Lining Up Toys

One of the things I kept dismissing the past few months in thinking about any of the early indicators of autism with Rosie was this thing about kids playing with their toys by lining them up instead of using them as the manufacturers intended. I don't remember her doing that (though I remember it in my brother!) and so I figured it was one of those things she didn't ever manifest. After all, she plays imaginatively with toys, incorporating them into little stories. (Though it was always really hard, if sometimes downright impossible, to get her out of her imaginary world before age 6 or so.)

We were looking at the family picture album, though, and I saw that she did line toys up to some extent, more than I thought, though I don't know what would be considered a "typical" amount of lining up. We gave her stickers a few times when she was little, until we learned what she would invariably do with them. She would always line stickers up on her legs, the carpet, or the furniture or walls, and that was that. Trying to get her to create scenes with them or put them into a book or otherwise preserve them was pointless. We couldn't get her to understand where appropriate places for stickers would be. She didn't care about whether they were pretty or interesting at all. I remember that being a bit puzzling, since her older sister always wanted to save the pretty stickers when she was that age. Somehow, I identified that disinterest in keeping stickers with how Rosie always let helium balloons go instead of trying to keep them.

Likewise, I also noticed/remembered in the family pictures that Legos were generally geometric arrangements for Rosie, not representations of buildings or animals or whatever, until age 6 or so. But that makes at lot of sense, doesn't it? Legos lend themselves to geometric arrangement, especially symmetric arrangement. Do "neurotypical" kids always, always create "things" out of Legos instead of arranging them aesthetically? Rosie creates "things" out of Legos nowdays, though I do notice some "perseveration" - really extensive airports with a dozen or more airplanes and long runways, fleets of ships and boats that make their way into drawings and chants and poetry.

When I notice myself starting to use "quote marks" a lot, I think it's a hint that I'm starting to wonder... what's so darn unusual about this way of thinking, anyway? Er, it's just all that engineering and accounting blood in our family.

Sensory issues

I'd thought that Rosie didn't have many sensory issues, but a recent spate of them has proven that thought wrong. Before a holiday gathering at someone's house, she grew very agitated, worried about the crowd of people, the family's dogs, and obsessed with the idea that no one would want to play with her. She found the car seat too hard, her shoes too tight, and her fur-lined sweatshirt jacket unwearable because of the hard plastic zipper. She couldn't wear her jeans and had to switch to sweatpants; the tags in her underthings were too scratchy. We could not wash her face at all and the light was too bright. We ended up not going. On Christmas day, overwhelmed by guests and noise, she finally withdrew and sat on the couch hypnotically rubbing a soft piece of foam across her nose and cheeks. Which looked soothing even to me, actually. She tried to use the foam to settle her young cousin down by rubbing it on his face, but he wasn't having any of it.

I have to consider whether it's holiday excitement overall that is raising her level of sensitivity (on just about everything, not just sensory issues) but I find myself wondering if she is, as her grandmother asked us, "getting worse." It certainly seems as though last year we didn't encounter these things - or perhaps if we did, I dismissed them as overexcitement and whinyness in a somewhat high-strung kid. I think that school is much more stressful for her this year than last, though, even without the bullying, and perhaps it can contribute to her overall tension even during the holiday break.

On the up side, relatives are encouraging her interests, and she got an avalanche of science-related gifts for Christmas. She's in absolute nirvana, growing tadpole shrimp in a tank (though she had to read the directions to be convinced that they were not, in fact, sea monsters per the box), looking at blood cells and live bacteria under her new microscope, taking digital time-lapse photos of the cat, putting together electrical circuits to light a bulb. She even steeled herself to play Operation despite the horrible buzzer, once she realized that it was an electrical circuit that closed the buzzer connection.

Routines and resources

Well, the school assessment is still dragging on, so it'll probably be January before there's anything recommended or concluded. In the meantime Rosie plays by herself at recess: "As usual," she says when asked. She feels a little lonely throughout the day, she adds. Sometimes she tells me that she plays with one of the kindergarten children who is her friend, but I'm not sure if this is imaginary or not.

There was a garbled tale of the school psychologist getting her to destroy her imaginary friends in some therapy session, so I've been trying to get hold of him to hear what this means. If it's true, I'll be pretty damn ticked off. She's quite clear on her imaginary friends being imaginary and if it helps her get through the day, good for her. It's adaptive.

We've worked a massage into the going-to-bed routine, which seems to help settle her down for the night. "Ow," she said tonight. "Don't press too hard over my radius."

"Your what?" I asked.

"Radius," she said. "The smaller bone in the arm."

"Yes, OK," I said. "Are you memorizing all the bones?"

"Yes," she giggled.

"Good for you," I said.

"Make sure my blanket covers my femurs," Rosie said.

"Oh, your femurs are well-covered," I said. "I'm just trying to tuck in your phalanges."

Much laughter.

A few days ago, someone uploaded a rather great talk by Temple Grandin to YouTube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bgEAhMEgGOQ Highly recommend it!

Support meeting

Well, I attended an asperger's/HFA/PDD support group meeting this evening, which I didn't really get much out of. I was hoping for something a bit more proactive and informative - I'm not really looking for a group of parents sitting around objectifying their children and comparing behavioral notes. I mean, there's a thread of interest in hearing how other kids are manifesting their differences, but I was a bit shocked at how some of the parents view their own kids, or view people on the spectrum. "Those people," they were saying, talking about their own kids - not to mention the adults around them - as though they belonged to some other species with absolutely incomprehensible thoughts and motivations and emotions. It was totally weird and really offputting. I wanted to shake one or two of them.

But then, I think it's possibly a result of the dilemma in which I find myself. I don't particularly want the school district's assessment of Rose, or their "help." The problem is that the condition of thinking differently in this way is medically diagnosable. Sometimes it's caused by, or related to, things that 'go wrong.' So, other than the potential medical complications, why does it need to be quantified and treated in order to be accepted, to deal with it? Why (in an idealized world) can't people just note that So-and-so has these particular cognitive traits, which explain certain behavioral differences and certain strengths and weaknesses, and move along?

I don't know that I'm being particularly coherent, or logical. Mostly I'm shocked at seeing how some parents distance themselves from their kids on the spectrum. I mean, many of Rose's traits look a lot like mine, somewhat enlarged. I have several relatives who also have these traits, even more so, actually. Have these parents never looked at themselves? Or do they feel it's too stigmatizing? That just makes me mad.