climb every mountain

I don't get to accompany Martin to speech therapy very often. Last school year, his tutor took him. This school year has been crazier. My husband and I have swapped off taking him on Thursday afternoons.

When Martin was first evaluated by his speech therapist - over 2 years ago - his speech was so limited that she could not even test him. She tried to evaluate him with a benchmark test for 3-year-olds and could not get him to respond to any parts of it. Those were some of our many days filled with bad test scores. IQ - 60. Fine motor skills - 2 years behind. Etc.

Martin loves to go to speech. We sign in at the front counter and he waits there for the therapist, refusing to take a seat like everyone else. The receptionists always ask him how it's going and what he's doing. "I'm waiting for Miss Beth," he replies. When he sees her, he runs down the hall and into the therapy room. I wait outside, although I can watch through a glass wall and listen with earbuds.

Yesterday, Miss Beth was trying to get Martin to recount a storybook in his own words. He did pretty well. She also tried to get him to describe objects on a card, which was harder because he simply wanted to name the object. Finally, she wanted him to draw something he did that day. She drew a picture of herself eating spaghetti as an example. Martin drew a picture of himself on a mountain and swimming in the ocean. We live in Ohio, so you decide whether not that picture was accurate.

Back in the day, Martin used to scream during speech therapy. He refused to take direction. It took months of repeated effort to help him realize that the activities could be fun. And now he's telling stories. And like Lake Wobegon, they might be true or not true. The point is, though, that he's willing to tell us something. I'm still getting used to the fact that Martin can sometimes tell me the things on his mind.

growth

Day three with the new tutor didn't start out very well. In his best imitation of an irate teenager or Civil Rights protester, Martin refused every proposed activity. He yelled. He fell to the floor. He ran away. He cried. It was not a good morning for our neophyte tutor. We supplied encouraging words, assuring her that Martin struggles against anything (or anyone) new. We told her to try the activities that already interested him rather than pushing new ones. It was not a good morning.

At lunchtime, Martin somehow realized that the world and his new tutor were not against him. The two of them went to the library for awhile. When they returned, they did some activities together. When it was time for her to go, Martin told her that she could take her coat off and stay longer. Three hours earlier he was yelling at her at the top of his lungs. He almost made the poor girl cry. And now, all sugar. I cannot figure it out.

Every day, I have the urge to cave. I just want to give in to Martin's demands. Not only because I know he's having a hard time, but also because it would make my life easier. It's easier to avoid new things than to go through the elaborate orchestration of making a new thing Martin-friendly. Even so, I have to do it. Martin simply has to get used to his new tutor. He simply must do new activities with her. There will be no growth otherwise.

psalms for autumn

On the drive home from the library tonight Martin sang another one of his wacky psalms. To make even a bit of sense of it, you must know that he had just picked up a banana at a kid's cooking class at the library. So here goes:

Raise up your hands to the green light,
Raise up your hands to the yellow light,
Raise up your hands to the red light.
I am waving the banana,
And it is Martin's banana,
And all the Christmas lights are shining,
Christmas is so huge,
And I am so huge.

This song is mostly nonsense, unfiltered response to the traffic signal, some food, and the newly installed Christmas lights all over downtown Wooster. At the same time, it is a sign of Martin's recent verbal leap. For instance, yesterday he disobeyed his new tutor and ran away from her in the college parking lot. When I asked him about it, I received this shockingly long reply that basically cohered with reality:

"Um, I was just holding Miss Jamie's hand and then I was not holding Miss Jamie's hand and I was running out to the street and I was not listening and then Miss Jamie she just grabbed my hand and I was not listening and I will get a time out."

This is a child who, a year ago, we were trying to get to answer yes or no questions 50% of the time we asked them. This is a kid who we were drilling every day with the hope that he'd take more than one turn in a conversation. We were yearning for something, anything sensible to escape his lips. And now we're getting paragraphs. They might be full of run-on sentences and repetitive, but so are many of my students' papers.

I'm just so amazed by it all. So amazed that we made it through the library cooking class, even if he refused to eat the food he helped make. So amazed that he knows what Christmas is after several years of the day being nothing but a nuisance to him because it changes a typical daily schedule. So amazed that he's reasonably happy and making progress despite all the ups and downs we've had with schooling and tutors this fall. You are huge, Martin!

riffing

Last night, Martin asked me to play "Old Testament Go Fish." Having never heard of this game, I asked Martin how to play it. He preceded to deal out a set of laminated flashcards, each with the name and a symbol for a book of the Hebrew Bible. He directed me to pick up my "hand" of cards. Then he looked at his hand, got a big smile, and asked me if I had Zechariah. Since Martin, like so many kids, can't keep his hand to himself, I could easily see that Zechariah was the top card in his hand. So I told him, "No, I don't have Zechariah." "GO FISH!" he yelled. Since there was no stack of leftover cards in the middle, I wasn't sure what to do. Martin showed me by promptly laying down his Zechariah card. He then expected me to ask him for a prophet card already in my hand. We continued back and forth until all our cards were in the middle. When the game was over, Martin said, "That was a wonderful Old Testament Go Fish." I nodded in agreement.

I can't tell if Martin simply hasn't learned the rules of play for Go Fish or if he knows them and is riffing on them. I pretty sure I've seen him it play the real game before. That means he adapting the game to a way he wants to play it. And that means he's being a fairly normal kid. I noticed another example of this behavior lately. Martin was holding his little sister's doll, an object she refers to as "baby." When I asked Martin if he had a name for the doll, he said, "Her name is Daby."

While this kind of behavior is standard in typically-developing kids, it's striking and new for Martin. It reveals a flexibility with the world that surprises me. Martin usually lives within a coherent and bounded world, one in which certain things follow upon others, schedules rule, and expectations are high that everything stays on track. Martin has always struggled with the introduction of new things. But lately he's showing signs of willingness.

Two nights ago, I took him to the international students' talent show at the college where I teach. There were dance groups and music performances. One student had some particularly sweet moves and I leaned over to tell my husband that it reminded me of a Michael Jackson number. Martin heard me, looked surprised, and said, "an Andrew Jackson number?" "No, not Andrew Jackson. Michael Jackson," I replied. In the past, Martin would have insisted - to the point of tears - that the student and his dance looked like Andrew Jackson. He would have forced his point that the world was as he wanted it. But the other night, he simply accepted the new idea. "Oh yeah," he said, "Michael Jackson."

too cool for school

Tonight we had a bunch of kids over to celebrate Saint Martin's Day. The holiday is a big deal in parts of Germany. Kids parade with paper lanterns and candles through the streets. There are special songs, often accompanied by accordion. There are wonderful treats called Weckmanner, little sweetened yeast breads shaped like gingerbread men. We had an Americanized version of Saint Martin's Day. We had the parade of lanterns. But party accompaniment came from an I-Pod and treats came in the form of cookies.

After the parade, some of the kids wanted to see Martin's new school room. Soon enough, scads of kids were pulling things off shelves, drawing pictures, and playing with activities in the room. The older ones had all sorts of questions. "Is this where Martin goes to school?" "I think I want to homeschool." A little girl began to cry when her parents' call to go home meant she had to leave the school room. Through all of this, Martin was thrilled to have his school room full of kids. Even though things were a little loud for him, he had a great time. The lanterns, the cookies, and the friends exploring his new space all served to make him feel really good.

And that's good since we were celebrating his saint day. Here's to more parties and friends in our school room! Here's to homeschool in contact with the rest of the world!

in the office

This morning my pediatrician screened our 18-month-old daughter for autism. It's now standard practice to screen children at their 18-month and 2-year doctor visits. The questionnaire asks whether your child makes eye contact with you and if your child can play with toys appropriately as opposed to simply fiddling with them.

No such screening tool was used widely when Martin was coming up. I can't help but wonder what my answers would have been. Thinking back on that time, I remember that Martin could amuse himself for longs periods of time. As a 6-month-old he could play with a piece of paper for half an hour. When he was 18-months old, he built block towers about a dozen pieces high. These were signs, but we had no idea. We thought he was just bookish, which made sense given his parents. His ability to concentrate didn't seem odd as I was simultaneously sitting in a tiny office for hours each day pouring over 19th century New York legislative records. One person's weird is just another person's job, right?

Another aspect of a standard 18-month-old's pediatrician visit is immunizations. No matter how convinced you are that there is no basis for connecting autism to shots, no matter how much you trust the process of peer-reviewed science, it's a big, big deal to think about giving an MMR to your seemingly normal toddler when she has an autistic big brother. I'm fortunate enough to have a doctor who will talk these things out with me. He doesn't believe there is a tie between shots and autism, but he knows the stakes are high for families with a clear genetic predisposition to the spectrum. He also knows that there's little chance that Sasha will get the measles in the next 6 to 12 months. So unlike some mothers who've had doctors scream at them about immunizations, my doctor said, "Let's wait. Let's give it a year until she's a little more grown up. You have to feel good about what you do with your kids." It made me start to cry.

I've cried in that pediatrician's office before. The same doctor diagnosed Martin just over two years ago. But today I cried out of relief. Relief about caring for Sasha and relief about a doctor's solidarity. And more than that, relief that Martin is doing OK despite all the things I didn't know a few years back.

wh

Autistic kids often struggle with "wh" questions. Questions with a who, what, when, where, or why. These kids might stare at you blankly when you ask, "Where are you going?" or "Why are your clothes on backwards?" Even if they can answer such questions, asking them remains difficult. Martin and his tutors do flashcards designed specifically to develop proficiency in answering and asking these "wh" questions. We hold up picture cards and ask questions like, "What is the girl holding?" or "Where is the boy going?" The hope is that Martin - aided by the visual prompt of the card - will answer "A ball" or "To school."

Martin has made progress in answering "wh" questions over the past year. But his ability to ask them has increased dramatically only in the last few weeks. He asks us about where things are, what time it is, or when we will go to the library. It's really exciting. He has not, however, entered the final "wh" frontier: why questions.

I've known kids, ranging in age from three to five, who ask why about everything so much and with such intensity that my normally pacifistic personality morphs to the point I'm ready to clobber someone. You know the kid, right? "Why are you going out the door? Why is the sky blue? Why do you need a water heater and an ice cube maker? Why are you drinking that bottle of Scotch?" After the twentieth why question, you're ready to do anything to make it stop.

Martin has never asked why. Although he expresses frustration that church happens on Sunday but not Saturday, he never asks why that is. Even though he's sad when we tell him that we can't go to the park on a particular evening, he's never asked why not. Since the word "why" hardly exists for him, it's as though his brain can't accommodate the concept of questioning. It's so weird. And it makes me believe, once again, that Wittgenstein was right.

Nevertheless, I predict we'll hear a why question by Christmas. I'll let you know.