Parenting Severe Autism
Parenting Severe Autism
EP.39: Navigating Holiday Joys and Challenges with Severe Autism
Is the holiday season a joyful experience for families navigating severe autism? Join me, Shannon Chamberlin, in this heartfelt episode of the Parenting Severe Autism Podcast as I share our journey through seasonal traditions with our son. Through these stories, I look at how we’ve managed to create a harmonious environment that supports Jacob's development and our family’s unity.
Caring for a child with severe autism comes with its own set of challenges and celebrations. Learn about the routines we've embraced, from soothing spa days with sugar scrubs to creative solutions for bath time that empower Jacob’s independence. I’ll share how yoga and breathing exercises have become indispensable tools in easing his headaches and promoting emotional regulation, especially during transitions. These practices are not just about care; they’re about fostering joy and effectiveness while building resilience and independence. Our journey is filled with small victories that highlight the deep connection and mutual understanding I share with Jacob.
Finally, we address the stress and complexities of managing behavioral challenges and maintaining emotional balance in the face of holiday disruptions. Whether dealing with meltdowns, medication adjustments, or the constant echolalia, we emphasize the importance of teaching choices and celebrating moments of responsibility. I discuss the impact of environmental factors and share personal reflections on resilience and self-care for parents. As the holiday season approaches, I encourage listeners to find moments of respite and support, preparing for a return to normalcy with renewed strength and understanding.
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Hello and welcome to the Parenting Severe Autism Podcast. I am your Sh., . I'm so happy that you're here with me today. For more information about each of these episodes, you can head on over to psabuzzsproutcom, where you'll find the transcript, show notes, contact, email, social media page, coupon codes and merch, as well as a link to support the show where you can just buy me a coffee for as little as $1, and a portion of the proceeds from that program and from any merch sold will go towards helping other severe autism families in need who may not be able to afford the sensory items, therapy items or specialty foods for their loved one.
Shannon :Well, apparently it's almost Thanksgiving and I have been reminiscing about our past holidays. There was a time when we were able to enjoy our holidays as a family, largely because Jacob still enjoyed things. We didn't force him into a lot of Halloween because he never really enjoyed Halloween. My very first Halloween with them, we got all done up and he was Spider-Man and we went around the neighborhood. We got about five houses down and he was already crying and you know, it was just a lot of attention. Everyone always thinks he's cute anyway, and I don't know if it's because he was cold and cute or... it was just too much, but where he would normally thrive on all the attention, with everyone saying how cute he is, he broke down. It was just too much. I guess by the time we got him back home he just had a snotty face and he was just not enjoying Halloween. With Thanksgiving and Christmas, that always seemed like fun.
Shannon :I always learned a lot about our son during the holidays because of all the different family that we used to have to go see. We went to one of my spouse's aunt's houses she was hosting that year. I learned the types of food that he doesn't like. The biggest thing was he did not like mashed potatoes. They had a huge buffet of food and we put everything on his plate and he was so pissed off that there were these mashed potatoes on his plate. He didn't want anything to do with them. He didn't mind if the foods were touching or anything like that. He just hated the mashed potatoes. I think he didn't like the texture. I remembered that forever and ever and I always told my spouse hey look, don't give him mashed potatoes, because it really did upset him and if you're trying to have a good time, that's the last thing you want to do, right? So we try to just keep it to things that he likes. He likes loud flavors like sour apple and pickles and you know just loud things like that.
Shannon :I tried to carry my holiday traditions from my family into this family, so what we always did was we would have Thanksgiving dinner and then we would have a few cocktails and decorate the tree, and the first couple of years it was just the three of us and our neighbors came over and hung out and we have the cutest little pictures. They actually were pretty good buddies. After that initial scare that he gave her when he barged into their house for no reason. They were really cute hanging out together. She was significantly younger and that's just the way Jacob needs his peers to be either significantly older or significantly younger, not so much into peers his own age. So that was really cute and fun.
Shannon :And during those years there was a thing that we didn't realize, so I want to get this out in case any of you are in this situation. We could not get Jacob's supplemental security disability income because he was found to be qualified for it and he would receive it, and then they would find that his dad made too much money in the business. Even after we got incorporated from a sole proprietorship to an S-Corp, we still couldn't get the money, and it turned out that the accountant we were using had not been accounting for him. So later on we did get a lot of money back. But disability income, which is the federal income, does depend on the parent's income, whether he gets it or not and how much he gets. He was receiving it and then they decided that we made was receiving it, and then they decided that we made too much money and then they decided that he should have to pay the money back. That made Christmas really difficult. We were really happy when we moved into the home that I have been telling you about on all that land, because it was a big kitchen, big enough house to host everybody and it had a good draw. The nature, all that land and all the beauty made everyone in the family want to come up there, and it was about an eight-hour drive, so we were very grateful. We had a ball on our getting ready for our first Thanksgiving in this new house, even though there was some friction with school and we still couldn't figure out what was going on there. We were able to just remove ourselves from the situation and enjoy the holidays with our family.
Shannon :What I really started to notice during these holidays was how well my son knows me, and it made me laugh so hard. Everyone who didn't live with us thought I was crazy and they looked at me like they thought I was I don't know like maybe I needed some medical attention. It was a weird thing and if you have this connection with your child then you probably understand. When they do something or murmur something about you or your behavior, there is kind of an inside thing between the two of you. Everyone outside of it they look at you like you're crazy, right? Anyway, we're all sitting at the table and I had been working with Jacob on some things.
Shannon :One was that he didn't have to eat everything all at once and he didn't have to throw it in the garbage if he didn't eat it all at once. There was something called saving it for later. I could tell that he was not having a good time with his food anymore. He had way more than he should have on his plate as usual on the holidays, everybody does that but I could tell that he was done, but he was still eating, so I kept trying to convince him that if he stopped eating it would be okay and we could save it for later. So I'm like, okay, are you all full? Are you full? Do you want to stop eating? And I can put it away. Save it for later. And that was the only phrase that would get him to do it. I had to go through all the conniptions of all the different words, but save it for later is the phrase that he will lock in on and agree to. And it had gone on for quite a while before he agreed. And we kind of had the attention of the family. While, you know, while they were sitting at the table, everyone was in their own conversations, but they also knew that he and I were having a thing here. And finally he's like, yes, okay. And he starts to kind of remove himself from the table as I start to take his plate and get ready to put it in a dish for later.
Shannon :And he has this way of talking. Well, he used to. He likes to do the movie narration voices where it's like real deep and he'll talk real slow, out of the blue. You hear him say 20 years later I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face and no one understood why that was funny. Well, first, that was really cute. I mean, where did that come from? Right, I've never heard him say that and that was so many words all at once, and I was really just tickled about the whole thing. But it really made me realize what he thinks of me. And he was so right because I was so busy, you know, and I was always just juggling a million different things, and I really think that he felt that way, like, yeah, okay, you'll save it for later, I'll see it in 20 years. Thanks, mom. You know, this is because, like, if he ripped his pants or he popped a button off his pants, then I was gonna, you know, I had every intention of sewing that button back on. It didn't take 20 years, but it, you know, it might take a while. I thought that was hilarious and that was probably my fondest memory of the holidays at our house.
Shannon :I remember that after Thanksgiving dinner, his grandma wanted to have him help her shop, and this is a really unfun way to do it, but this is the way she insists on doing it with everybody. Okay, so her thing is she either wants to take you to the store and ask you what you like and then get that for you right in front of you. Or she likes to have you look through the website or a magazine or something and tell her what you like and what you want and then she'll get it for you. And yes, those are gifts, but you know the kind that get wrapped up and are surprises. She likes to act like they're still surprises. So she sat down with our son at the table and put his iPad to good use. I never even thought about using the iPad to shop. I just used it for his entertainment. So that was cute. But yeah, she sat down with him probably for I don't know, I swear it was a couple of hours and she just had him on. Like GameStop and whatever other online stores, you can look at video games and movies and pick out everything that he wanted. So they had a little special time together. I didn't see any harm in it at the time. Later on I grew to understand that this was an issue, but it was really cute.
Shannon :It didn't last long. We did have a few and he always decorated the tree with me. It was great fun. It drove me absolutely nuts because he would put all the ornaments in one little spot on the tree. You know, I had to praise him and tell him how good it was and try to use the power of positive suggestion to show him that we kind of want them distributed. But he insisted on putting them in this little spot every year so he would go to bed and I would go and change them all around and he didn't seem to mind after that. I was just happy that he was decorating. He would make little ornaments at school and bring those home, so we've always saved those and it was a fun time for a while. As I mentioned in my hindsight episode, there are certain things that seem better when he was younger, and that was one of them. I have a couple things I had been working on with him since the townhouse. Okay, so we were there from when he was younger, and that was one of them. I have a couple things I had been working on with him since the townhouse. Okay, so we were there from when he was about seven years old to 11, eight, nine, 10. Yeah, seven years old to 11 years old.
Shannon :I think during that 10 and 11 year mark I had been trying to teach him to bathe himself a little bit, because my neighbor didn't understand autism at the time, and neither did I. She learned that I had to bathe him. I threw him in the bath every other day, so three times a week or so. I was giving him a bath. I got to do everything. She was like, well, how old is he? You shouldn't be having to bathe him at this age. And I was like, well, you know, it's hard to explain, I guess, but really he doesn't. I don't know if it's that he can't or that he won't, I think it's both. Because he's perfectly able to use his hands, but when you give him something in his hand and ask him to use it to wipe himself or a plate or a window or a table or anything, his hand is like a wet noodle and it's just completely ineffective and it's really annoying.
Shannon :That was one of the reasons that I had to bathe him, because I tried to get him to do it, but he's just so floppy and useless and I just was like I don't have time for this, I need to get this done. I don't want to do this all night, but he was so waxy, by the way, and he still is, so I would always make this brown sugar scrub. It was the only thing I could think of to get this waxiness off of him and his feet always stunk. After I washed him, his feet still stunk. He's just really gross. But he loved the bathing. He loved it. He felt pampered and I would clean his ears out. He was really good. I always made sure my q-tip was warm and wet and squeezed out. He stood really still and he was just so good I could brush his hair and wash his face and wash behind his ears and clean his ears out, cut his nails and everything.
Shannon :And his dad had me trying to cut his nails in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. That was when he was like six and I was terrified and I didn't understand why we had to do this, why, why, when he's sleeping, why do I have to have all the stress of not waking him up during cutting his nails? What in the hell is going on? But it was just his dad. His dad just was terrified that he wasn't going to like it because his dad doesn't like it. So it turns out when I started doing things my way, everything was fine. He didn't mind getting his nails done, you know, and it's just a necessary thing. But he loved everything that I did for him during our spa days and that was three days a week. He just loved it. You could see when I would wash his face as soon as my hand touched his cheek and would start going in a little circle. He would just nestle right into that and close his eyes and smile. You know, he just he loved the whole experience.
Shannon :And then I introduced this brown sugar scrub and it was just, you know, brown sugar and a little bit of oil, and he loves and hates that. I didn't know. You know, with his sensitivities, and you never know how it's going to affect him, right? I told him, I showed him the waxiness on his like, in between his toes and just everywhere. He just had this waxy cheese stuff, I don't know. It was just disgusting. So I couldn't get it off In between his ears and his toes, having all this wax behind him. The rest of him was just dead skin all the time, more and more and more and more. Just regular poofy washing Didn't exfoliate it enough. He just always had this dry skin. So enter the brown sugar.
Shannon :So I would start doing these brown sugar scrubs every week. He really is floored by the sensation and every time I start using brown sugar scrub on him he'll go whoa, his eyes get real big and he starts laughing and it's just. It's actually kind of fun to spa him because he's so reactive, you know. But I did agree with my friend that maybe it would be nice if he would do more for himself. You know, at 10 or 11 years old I don't think that's unreasonable.
Shannon :So we had a clear shower curtain I may have told you this a see-through, clear shower curtain liner. I would close it and I would load up his poofy with soap and then give it to him all sudsed up, close the curtain and stand on the other side of the curtain and kind of do a monkey, see monkey do so. I would raise my left arm and have an imaginary poof in my hand and show him that I want that poof in the armpit and then I would do up and down the arm. It was kind of fun. He was okay at it, but he had fun doing what I was doing in motions, without words. He really enjoyed that. That was how I tried to teach him to bathe himself and this went on for many years.
Shannon :He will not, cannot do it on his own Even right now. If I don't do it or his dad doesn't do it for him, he just doesn't get scrubbed, he'll just sit there and he has all the tools. I bought him a nice big puff with a wooden handle. I mean it's huge and there's just no way you can screw it up. But he won't do it. So it is kind of aggravating.
Shannon :But that was one thing that I had been working on with him. The other thing I had started in the temporary house was yoga and yoga, breathing and water. I had him convinced that water cured headaches. He started saying things like you know, when I took him to the new school and we had to go check in with everybody and meet the teacher and all that stuff, his dad was working and I just ran him in there and we did the thing. And as soon as we pulled up and started to get out of the car, he says oh, I headache. I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, here, drink this water. And I just gave him my water and he never complained again. I was like, wow, that's magic. So then every time he would complain, this was his thing, like during a new transition or a new threshold or you know a new activity, anything getting out of the car and going into another area, things like that he would just, oh, I headache, I headache. I'm like, oh, here you go, have some water. I don't know if he knows what a headache is. I think he does now, but back then I don't even know if he knew, but that's what he would say and that's what I would do and everything worked out fine and he never had a headache after drinking the water. So he became very dependent on water and I just figure maybe it's like a nervous tick or something right With the yoga breathing.
Shannon :He has always loved me working out. I used to work out in his bedroom in the townhouse because he had the only DVD player. He had an Xbox and I used a DVD. So I would go in his room almost every day at night and get these exercises done and he loved it because during the floor work it was abs and the lady at one point in the workout would say something like yeah, baby, right there in those obliques, and she would tap on her obliques and he just thought that was hilarious and he would sit there and wait for the whole workout until she said that and he would go, oh, and he would tap my obliques and he just got so excited about that. So he was very tolerant of me working out in his room and taking up some of his time. It was only a 20 minute workout, but I thought that was really nice of him to allow me to do it.
Shannon :When we lived in the temporary house he was with me like all the time, so every once in a while he would sit with me while I was trying to do some yoga and I thought, well, this is cool, I'm going to put him to work. This is really good for him, because he actually is man. He's kind of a hunchback and I'm really worried about it. We're trying to get it corrected, but he won't do anything to help himself. So at the time I was like let's get him some yoga, and that was probably one of the worst experiences trying to get him involved in yoga. He was very, he's very rigid and he's very like his bones. I started to feel like his bones were just steel, like he's just he's made of metal and he's very hard to move and I tried like hell to get him to, you know, bend over, and I mean he just he can't even touch the ground. He can't touch his toes and he's very thin. He just he doesn't bend. And it was really hard.
Shannon :I really wanted him to do yoga, especially when I saw the way that his body was reacting. It was very resistant and I was really trying hard. But what I got him to do was breathe and that's about the only thing he ended up being able to do and I couldn't work with him anymore. I was so frustrated with him every single time I tried to get him to just bend over. I couldn't get him to do a damn thing. He was just, if you could I don't know how can you be a piece of steel and a wet noodle at the same time, but that's him, if you can picture that. I don't know it. Just you can't do it. I can't. I can't work with him physically, like on, you know, physical education, gym things like that. I just can't do it. But I did get him to breathe.
Shannon :He's a very shallow breather. He doesn't understand what it is he does. He's starting to do it better now, but this has been years. I mean he is about to be 24 and this is when he was 12. I was working on this, you know. So we're always telling him take yoga breaths, take yoga breaths, and he will try, and that's very nice, especially lately with his meltdowns and everything, no matter what, every stressful situation that has come up since I taught him yoga breathing. All I have to say is yoga breath, yoga breathing, yoga breathing, yoga breath, and he will instantly stop and close his eyes. It's funny because he doesn't actually inhale most of the time. He's starting to now, but he will stop and close his eyes and slouch and then raise his head and his eyebrows up and then go back down into a slouch and then raise his head and his eyebrows up and then go back down into a slouch and then he'll go. He'll breathe out like a half a second after a couple of those I don't know whatever, but it works for him. He thinks that that's what you're supposed to do and he thinks that it's supposed to relax you to do it. So at least he's trying.
Shannon :And he would get stressed out at school and I would tell him yoga breath and I put, put that in the notebook how to take care of him. Yoga breath, yoga breath. And everyone was really amazed that this would calm him down because he doesn't actually breathe during the yoga breathing Whatever it takes, kid you know. But also, we had not yet explored medication for him. We really were both against it. Medication for him we really were both against it.
Shannon :We didn't want to introduce pharmaceuticals into his still developing brain and body and we felt that he was too young. And I know a lot of you out there are doing the same thing and I would do it over again the same way. I don't think that we made a mistake on that. It was hard at times, it was very difficult and we did have fights with school, faculty and stuff about it. But I geez, you know, he's really his mental state. He's just, he's really smart, but he's really dense and it just depends, I don't know. But I'm just, I'm glad that he did not have the pharmaceuticals, because there are so many studies that show that they have an ill effect on everything as they're growing up. I mean, you're talking about your body, your organs, everything.
Shannon :We did not want to explore pharmaceuticals for another handful of years, so we were using more holistic methods diet, exercise, breathing techniques. We also started to incorporate whispering. We would bring him out into the woods because we had all that land and get him all camouflaged up, because he's a huge fan of Primetime Bucks, which is a hunting show. He'll watch the DVDs over and over again and he makes the little sounds for the deer and everything. It's really cute. He loves it and that's probably one of his fondest memories from growing up in this house, because everyone's a hunter here and we would take him out into the woods and work on our hunting voices.
Shannon :So now instead of inside voices it's hunting voices, and he understands that he doesn't care about your inside voice. But if you say hunting voices, if he's feeling cooperative, he'll start whispering. He does tend to talk more nonsense in a whisper, so it, you know, kind of defeats the purpose. But at least he's trying to control his volume, which you may already know is very difficult to convey to him. Otherwise he's just super loud. Probably your kid too. You know a lot of them. They just don't have any kind of filter, whether it's attitude, behavior, words or noise level. So he's just a wild card just out there yelling at everybody.
Shannon :So all of those things came in handy during our first couple of holiday get-togethers at our new house. Believe it or not, that's when I started to see like the culmination of my efforts with him and dad's efforts with him, start to show that they actually calm him and I started to understand that, even though he doesn't always go along with the program, with the things we're trying to teach him, and he's not going to think of it on his own most of the time, the biggest benefit to him is that he seems to attach a feeling to these lessons and it's the feeling that gets him through the next hard time. He is actually starting to tell himself when to take yoga breaths now because he knows, like we have just laid down the law, you do it one more time and you're grounded, or something like that. He'll go and sit down and make a big show of it. You know, okay, okay, oh, yoga breath, you know and he'll. I think he's doing it more for show, to show us that he wants us to think that he's trying. But every once in a while you'll watch him and you'll see that it's actually working and he's kind of getting into it and concentrating on his breath and he has learned to breathe a little deeper.
Shannon :After 12 years of us teaching him, I think he feels some sort of almost the same warmth that I feel when I think of my family traditions of having a couple cocktails and decorating the tree, and that takes me back to my grandma's house with my uncle and my mom and all the wonderful smells and the awesome nuts and the nutcrackers and all the you know the high balls that were going, mom, and all the wonderful smells and the awesome nuts and the nutcrackers and all the you know the high balls that were going around and all that stuff. That is a memory for me that's triggered and I think that that effect is the same effect that Jacob gets when he starts to incorporate some of these techniques that we have used with him as a family to help him learn to relax. I really think that, if done under the right circumstances, we can create what they call neural pathways. Usually those are done by writing things down, but you can create like a neural pathway in a sense, I guess, where just the mere suggestion of an activity will have an emotional nervous system effect on him and help. So I think maybe that'll help somebody out there.
Shannon :I think that there's really something to that. For instance, if you're into essential oils, you can know that well, this lavender oil is supposed to help you relax. So I think that I see that you need to relax and I'm going to ask you to smell this lavender oil. Well, that's not necessarily the best way to introduce that calming oil to a person if they're already upset, because when someone is experiencing a feeling or an emotion or an event, then they attach that feeling, that emotion and that event to the very next thing that they encounter. So if you're having a meltdown and in the middle of a meltdown I say, hey, smell this beautiful flower. Well, the next time you smell that beautiful flower, there's a really, really good chance that you're going to feel exactly the way you felt during that meltdown at the time when I had you smell that flower. And now a perfectly good calming object is working against you. It's not going to calm you down, it's going to put you into a tizzy and you may not even understand why, but you're just going to feel sick or you're going to feel whatever it was that you were feeling at the time that you smelled that smell in the first place. The same applies to a calming technique that doesn't have an olfactory sense attached to it. So if I'm like, hey, let's do some yoga breathing right in the middle of a meltdown and that's the first time that he's ever heard of yoga breathing. Well, the next time I ask him to do yoga breathing, I'm basically just asking him to have a meltdown. So I think that if you're careful about how you use your techniques, it can definitely have a good effect, just because of the bond that they may feel they've developed with you during the part where they learned it from you. So hopefully that makes sense. But I think it's a psychological thing there that you can tap into and it helps. We just used the yoga breathing the other day.
Shannon :We've been having some really hard days with him lately and I don't know, I just man, I really I hate to mess with his meds, but I think we're going to have to. There's just something wrong. He's okay today, but he's having more bad days than good and I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it was because there was snow coming and I mean he's so if the wind blows a little too hard, he is just a psycho and very dangerous and I just I think that he could try to control himself a little bit more. I think it's really out of hand. I know he's special, I get it, you know, but a little bit of try. I would love to just see a little bit of try. Just because he's special doesn't mean he can't try to control himself.
Shannon :A lot of this stuff is very intentional. He makes the choice. It's not a blind rage meltdown where he doesn't even know what's going on. A lot of things are just choices and we've been working on that for years and I didn't even think of that. It was a teacher. I learned in school that they were teaching him to make good choices and it was making a difference. It was affecting him. He was understanding that I don't have to act this way. I can make a choice to be angry or to be calm. And that's where I got the idea. I'm like oh, that, wow, I didn't even realize, you know. So just the other day he was man, okay.
Shannon :So just the other day he came down here. He was just going crazy. I mean, these meltdowns are ridiculous and I don't know why they're happening. I'm not sure what's going on, but he came down here and it's been first thing in the morning every day, no matter what time. If he decides to sleep in or if he decides to get up early, it's just right away and he's even been forgetting to bring his water glass down here to get his medicine. I mean, he's just been really off. He's not bringing his water glass down at night, he's not bringing it down in the morning. He is on some kind of weird trip where he just can't even remember how to function. This is a routine.
Shannon :We've been doing this for quite a while and he's not doing it now. It's like it's throwing him off and he's blaming us. Like he'll come down here without his water glass and we're as nice as pie. Oh, you almost forgot your water glass for medicine. You got to say it 20 times before you can even get him to understand that he needs to do it, and then you have to actually order him to do it because he still won't respond.
Shannon :This is all being nice. We're just we're faking it. He's faking being nice to us and we're faking being nice to him and we're trying like hell to keep him happy. We're just trying to mirror what he's giving us but be more positive about it. Then, all of a sudden, the next time we see him, after we ordered him to bring his water down here, he comes down, he's cool, and then he goes away and then he comes back and he's just psycho. This is what's been happening and just the other day I was so proud of him. After the fact, you know, it's just a whirlwind of crap.
Shannon :But he comes down here, he's flapping and flapping and flapping, and doing all the stuff and yelling and using this death voice and making ugly faces in the mirror, even though he's cleanly shaven, which usually the clean shave keeps him cute and nice. I don't know what's going on, but he's just coming down here and being evil and he starts in and you can see the meltdown is almost fully underway. He runs away and he comes back down and he just wouldn't calm down. He didn't give his medicine a chance to work and he hasn't been giving it a chance and he knows the drill, he knows how it works and he just won't calm down. So I tell him to bring his water down and let me give him some new medicine, and that's the cannabis medicine.
Shannon :And he came down here and I heard a really weird sound, one that I've never heard, as he was coming in and I just attributed it to his running meltdown. I didn't think much of it because there were so many more things to think about. I went upstairs and took a shower and I came back and noticed that there's a big puddle of water on the floor in my hallway and I mentioned it to his dad and we decided, oh, it must be from when he came down here and there was that weird noise and he had a full glass of water and he did seem a little skitzed out about his entry in, so maybe that was it. Before I even had my hair fully brushed, he came down here and he was fine, he was all medicated and he tried to like be around us for a minute and we tried to ask him a question and he said, oh, da, da, da, da, da, okay. And basically he was saying he'll be right back, he's going upstairs, okay. And we said okay.
Shannon :So he came back right away with a paper towel and I wasn't even paying attention to him. I was in the other room and he came in and he's like I got this. I got this, you know, and it was a wet paper towel. I was like where'd you get that? He just was like and I was like oh, I knew, I knew he cleaned up the puddle that he knew he made and we hadn't even said anything to him at all about it. He wasn't in the room when I mentioned it to his dad a few minutes beforehand, so I was so impressed.
Shannon :I mean, that's how things stick with him. If he takes a nap, you have to remove his shoes and his clothes from his bedroom or he won't be able to rest. And don't leave them in there overnight for damn sure, because he won't sleep all night. He left some underwear in the bathroom a few weeks ago and he didn't. He hardly slept all night and he was so worried about the underwear, you know. So he's just like that and he'll obsess over it. He had that water thing. It bothered him enough to where, after he had the medicine and he did his own yoga breathing, which I just told you about that was the other day. He initiated that on his own. He waited until he felt better. The very first thing he did was come and clean up that puddle that he knew he made. Man. I was so proud of him. I thought that was awesome. That's my new. I'm thankful for that. This week, thanksgiving is just in a couple days. By the time you hear this episode, I think Thanksgiving's going to be tomorrow. So if there's anything cute that's happening, try to hang on to it and make it your. I'm thankful for this thing.
Shannon :In my next episode I'm going to continue the story about what happened during that first year of school. I do want to just give you a quick preview. All that showering himself and monkey see monkey do and teaching him to be more self-reliant, and all of that jazz just went out the window because he ended up being so unhappy during the time that we were trying to figure out what was going on with the school that I actually just started bathing him as a courtesy to give him some sort of pampering and good feelings. It was the only thing I knew that he still would respond positively to, and I knew that he felt pampered and he felt special and just the way that he would love it when I would touch his little cheek and all that stuff, and I knew that that put him in a certain state of just bliss. I bathed him, I think four to five times a week at that point because his life was just so hard and I didn't know what else could make him feel good. So I just gave up on the whole bathe yourself thing because the school was just. It was just. Everything was terrible. So more on that in the next episode.
Shannon :I'm wrapping up the questions. If you get them in by Friday by Black Friday, I suppose, is the date If you get your questions into the email, contactparentingsevereautism at gmailcom, these are questions for dad. That's the deadline. I'll be running that interview with his dad pretty soon. I've been wondering how everyone is doing out there with the holidays.
Shannon :Holiday time was always hard for me, even before all everything I just told you. You know, the no school part really screwed everything up for me because he had I think it's the echolalia. I just couldn't stand it. I hadn't been around kids that much in like forever, ever, probably ever in my life. And now I have this kid every day who, at seven, eight, nine years old, is running around just babbling bullshit all day long, I mean nonstop, you know, and I want him to exercise his voice, I want to see if something good will come of it. But damn, oh geez. You know it's rough. And that was before he was visibly affected by the change in routine. He seemed to be a lot more flexible when he was younger but you know, thank God he wasn't experiencing more distress from not going to school, on top of the echolalia and everything that he is.
Shannon :Naturally, I just I was having a really hard time with that. I never felt like I ever got a break or a chance to relax or anything. I hope you have a place where you can go and take a few breaths. You know it's almost over. I mean not really. You still got another month until you know Christmas and New Year's, but then after that you know you're done until spring break. So, man, stand your ground when you have to. During this time you hang in there. You're a superhero.