Seedlings

I've been attending a Bible study for moms lately that's offered at a nearby church every other week. I really enjoy it, as the session is a nice mix between mom talk and spiritual talk.

A few weeks ago the speaker on the DVD message we always watch said something that encouraged me although the statement in itself isn't really that encouraging. She said that studies have found that people working jobs with projects that have a set beginning and clear ending are usually more satisfied than people in more open-ended positions with projects or issues that never really resolve.

This is another reason why, she was saying, we as moms can feel especially drained. There are always more dishes to be done and more toys to be cleaned up. Our kids are very long works in progress. It's not as if we discipline them and - poof! - that issue never comes up again. Parenting can be a very tedious process.

I think a number of the ladies there that day kind of breathed out a sigh of relief with that one. The whole thing made so much sense. Parenting is an 18-year (Oh, who am I kidding? It's a lifetime) job. Of course it can be draining to do and do and do and not always see the results of anything you do for a very long time...or to do and do, only to have it all quickly undone.

The other day we were visiting with relatives we don't see very often and after awhile the kids decided if they had a captive and adoring audience, they were going to milk it for all it was worth. Or, at least Anna decided that, and Ethan followed along. The last 20 minutes of our stay included hitting, throwing of objects, screeching, tattling, and of course, crying.

By the ride home, I was DONE. The kids asked for their XM radio station and I purposely turned the dial to my favorite stations. Sometimes my selfish side very necessarily rises up and I tire of my universe constantly rotating around my children. Sometimes I just want 20 minutes to listen to a song I like. Sometimes I want to know that the words and consequences we speak and give to our children are making a difference.

After the kids had gone to bed, I calmed down a bit. I wandered over to the trays of seeds we have balancing precariously on wobbly TV trays in the dining room. We planted them last week; mostly herbs. I told the kids not to expect anything to sprout up for at least 10 days.

Then I saw. I had to lean over and peer very closely to see them: the first two shoots, popping up above the soil.

One for Anna; one for Ethan.

I remembered again the potential that is always there even when we can't see the work happening.

I remembered how patient God is with me, an imperfect vessel.

I remembered that tomorrow would be another day.

And then I let it go.

"But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love." -- Nehemiah 9:17

Flying Frogs and Progress Reports

Today was swallowed up by reports and evaluations.

This morning we were back in the little room down the street from Connecticut Children's again: this time for a speech re-evaluation to qualify Ethan for a social skills class.

Even Ethan knows the drill at this point. I feel a little bad about that. At one point during the session, he literally picked up the picture he was supposed to be studying, and asked Jen, the speech pathologist, "So? What do YOU think this is?"

He kept turning around, too, giving me little smiles and looking for encouragement. "I'm doing a really good job," he announced several times, fishing for compliments.

This time Jen, the same speech pathologist who helped diagnose him and who saw Ethan for speech two years ago, administered the ADOS test to gauge his "social/pragmatic skills."

She is a wonderful practitioner, and I had just one qualm with one of the tests. She took out this picture book (no words to the story) and began grilling him on what was happening on each of the pages:


I remember seeing this book in the library when I used to work there. It's award-winning, but I thought it was weird. I don't even think I ever flipped through the whole thing, but it's about frogs flying, or something. To quote a review I found online, the book is “Sort of science fiction, sort of National Enquirer, sort of 1940s-style detective story, sort of 1960s-style comic book. Totally fun." Here's just one of the fun-filled pages Ethan was asked to describe:


Why in the world would someone use this whimsical book, so completely disengaged from reality and concrete concepts, to gauge a child with autism's skills at telling a story? I had trouble figuring out the story looking at it as a 20-year-old. It's just bizarre.

That aside, our 1 1/2 hour appointment told us things that I already knew. It's a little frustrating but much more gratifying to hear a professional say them.

Ethan is very smart.
He's come a long way, particularly with language.
He has some big gaps, most of which relate to critical thinking, sequencing (there's that word again) and something called "central coherence" (big picture thinking). It's hard for him to re-tell a story, in the right sequence; to understand why certain things happened, and to recognize the important parts of the story and how it all fits together.

These are issues I'm sure the staff at school is aware of, but they don't work as much on them as I think Ethan needs. I think I understand why. As Jen plainly stated: "The school sees that he knows most of the things a four-year-old needs to know. What we have to understand is that down the road, more and more as school goes on and he gets older, he's going to need to employ his critical thinking skills. It's important to work on that now so we can head off some of those challenges he may have down the road."

AMEN to that one.

And so: he is probably going to start a social skills group in the summer to work on sustaining conversation, play, interaction, all of that. And she recommended speech if he wasn't having other services in the summer, to work on things like understanding how the parts make up a whole, on how the little pieces fit together, on what motivates people and characters in books, about taking another person's perspective. This is big. These are core issues in autism world. I am simultaneously a little tired to always have something to be working on, but happy to have a plan. There is nothing worse than feeling something is missing but not being able to have anyone confirm your suspicions. I'm thankful that many, many of Ethan's teachers and therapists over the past few years have been receptive and proactive. It means so much to be heard -- and in the long run, will mean so much to Ethan, even if now it meant sitting through yet another test.

After school I ran into Ethan's physical therapist, Mrs. B. My heart sank at first. Last week he had acted like a little hellion with her, but today she was all smiles and reported that the Ethan she knew and loved was "back." I asked her something I'd been meaning to ask for awhile: if she thought next year when Ethan was 5 if he'd be able to do T-ball and soccer in town. I know there are challenger leagues for kids with special needs, but I wondered if she thought he could handle the environment with typical kids.

"He's nearly ready now," she said. She loved the idea. She thinks he can do it.

Tonight was the parent-teacher conference. Ethan was "calendar helper" at school today. His progress report looks great; it's the social goals on his IEP that continue to creep slowly but surely towards improvement. The speech therapist called him "Asperger-ish."

All in all, it was an informative, exhausting, rewarding day. I will go to bed remembering the best part, which was the song Ethan made up out of the blue this morning while getting dressed, something along the lines of:

Mom, I love you
I really love you

Nothing can be better than that.

Train Table, Revisited

The infamous train table, 2010

"Mom, are we going to put the train tracks back together again?"

Ethan's question a few days ago threw me for a loop. I've written about our foibles with the train table. For the past few months it has sat, untouched, with broken tracks heaped all over the place. After the peeing incident, I'd basically called the thing a loss and was just trying to figure out how to get rid of it.

This afternoon, we were up in his room. Ethan had gotten out of school early. The jumbled tracks stared at me again.

"Eth, do you want to fix the tracks?" I asked gingerly.

"Yeah!" he replied.

I looked at the train table and tried to see through my son's eyes.

"Do you want all this stuff on it?" I asked him, referring to Cranky the Crane, the helicopter landing pad/hospital, the water tower, and various other Island of Sodor accoutrements. I realized I had never asked him. I had just forced on him my idea of what the perfect train table set-up would be.

The extras all went on the floor. I focused on putting together one simple track. Ethan helped. I watched the way he tried to fit the tracks together, understanding the basics but not getting, at first, that you could flip the curving tracks over and they would curve in the opposite direction. I thought about how frustrating and how much more time consuming would be to put tracks together without understanding that.

We had one circular route done, but Ethan wanted more.

"The rest of the tracks are downstairs. Do you want me to get them?" I asked.

"Yeah!"

I bounced down the stairs, full of light, a bit giddy. He's playing with the trains...he's playing with the trains...

We built more tracks. When we ran into an impossible connection, Ethan wrote it off as a dead end (oh, how he loves dead ends) and started a new way. Two more times I went downstairs to get more tracks. We played like this for a half-hour, until we had to pick up Anna from school.

I have no idea if Ethan is going to play with the train table tomorrow. He may go back to his "human tornado" routine and smash the whole thing to smitherines. He may let what we've built sit there frozen in time for another few months.

But today, we played. And later that day I heard what I described to Dan as "one of the most beautiful sounds in the world" -- the jangling and clanging and bumping and beeping of toys as Ethan dug in the toy box, looking, and pulled out several different toys to play with, one by one.

And just like that, a rather blah, raw, windy day turned into something special.

"With God, all things are possible..." -- Matthew 19:26

Lessons from Running

So, I've started running.

For those around me, namely my dear friend Suzanne who is coaching me through the process, it's not a pretty sight. I'm not a naturally athletic person at all. The only team sport I ever played was softball in fifth grade (our team's name: The North Atlantic Termites). I breathe through my mouth and get red, sweaty, frizzy-haired and wild-eyed very quickly. My grandfather back in the day was known as "the guy who never missed a day of running for 20 years straight." I apparently inherited few of his genes.

However, about a month ago I decided I needed to get into, if not shape, at least better shape. I just love food too much to not exercise and burn some of it off. Thankfully, we've had some incredibly gorgeous weather around here for February and March, which has made it a lot easier to get motivated. Normally the theme of the day this time of year would be sleet and mud, but instead people have been wearing shorts and the daffodils have been in bloom for a couple of weeks. So Suzanne, who lives in town, and I have headed out to the high school track several times a week, and I have learned quickly what I really already knew:

Running is really, really hard.

Well, not the running part. I suppose it would be the running for any sort of significant distance part. I get stitches in my side. I get itchy. I run out of breath quickly.

Thankfully, I learned right away that you don't start running just running. You walk and then you run a little and then walk some more and then run some more. Every time you try to walk a little less and run a little more. Slowly, your endurance builds.

This morning I decided to go out running for the first time on my own. The fact that I woke up and was actually inspired to do this is a miracle in itself. The fact that I actually did it and enjoyed myself is as well.

As I ran, I couldn't help but thinking that this running thing illustrates a lot about our lives in general. This analogy is certainly nothing new, but I guess in some ways it's new to me. As my sneakers pounded on the pavement the verse kept running through my head: "...Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us..."

Running is about endurance. Life is about endurance. But how do we endure to accomplish the purpose God has for each of us? Running with the sunrise, I saw that:

1. We have to take it one step at a time, while periodically keeping our "eyes on the prize."
If you're only looking at your destination, you'll be discouraged at how far you have to go. So we need to primarily set our sights on the tasks in front of us (I guess with running, this would be the next landmark rather than the finish line). Our race is really a compilation of many small milestones. However, if we only keep our eyes on our "feet," or present situation, we'll lose our inspiration. We have to glance up every once in awhile and remember what we're aiming for.

2. Sometimes you don't realize how far you've come until you turn around and look back.
I still can't run very far AT ALL. I'll be happy when I can run even a mile straight! This is a bit disheartening, although I've only been running for a couple of weeks. However, today I turned around after I'd ran and couldn't even see the place where I'd started from. The journey looked so much longer and felt so much grander after I'd accomplished it. How often in life do we go through something, and only after we've come out on the other side are we in awe that we were able to do it?

3. You have to have the proper tools.
Everyone talks about having the right running shoes, and I know now that they're right. My cheap sneakers are just not cutting it (thankfully new running shoes from eBay or on their way!). I've got blisters. My feet are taking a pounding. They will still take a pounding once I get the new shoes, but it will provide some relief. I also needed some workout clothes (running with sweatpants that are literally FALLING DOWN is just not the way to go). These things seem so simple yet can make a big difference. And then there's just the fact of knowing the right way to run. You can have the best intentions and start gung-ho only to fail miserably because you didn't, say, stretch enough first or pace yourself, or you tried to do too much too soon.

4. The journey is a lot easier when you're not on your own.
You know, I consider myself an introvert (although not an extreme one), yet even I get bored exercising alone. I tend to count my steps (Ethan would appreciate this) for lack of anything better to do. But when I have someone along, the time passes much more quickly. I'm not just looking at the next marker and wondering how long it will take me to get there. I've realized more and more lately that we can't do life alone. I don't just mean with or without a spouse or kids. I'm saying we need a depth of relationship; all kinds of relationship. We need people we're mentoring and people we're learning from. We need people at the same life stage we can bounce thoughts and ideas off of. We need friends who share our beliefs and who can encourage us. We can't just live in the bubble of home, as is so easy to do, particularly if you are an at-home mom. Even those of us who are quieter and more reserved were meant to share our lives on different levels with different types of people.

I hurt all over.

Back out tomorrow at 6 a.m.

More Thoughts on Play

Anna immersed in play, at about age 2 1/2

"Moooom? I'm boooored!"

That phrase seems to be some sort of rite of passage, when it comes to both being a parent and being a kid. What parent hasn't heard her child say the words? What parent didn't utter the same words, eons ago?

Anna went through an "I'm bored" phase awhile back, which I viewed as close to ridiculous. The girl has tons of toys and trinkets and books and games and craft supplies oozing out of boxes and bins all over the house. She also has an incredible imagination. After awhile I'd get fed up and tell her, "You're staying out of the kitchen (these issues always seemed to come up around dinnertime) for a half-hour, and you're going to come up with something to do."

After about five minutes of obligatory whining, suddenly it would grow very quiet, and I'd know: Anna was creating. Sure enough, within another few minutes she'd come scampering to the doorway with some sort of house for her My Little Ponies she'd fashioned, or be concocting some kind of food for her stuffed animals using beads and sparkles, or gathering supplies for a camping expedition to take place under blanket tents. (As I write this, incidentally, she is building homes for her Lalaloopsy dolls out of cardboard boxes.)

I always knew Anna could play, she just needed to put some effort into getting started when she was feeling lazy.

I don't think we realize how much goes in to play. I know there are things I never considered until the last few years. Play is more than just coming up with an idea. It's also knowing how to execute the idea. It's breaking the idea into very small parts and carrying them out successfully, in the proper order. Apparently the fancy words to describe this in the developmental pediatrics world would be "motor planning" and "sequencing."

If I insisted Ethan play on his own for 30 minutes (with no electronic devices or puzzles!), this is what might happen. He would first have to come up with an idea. This sometimes does not come easily. But even if he did come up with an idea, to truly play, he would need to add to the idea, to expand the idea. There are various reasons why kids on the spectrum do things like pick up toys and simply drop them or throw them or spin them. This play thing is not as easy as it sounds.

I witnessed this all play out (no pun intended) this afternoon. Since the weather was unseasonably warm water play seemed like a good option. I filled up a bucket for Ethan on the back deck along with various other small bowls, water cans, squirt guns, spray bottles and more and told him to go for it. This is what I saw:

He tried to pick up the huge heavy bucket to dump water into smaller items before realizing he could fill the smaller items with water from the big bucket.

He attempted to squirt the squirt bottle but had it the wrong way and wasn't grasping it right, so he couldn't get it to shoot out any water.

After I gave him a plastic slide from an old bath toy and some toy people to see if he wanted to play "waterslide" (we just got back from a trip to an indoor waterpark), he lay the slide flat on the deck, not knowing how to balance it on anything to tilt it into a position in which a toy person could race down it.

When trying to fill up small cups of water in the small bucket, he didn't realize the best way was to tilt each slightly to the side. Instead he put them in straight down, and didn't push them far enough down for much water to flow over the sides and into the cup. This meant every time he attempted this, he got just a few drops of water in his cup.

He then moved over to the sandbox to make sandcastles. Only he kept forgetting to fill up the bucket all the way or to really pound down the sand, so his castles kept collapsing into chaos as soon as he'd turn over the bucket.

How can I blame the boy for finding solace in buttons and switches? Just writing this makes my head ache. Yet these are exactly the types of challenges many kids with special needs have when they are asked to "go play." I imagine it would be like someone telling me to assemble a chair with no directions. To say I'm not handy is an extreme understatement. I'd first stare at all the pieces and wonder what to do with them. Once I finally figured out a piece or two that went together I'd fumble around with the screwdriver and undoubtedly strip a screw...or get a few parts slip-shoddingly together only to see them fall apart with the slightest bit of pressure. I certainly wouldn't find the whole experience to be very fun.

I'm no expert, but something in me tells me we're going about things the wrong way when we try to "teach" kids play. Ethan's teachers talk a lot about modeling play schemes. They put the cow in the toy barn and have it say moo. Then they hope Ethan will copy and do the same. Okay, he can handle that. But where does that get him when no one is around? He's not generating ideas. He's not problem-solving. He's simply imitating.

That's like someone standing with me while I'm assembling the chair, telling me exactly what to do and how to do it. I might actually put the thing together, but would I know how to put it together? Would I be able to do it on my own, or assemble a different object other than a chair? To me it would seem more worthwhile to first be sure I knew how to properly use the hammer, the screwdriver, the drill. To review how the pieces work and fit together. To understand the why and not just the what. And then with time and practice, I'd begin to understand how to assemble it on my own.

This is why I don't care for teachers exclusively grasping at any old typical four-year-old play skill and offering it up for Ethan to imitate, because he's smart and catches on quickly and because this will help him to fit in socially. We must also be sure to go back and work on those skills that he skipped over or never refined -- skills like exploring...manipulating... testing...discovering...trying and failing and trying again a different way: even if that means dumping water and digging in sand like a two-year-old, when the other four-year-olds are playing superheroes.

I guess that's what home is all about. That's why we're here. Which is why Ethan ended his play today blissfully happy, covered with sand and water, brushing off his hands with satisfaction after finally crafting a sand castle that no one had built for him first.

The Hardest Easiest Question

“How old is he?”

It’s a relatively straightforward question, with a not-so-simple answer.

How old is Ethan? Well, he’s four, of course. Four and a quarter, to be exact – except he’s not.

He’s five, as I watch him write all of his letters, and count to 40 and beyond, do simple addition or spell words.

He’s two, when he throws himself on the ground and tantrums when I tell him to come inside, or when I make him peel the banana rather than eat cut up pieces, or when he loses a foot race to the car.

He’s three when he’s in OT, not quite grasping his pencil the right way, when he’s a bit behind in his ability to manipulate and grasp.

He’s five when he beats Angry Birds on Dan’s phone.

He’s two (or younger) when he gravitates toward the baby toys at playgroup, looking for any object with cause and effect, anything he can manipulate easily for instant reward, rather than the toy farm or trucks the other kids are playing with.

He’s three when he plays alongside other kids more often than playing with them, able to tolerate their presence but not that interested in involving them.

He’s two when he starts screaming and hitting the child who won’t give him a turn.

He's five when on a different day and in a different mood he's chasing the same child (of kindergarten age) on the playground or playing hide and seek.

He's four every day, in a class of mostly four-year-olds. Yet in some ways four is less than an age and more of an average.

I think all kids have a little of this. There aren't many who follow those milestone books to a "T." With autism, the developmental extremes are just more, well, extreme.

This is what is hard to convey sometimes, when my son looks five, is four, speaks fairly well, but sometimes throws fits or plays like a toddler. I try to remember this, when I see a child for whom everything is not quite adding up. There is, I know, nearly always a story behind the story.

Book Stories

I am convinced that the books on a person's shelves can tell you a lot about that person.

I was thinking this the other day, while at my parents' house feeding their cats while they were away. I was wondering how it is that my mom and dad, with whom I share pretty similar spiritual beliefs, could have such vastly different books on their shelves than the ones on my own.

I am a huge book-lover. As a child I was what the teachers would call "a voracious reader." I used to go over my friend Brie's house (she also a bookworm) and we'd spend hours in her room, not speaking, devouring books. I'd check books out the library and read them while walking home. To this day Dan and I love nothing better than spending vacation days in cute bookstores. Anna is quickly following in our footsteps. Who knows? Ethan may not be far behind.

The books on my shelves reflect various stages of my life. There are the "so you want to be a writer" books...the travel collection...the classics I should have read in college that I stocked up on to get to, someday. There are my Red Sox books and photographic essays and yes, my September 11 collection and disaster phase (Night of the Grizzlies, the Worcester tornado, and so on). There are my Oprah's book club novels and other acclaimed current offerings, all of which seem so bleak to me that I have trouble digesting them. There are the Christian fiction books that irritate me due to their hokey-ness and sometimes, to be blunt, just plain bad writing.

Then there are the Christian non-fiction books I've bought in the last five years. These are the ones that give me pause. These are the ones that I hold up to my parents' book collection and have to laugh. My parents have many books by Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly. They have numerous others on prayer, intercession, spiritual warfare, Israel, and the coming Armageddon. They are strong and sure of their specific path of their Christian walk and they prefer to dwell on battles, good and evil, justice.

My books? Well, here they are, my recent favorites; books I've devoured over the last several years that have had a lasting impact:




There is one notable book missing, and it's one of my favorites (I lent it to someone awhile back). It's called Your God is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control, by Mark Buchanan, a book that was life-changing and in part inspired this blog.

Two of the books that went straight to my heart are Choosing to See by Mary Beth Chapman, about her loss of a child, and Lessons Learned in the Dark by Jennifer Rothschild, about her loss of sight. Sometimes in our darkest moments we actually finally have our eyes opened and see.

The Shack blew my mind with its very unconventional view of God. Donald Miller's books challenge Christians to live and think in a way I'd not been challenged before. Patsy Clairmont talks about her very real struggles with fear and anxiety, something I could relate to whole-heartedly. Soul Survivor -- How My Faith Survived the Church...well, I guess the title says it all. Our Eyes Fixed on Jesus is written by brilliant man who has spoken at our church, Guy Chevreau, and really helped clear up some confusion I had about the lack of balance I feel some Christians have when it comes to satan and demons. And C.S. Lewis, well, is C.S. Lewis. Enough said.

My collection seems to represent more of a quest and of lots of questions, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we all have to find God for ourselves or our relationship with Him is flimsy and of little value. I don't think God minds questions but rather encourages them.

I think one theme that unites all the books is that they were written by people who think and feel deeply and who tire of Christian cliches with no meanings behind them, or of Christians who don't act much like Christians. I'd (obviously) highly recommend any of them, but more than that, I'd encourage those out there seeking a deeper relationship with God to seek God for yourself. Don't accept things sight-unseen, search the scriptures and ask God what He's saying to you. Ask for wisdom to walk the right path. And then don't look to the left or right. Just start walking.

I don't know how all of that came from me pondering over books, but there you have it, my sermon for the day. I make light of it but I'm serious. I've spent a lot of time trying to walk other people's spiritual walk, when I needed to set out on a journey of my own.

The books on our shelves tell our very human stories. And I wonder: what stories are your books telling?