anxiety. Wish us luck!!

And On His Farm He Had a...

One of these things is not like the other - can you spot the real animal among the toys?

Here, kitty.

My son is an animal lover. He is fascinated with farms especially, but safari/zoo animals and underwater creatures come next. One shelf in our living room is dedicated to his LEGO farm, to which he attempts to add live insects that come into contact with us. Once it was a butterfly trapped in the laundry area, though we set that one free outside, and last week a grasshopper they found on a plant outside.

He regularly visits the dog obedience school down the road and the veterinarian's clinic around the corner. Lately, he's been spending plenty of time with a stray cat that sometimes lives in our parking area, and recently, he found a kitten of his very own.

While playing outside with the Au Pair on Saturday, they heard mewing coming from the bushes. On peeking inside they saw a tiny kitten that had been abandoned. Apparently it had been found in a car's engine and left in the bushes with its grey sibling, who was picked up by another kind soul.

I was away at a meeting, and on arriving home for lunch was introduced to the new member of our household, which had already been given a bath. We took the kitten to the vet's office, coincidentally at the same its adoptive owners took the kitten's sibling. Both were given de-worming medicine and had their claws trimmed.

We then marched home with our new kitten, who seems to be adjusting well to its new surroundings after a night of whining plaintively for its mother. Little Boy and Little Kitten now spend afternoons playing happily together. 

You Have Not Been Successful

While my son has a long way to go before he communicates at the level of Carly Fleischmann, it is interesting to get quick flashes into his thought processes every so often.

At his last preschool, there was a programme at every term's end, when the children would prepare a dance number, go onstage class at a time, in costume, and perform for their parents. This happened at the end of October, before Christmas break, and in March when school broke up for the year. As Little A attended that school full time for three years, he had many a "programme day."

While he generally did not like the noise and mayhem, Little A did like being around his classmates and having people there to show how proud they were of him. The feeling of being a part of something mattered, and we could see that.

As part of a self-imposed desensitisation programme to the sound of applause, he took to finding videos of children performing for parents. He searches youTube for videos of his favourite nursery rhymes performed by live children (or, for some unknown reason, Hindi cartoon characters), and recently typed the name of his school into the search bar as if to say, I no longer go to Toddlers (his old school was called Toddlers and Teachers), but I'm watching them perform anyway.

Over the weekend, on one of his many trips a day to play with the stray cat he befriended in the parking lot, the feline was not there. It sometimes disappears for a while, only to return a little later. Little A has taken to sitting in a particular spot and waiting for the cat to come out, asking me to call it by saying "Pah, pah," which basically means, "Meow, Mummy!" When I bring my mobile with me, he types "Cat meow."

This time, after sitting patiently for about 10 minutes (a huge feat for a child who can't watch a half hour tv show in its entirety), Little A gave up and stalked moodily back into the building. On the way, he gave a quick, annoyed scream, grabbed my phone, typed in a word and showed it to me. The word was "Fail," but before I could say anything in response, he deleted it and carefully turned on the caps lock key to spell "FAIL." He screamed again, once, quickly, to express his frustration, then calmly walked into the building.

It's funny how even non-verbal children pick up on the slang of their time. I never use the word "fail" colloquially, but he knows it means something didn't happen, as when our Internet connection is slow and the phrase "Failed to Open Page" pops up. He sometimes spells this phrase out with letter tiles, as if to tell us that the Internet is acting up again.

Lately, I've been explaining to him that he has Apraxia, and that's why it's hard for him to talk. I have yet to spell it out, but I know my clever boy will quickly see that this word contains the same letters as one of his current favourites - "Pixar" - and hopefully he will intuit that being non-verbal is not too bad, as long as there are other ways in which he can use his words to communicate.

Let's Eat

Ah, sustenance. The human being needs all sorts of literal and figurative nourishment, from the arts to the actual products of the land. Some people seem to live on coffee and cigarettes, others on chocolate and candy. Sushi and a good book could do it for me, though lately I've been favouring plenty of fruit and veg.

Little A, like most children, ate everything as an infant, though he really did not like applesauce or apples, and still won't eat them. Then he was diagosed with ASD and we attempted to rid him of gluten and casein. He no longer has dairy, and never liked sweets (fruit included) but we could never completely go gluten free because his favourite snack, corn flakes, are made with some sort of malt barley coating.

He went through a stage of liking three other snack foods - a sweetened corn snack, kettle popcorn and pretzels, but these days he has shifted firmly back into cornflakes territory. Real-food wise, he no longer eats pasta and bread, and has gone off broccoli and leafy greens, something he used to consume without complaint, so long as it was mixed into his meat-and-rice meal (think mixed fried rice in various combinations.)

Most recently, he's gone off soy-sauce based dishes as well, and only likes "orange food," or anything based in tomato sauce. At school, however, he will only eat processed breakfast food.

In my attempts to get him to eat healthier, I limit the processed meats to schoolday lunches only, so he has to eat "real" food at home. For a few days, this worked. But then the weekend came and he realised he was being cheated of his daily dose of additives.

He now comes into the kitchen, looks at what's cooking, and then at the food on the table. If it isn't to his liking, he puts a pan on the hob, climbs up to the cupboards, selects a tin of processed meat, and motions for us to open, and quickly cook it while he takes an empty plate to the table, pushing aside the one with the unpreferred food on it. This is accompanied by appropriately selected word cards or writing - "Sanuge" for sausage, or bacon, or Spam.

One of the establishing tenets of communication therapy is that what the child asks for, provided it is requested properly, they get immediately. It's a basic reward system to encourage them to communicate more. As they get better at it, the concept of waiting is introduced. Then they are made to choose between preferred and non-preferred objects, and finally between two non-preferred objects. I know when we get to that part on the food game, my little one will likely go hungry. I was a headstrong child and a very picky eater, likely the result of so many food allergies, and would fall asleep at the table rather than consume food I did not like. If he's anything like me, then I'm in for it. 

Wonder

The minute I spotted the song lyrics on the first page of this book, I knew it would be an amazing read.

Natalie Merchant's song tells of a child with disabilities who is, nevertheless, "one of the wonders of God's own creation." I have loved this song since it was released in the 1990s, not least because of the beautiful voice of its singer.

I hadn't heard the song in well over a decade, and reading the lyrics after so long made me realise that this song was written for Little A, and all others like him all over the world. Hearing it again brought tears to my eyes, as did reading RJ Palacio's wonderful first novel.

The book, while it does not deal with autism, is the story of a child who is different and who has spent, and will spend, the rest of his life trying to fit in and longing for true friends who will see beyond his differences to accept him for the person he is inside.

I would be lying if I said this wasn't my most fervent dream for my own son. He does not yet have a single real friend (the Au Pair and family don't technically count), and while he tries to interact with them, most children his age are very aware that he is different, and do not have the patience to cultivate a relationship. Little A, for his part, still does not sustain interest in other children for their own sakes, beyond perhaps a shared activity they both enjoy.

Still, I know this will always be a primary area of concern, and I know that as he grows older and more aware, Little A too will want someone to call a friend.

I loved this book, and do not hesitate to encourage readers of all ages to pick it up. Even if I wasn't the mother of a special needs child, I would appreciate the beauty of this novel. My godchildren of teen-age don't know it yet, but this book is what they'll be receiving from my family this Christmas.