Tag:autism
Back to School: The Coaches Meeting
This is one of the biggest steps in preparing to go back to school. It’s something that I agonize over when it begins to consume my mind weeks before it actually happens. It’s time to meet the teacher. Last year the bar was raised to the moon. Realistically, I know that we will never have …
Read more
Back to School: Scrimmages
I didn’t post last week because we were on vacation—Sorry, not sorry! I have decided to turn my back to school posts into a little bit of a series though, so I am hoping to post twice this week. My last post was about easing out of summer and into a routine. Going on vacation …
Read more
Back to School: The Warm-Up
Summer is never quite what I expect. It used to be relaxed and breezy—a chance to go to the pool everyday and do strange science experiments with the boys. They’ve outgrown the science experiments and our lives have gotten too hectic. When the boys were younger, not much changed from season to season (including the …
Read more
What is Normal?
This year has been the year of changes. I largely attribute that to an amazing teacher, an amazing special ed teacher, and an amazing class. The perfect storm of opportunity for him to begin to find his place in this world. People are noticing. My mom comments on it all the time. He is at …
Read more
Always Listening
The thing with Yoshi is that he hears everything, even when you think that he is not listening. It gets more interesting because he doesn’t forget anything. You would think that after ten years I would be more aware of these things. By now I should have learned to watch what I say, even if …
Read more
Special Ed, Occupational Therapy, and IEP Woes
I know this is a hot button topic for a lot of people. Usually our story doesn’t look like most of the others you hear or read about. We’ve had a pretty good experience overall with the special ed process. Except for one part—occupational therapy. Yoshi went into school with an educational diagnosis of autism …
Read more
The Ninth Circle of Hell
I’m not here to give you a poetry lesson, but if you are not familiar with Dante’s Inferno, the ninth circle of hell (the deepest) was considered to house the worst punishments. According to Dante, the traitors belonged at the bottom of the well with a special place reserved specifically for treason against your family. …
Read more
Should You Medicate?
It’s the question of the age, isn’t it? There are pills to fix just about everything now. Why not autism? (tl;dr There aren’t any pills to fix autism.) Long before I had kids of my own, I was already outspoken about how over medicated our children were. I vowed that I would not medicate my …
Read more
Public Displays of Bad Parenting
We all feel like bad parents from time to time. We let something slide that we shouldn’t have, we lose our cool and yell, we forget something important – or maybe that’s just me. Now it’s even worse because we get to measure ourselves against the perfection we see on Facebook and Instagram every day. …
Read more
How Very Wrong She Was
We ran into each other at swim lessons. I hadn’t seen her in a while, maybe a couple of years. We used to be quite close, but life gets in the way sometimes and people drift apart. We had a lot to catch up on. Her youngest, her son, was just diagnosed with autism and …
Read more