Part 1:The Caveman Cometh...Out the Other Side of Turmoil

 My Caveman is now ten years old.  He is a uniquely wonderful and amazing creature, and sometimes I think he should be in the zoo, either for everyone to marvel at the marvelous critter he is, or to control his goofiness and give me a break!

His journey is a difficult one and the changes that have happened to him in the last year are intense.  We have struggled for years with trying to help him with his social interactions.  He is incredibly social and friendly one-on-one and never fails to make an impression.  He has an incredible smile and puts so much energy into reading facial expressions and responding to adults he makes you feel incredibly important and loved just by saying "Hi, how are you?" He can be a little overwhelming for age-mates.

 With peers or in groups of any size, though, he gets overwhelmed and cannot read the social cues that should tell him what is being accepted and what is turning off his compatriots in conversation and play.  Add to that the difficulty he has getting overstimulated and forgetting that rules exist--you know those rules about personal space and other people's feelings--and he can get really out of his depth socially in no time at all.

Over the years we've tried lots of therapies even as we've struggled to get a comprehensive diagnosis and plan for his future.  Play therapy, Occupational Therapy, neurofeedback, counseling with both social workers and psychologists, speech and social language groups, group therapy, extended school year, etc.  He is complex and contradictory, with emotions way too big for his body, but apparently the Autism Spectrum has a spot for him.  Asperger's Syndrome is different for everyone, but I highly recommend Be Different by John Elder Robison.  Also Autism Everyday by Alyson Beytien for a practical approach to dealing with daily issues without getting too technical. Next up on my reading list are Freaks, Geeks and Asperger's  and Pretending to Be Normal. There are so many more books out there now than there used to be on AS, and lots of controversy with the changes in diagnostic guidelines, but these two are wonderful.  Especially for us, getting started with older kids (Dolly is newly diagnosed with Asperger's at age 12 and My Favorite Alien has self-diagnosed as we've gone through interviews, ratings scales and checklists for the kids' diagnostic process).

Last summer Caveman was taking two different anxiety medications, a non-stimulant ADHD med and a mood stabilizer.  His doctor at the time was absolutely convinced he was medicating appropriately, but we felt that the combination was too much and the meds were working against each other.  Each had worked well initially and then gradually lost effectiveness, but he still had very wild mood swings and some episodes of violent rage.  Looking back it seems obvious, but at the time things were changing so gradually it was hard to see the pattern.  As fall passed, he was becoming more depressed and self-destructive, more frustrated and angry.  He was defiant and obstructive to any plan that wasn't his origination.  It was painful to address any conversation to him, because an angry, defiant retort would come back and a long argument would ensue for any small direction.  He was filled with rage and severely depressed, and talked about hurting himself.

In early December he went to school and told his teachers we had beaten him.  We had restrained him, because he had been flinging himself against the wall repeatedly, less than two feet from a window on one side and the Christmas tree covered in glass ornaments on the other.  It was a horrible episode, but in no way a beating.  The school knew him and us well enough to alert us that they were calling family services.  We called his psychiatrist and he advised immediate hospitalization.

The last week and a half before school got out for Christmas, Caveman was in the hospital behavioral unit.  There are options for adolescents, but for pediatric patients, there are very few, so he was a full hour away. I had just started back to work, at two holiday retail positions. The Monkey was having a birthday in just four days.  We were working really hard on keeping Christmas on-budget.  It was horrible.

Both of my "new" jobs flexed enough that we could go and visit him on the very strict schedule-1 hour drive up, 1 hour of visit, if we were on time, and 1 hour drive home...without him.  The Alien's job gave him almost a month of combined work from home and time off so we didn't have to "farm out" the Dolly and the Monkey.  The church helped with groceries and friends made meals and hugged me when I cried.  I cried a lot.  I screamed sometimes. I cried a lot more.

Caveman didn't make progress.  More and more meds, hours of different therapies, nothing was making a difference, much.  The general consensus was that his anxieties about being in the hospital were making it too difficult for the therapies to help.  After a few days, a different psychiatrist came in for the holidays, and he was more receptive to taking meds AWAY instead of just adding more.  And things started to get better.  Not quickly, and he moved to the half-day program without really having made much progress.  And even there, he was still having severe difficulties some days.  They once had to put him into a padded isolation room to stop his physical outburst...then had to go in and pull him away from the window he was trying to break.  Gradually the medications made their way out of his system and a message got through-if you're good enough at following the program, you get to STAY HOME.  His last three days were picture-perfect and he came home to stay the weekend before school started back up.

Odds and Ends of Our News

When last we met, things were interesting in the home of My Favorite Alien, The MOM, The Dolly, The Caveman, and the Monkey.  The MOM had recently gone  back to work, and things were finding their way to a new "normal".  Fast forward 5 months (yes, I feel guilty).

The daycare I have been working for laid me off for the summer (bummer) and we had a very nice vacation to see Grandma and Poppa B. in Idaho.  We took the long way out and saw Mount Rushmore, which was new for all of us. The highlights of the trip, aside from the beautiful scenery and wonderful "grandparent time" were visiting with cousins and going fishing with the kids' very own brand-new poles.  The lowlights were not catching anything but ourselves on our hooks, and thieves breaking into our van in Omaha on the way home, stealing our DVD player and Monkey's backpack.  He is still very angry about that, and I don't blame him.  I was too caught up in trying to get the broken window fixed (it was Sunday morning, so we were on our own) and get home without any children getting sucked out the window, so we didn't even realize his backpack was missing until we were almost home.  He lost some great books, his cash in his brand-new wallet, and a few toys.  I think he's maddest about the motorcycle-handlebar-type learning toy he had just bought at a thrift store and never gotten to use.  Poor Monkey.

Our ward boundaries were changed right after we got back, our ward became the "leaven in the loaves" and parts of "us" got redistributed into SIX other wards.  We now drive farther, to a nicer building.  Dolly and Monkey are adapting very well, Caveman and I not so much.  He is one of only 2 kids in his primary class, and it's awkward being outnumbered by adults-sets off his anxiety.  And don't get me started on Webelos.  If you let them run wild for 15 minutes before starting, you'll never get my Aspie back under control, you've removed all rules.  And if I've told you that, don't expect me to let you do that to him again.

So Dolly is doing swimmingly in 7th grade, and took 8th place in the district for 7th grade girls in Cross Country!  Caveman is enjoying having a best friend in 5th grade and had a smashing time at a birthday party.  Monkey is with the best teacher in the universe and doing very well academically, but may end up with social problems similar to Dolly and Caveman.  I will write a thoughtful post on Asperger's Syndrome before too long, but not tonight.

I am back at work at the daycare, teaching a language I do not speak and driving a bus, as well as supervising school-agers until they get on their bus.  I had asked for more hours and not gotten them, now that Monkey is in school full day.  So when the school district called for an interview on the application I put in over the summer (while laid off), I didn't hesitate to go in.  And I'm hired!!  I am the new Teaching Assistant at the high school multi-needs special education class!  I won't start till around the first of November, so still transitions to go through.  I have qualms about leaving where I have been working in the middle of a year, but I am leaving all my lesson plans and materials, and since I walked in to an empty plastic tub and no guidance or materials at all, I am working on not feeling bad.

I am also taking classes to get the Learning Behavior Specialist I endorsement added to my teaching certificate, which will enable me to teach special education. I must confess that 4 1/2 hours of class, 1/1/2 hours of drive time and several chapters of reading per week, plus , 25 hours of observation for the 8 week class have been extremely difficult.  It is with great delight that I report that I finished my final exam tonight in under an hour and came home to my family. Two more classes and the state exam and I will be done, probably in April.

My Favorite Alien is now working on getting me to ride motorcycles with him.  I have a helmet (from my birthday) and a very nice armored jacket (early Christmas) and we are planning on my getting into the training class in the spring through the local junior college.  We need something to do together, and this is his pick.  I used to ride all the time in high school, but it has been.....a long time.....

More updates coming soon, I hope, but here were the highlights!

Going Bananas

We love bananas.  We love BANANAS! WE LOVE BANANAS!  Our kids eat so many bananas, up to 10 pounds in a typical week, that we sometimes believe they truly are monkeys.  When we're not checking their pants to see if we need to cut tail-holes, sometimes we get more bananas of a certain ripeness than we can finish before they get yucky.  I personally like them a good bit greener than most of the rest of the household, so when I see big bunches of yellow ones, I start to think about banana bread and banana cake and all.

Today, on the other hand, we were also blessed with more apples than we're going to finish, so we pulled out the good old food dehydrator.  It's been a while since we used it (probably before the move in '06) so I took a look on the internet for some helpful hints.  We haven't had good luck with dried bananas, they are just too sticky and grayish for anyone to enjoy, but apples have turned out well in the past.  This time I hoped to find a "dip" that would help the bananas look appetizing without adding too much extra "stuff". 


After reading a few recipes/blogs/etc. I ended up with a dilute solution of lemon juice and Tang (out of OJ and not going to the store at that point)  We dipped 'em and dried 'em, and the house smelled LOVELY all day long.  One set of bananas got too dark (Dolly still ate them) and the others were still gummy, but not grayish.  They sure tasted citrusy, though.  A qualified success!  The apples were very tasty all around, but only Dolly and I would eat them.

Blogspot is refusing to upload my pictures, which was the entire point to this post, and is very frustrating.  There are some really cute pix of Dolly doing the fruit dip, but you are spared the ones of me in my "lazy Saturday" hair and red face doing the same thing.  Insert imagination here!

Life Goes On, and EVERYTHING Changes

After 12 years of being a stay-at-home mom, with all the joys and frustrations that it has brought, crises survived, and some of them averted, I have gone back to work.  Not entirely voluntarily, not entirely willingly, and not entirely satisfactorily, but I have done it.  And no one has died.  Yet.

It all started in the fall when the kids were back to school and I was mostly recuperated from my sinus surgery. I had applied without success to the local school districts as a special education TA, and at online tutoring and educational materials review companies.  No dice.  Twelve years out of the job market is a high hurdle to get over.  Not to mention that every Principal I ever worked for is retired and hard to contact.  So I went and applied for holiday retail jobs, both with online applications and in person.  I soon figured out that online works better, because they actually do contact you.  Soon enough I was hired by both Kohl's department store, and by Payless ShoeSource, where I had worked for a year or so, over a decade ago.  Did I intend to have two jobs?  No, but when Kohl's hadn't scheduled me significantly for 3 weeks, I accepted the second job.  Then I went crazy.

Fast forward 3 months, past trials and turmoils that I will blog about later, and things are totally different again.  I am working 6am to 11:30 am at a local branch of a nationwide chain of daycare centers.  My job starts with filling bleach/water bottles and delivering breakfast to the rooms, then "floating" between rooms as they need me.  On the negative side, it's stinking early in the cold dark winter morning when I roll reluctantly out of bed and I don't see my kids in the mornings at all. On the positive side, The Alien is successfully getting the kids out of bed and off to school each day, I can still get chores and errands done before they get home, and I'm only paying half of my paycheck for someone to watch The Monkey while I'm there.

While I often get sent to spend a few minutes in a room where they are "over ratio" for a few minutes before a second teacher is scheduled to arrive, I am usually only in two rooms: one where intake happens for everyone age 3 and over, and a half-hour stint in the gym with the "school-agers" before they get on their buses and go to school.  Then at 9:30 I teach Spanish.  Yes, Spanish. No, I'm not a Spanish speaker.  Spanish story time at the library is a huge help--thanks, Sue-the-librarian!  The job was described as VERY early Spanish, "just one step more than Dora the Explorer".

It's amazing to me how much my attitude toward life has changed and how much it challenges me to be doing so much supervision and so little actual teaching.  I really miss having the opportunity to teach much actual curriculum-especially science!  On the other hand, it's been challenging and exciting to develop a curriculum from scratch, in such an unfamiliar subject, for such young students.  I am remembering amazing amounts of things long-buried in my head after so many years of teaching in a very multilingual school.  I love finding a new song to sing each week and the books to go with that theme, and getting to know the children. Teaching a new language in the far corner of the very noisy Exploratorium with the constant traffic, is to say the least, challenging.

I have taken steps toward renewing my teaching certificate, which will take a while, and hopefully getting an additional endorsement in the process to make it more likely I can teach public school again, but for now this is it.  Do I love it? No. Do I hate it? No.  Is it paying a couple of bills with limited sacrifice? Yes.  And so for now, this is the new deal!

Going to Goodwill for Great Stuff

I can't bring myself to use coupons.  For pizza delivery, or a buy-one, get-one at the shoe store, sure.  But the grocery store? Very rarely.  They give me anxiety.  Either I didn't clip the right one, or I didn't bring the right one, or I don't like that product better than the generic anyway, or I have to make an extra trip to a second store, or.....you get the idea.  Too many rules.  And don't even get me started on those people who do "extreme couponing".  That approaches a mental illness, in my opinion.  It's too much work!  Running to too many stores, on the right dates, buying insane quantities, being the "early bird" shopper or getting the limited-time-only deal is not on my agenda.

At the same time, we live frugal lives.  I have made a lot of financial and material sacrifices in order to be the stay-home mom I believe my kids need.  I don't shop much because it's hard for me to say "no" to a good deal if it's not in the budget.  If I don't have a list, I don't go to the store.  And if I do go, I try really hard to stick to the list.  We try to buy only what we need, not whatever looks good today or would be a fun thing to have.

I went to get the taxes done last year and had donation receipts from Goodwill to claim.  Our tax preparer shared a story about immigrating to the US as a child and his family starting over financially.  I believe his exact words about purchasing clothing at Goodwill were "and then I knew we were destitute."  I can sympathize with his feeling of radical change in circumstances, but for me shopping secondhand is a totally different experience.


I love to dress my kids in hand-me-downs, because while they look great, if they get painted on, or gluey, or messed up playing in the mud, it's not a financial hardship.  We can have a wider variety of styles, and a wider array of choices in the closet than I could find in the number of store trips I get before I run out of patience and money.  I get beautiful holiday dresses for my daughter at garage sales, for less than the price of dry cleaning one of them.  I use Freecycle and other recycling sites to find toys, clothes and books.  We use the library A LOT.  So it feels really neat to go go to Goodwill or a yard sale and find beautiful things, often brand-new things, at a guilt-free price.

Most notably:

• Black stretch wool, satin pinstriped slacks from The Limited, with $98 store price tag attached, $3.99.  After I shortened them, they are probably the best fitting, most comfortable slacks I've EVER owned.
• Plum suede, knee high,cuffed boots for my daughter, never worn and still tied together from original store, $3.99.Not practical enough to pay full price, but a real fashion trophy she will enjoy, and I will enjoy watching her wear!  These became part of her costume for Seussical, the Musical Jr.
• Chocolate brown microfiber velour couch, full-size and factory-new, $325.  A perfect match for our living room with the antique piano in the same deep brown!
• Plaid purple windbreaker for my daughter, Kohl's store tags attached, $3.99
• The exact same royal blue leather purse I drooled over at Kohl's, but didn't buy, unused with matching wallet still attached by manufaturer  for $4.99.  I smile every time I see it.  Perfect size, perfect color, and doesn't fall off my shoulder!
• A beautiful winter coat for Caveman, green and black with LOTS of pockets, like new, $4.99
• Gorgeous lime green silk blazer/blouse with chinese figures on it, with designer/manufacturer tags attached, $6.99 (that one I came back for twice-when it was still there on the 3rd visit I knew it was for me. It was in the Halloween costumes!)  Like the suede boots, something I thoroughly enjoy the uniqueness of without paying the price.
• Brand-new brown loafers one size up for Monkey-boy, $3.99 Church shoes are so easy to get there, they so seldom get worn out before they are outgrown-and that makes it hard to pay full price for them, too.
• Like-new black dress shoes for Caveman, $4.99 in the same trip.
•  Antique, teak desk (or maybe it is a buffet with out the hutch) in lovely condition, $12.99.  Made a perfect computer table for the two boys' gaming computers (for Christmas) and still looks pretty in the family room.
• Student desks for both of the big kids' bedrooms for homework, art/drawing, etc. $12.99 each.

I don't always find the department store overstock items, but when I do it's a score!

On a slightly different note, Flylady (look her up if you don't know who that is) published a letter she got once from a follower of her home organization method that made me a fan of donating to Goodwill (or Deseret Industries, St. Vincent De Paul etc. Goodwill is just closest here).  The general idea was that getting rid of your clutter was really important because having too many "things" holds you back from enjoying the things that are most important.  She said that holding on to "stuff" created chaos in your home and life and that giving up what you no longer need or use gives you freedom.  The points that hit home to me though were that holding on to things:

• prevents you from accepting new blessings into your life because you're "full" or "busy"
• prevents things that were once blessings to you, but are now not needed, from blessing someone else,  and
• can even be a sign of a lack of faith.  Faith that the Lord will provide you the new blessings that you need at the time that you need them.

Having personally seen this last part in action, I know that letting go of things you can't use, or don't use can be a great blessing.  And that the Lord does indeed help us find what we need, when we need it, if we ask.  

Repost from Flappinessis....

http://flappinessis.com/2011/12/28/dear-shopper-staring-at-my-child-having-a-meltdown-in-the-grocery-store/

I don't know the rules for reposting this, and hope I am not violating copyright.  I have purposely not copied the post itself, but directed through the URL in order to avoid that, but I was so impressed with the post I had to share.

If you are the parent of a special needs child, if you have ever looked askance at a child behaving "diferently" in public (and who hasn't?) you need to read this post!

Look Me In The Eye: What will the new DSM definition of autism mean to us?

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