Mar

18

Featured Tuesday Blogger

Posted by preciouschild

March 18, 2008 |

What is your name and where do you live?

Babs Mountjoy, aka awalkabout, and we live in northwest Pennsylvania.

Your website?

Awalkabout’s Weblog

Your kids’ names, ages, and disabilities?

Captain Oblivious, 12, dxed with Asperger’s Syndrome, Little Miss, 8, classic autism and sensory integration disorder, and Ditto Boy, 9, ADD, these are still at home. I also have four older daughters who are all grown up.

Do you blog about their issues? What do you personally get out of that?
I blog about an assortment of topics, because I still think of myself as more than just a mother of autism. But I do blog about the kid issues a couple of times a week, to help keep my head on straight and share with other parents who are going through the same thing, so we all realize we’re not nuts. I try to provide suggestions or advice on issues I’ve encountered, and we’ve been blessed to receive suggestions both from parents of kids with autism as well as adult Aspies, who can explain WHY things are happening the way they are.

What does a “typical” day consist of for you and your family?

Either my husband or I get up and send the troops to school with their bookbags and lunches packed; Dad heads for a tech school in Erie where he teaches, and I go to my office to see clients/attend court. The kids come home, two on the “special bus,” and we do homework, which is sometimes a drawn out process, especially for Little Miss. Often by the time she comes home, she’s overloaded from school input and has to play outside for awhile first to revamp. Then dinner and baths, bed, etc. We’re currently without therapies by choice, preferring to work on issues ourselves with the tools we already have.

How have their disabilities affected the children specifically? And the family as a whole?

Captain Oblivious is just that; superlatively self-focused and will talk about his own interest and thoughts constantly, as is true of many Aspies. Very little in the way of good social skills. He hasn’t developed the intense interest in a particular subject many Aspies have, though, which makes it difficult to do as his neurologist recommended, i.e., push him in that direction and find him a career there.

Little Miss was quite impaired for the first several years, no speech, no eye contact. We really worried for a long time. She still struggles with language all the time, and is at least a year behind in her school work because she can’t explain herself like other kids.

itto Boy, like his dad, both benefit from ADD meds to get through their classroom days.
The impact on the family has been primarily to cause us to become hermits, even after the time consuming therapies have ended. If we pull through the day with no meltdowns and all tasks achieved, we consider it a good day. If Little Miss reveals a little more emotion or the fact she can now tell a joke and know why it’s funny — it’s the best day ever!

How have their disabilities affected you as a person and as a mother?

I’ve been a mom now since 1978. In thirty years of having children at home, having special needs kids hasn’t knocked me down as much as I would have suspected back when I started. What I always was heard is true: your occasions’ change. Perhaps we’re not celebrating our son scoring the highest number of baskets at the school game, but just the fact he got invited to his first birthday party, or a phone call from a classmate. We watch Little Miss sing and play the piano—at the same time. Or like I said on the blog, the day my daughter kicked a boy in the crotch. It was a triumph. Really.

What did you do right? What do you wish you had done differently?

What we did right? Insisted on the label. We got so many services and bits of therapeutic, financial and educational help that improved things. We hooked up with the right therapist, who insisted on the ABLLS test I’d been requesting for several years and no one would do. She pushed Little Miss with RDI techniques through language development and growth of empathy/emotion/theory of mind and helped us realize that we could discipline the others with the natural consequences they’ll encounter in real life.

What do we wish was different? We’d like to see the kids have outside friends and activities. It protects them from bullies to some extent, and allows us much more control. But it does create an artificial social arrangement.

What do you want other parents fighting the same fight to know?

You’ll survive. Autism is a scary word, but in all honesty there are worse ones; children who die from all sorts of diseases. Autism means your children approach our world differently. We just need to learn to interface through therapy, play, school, medical interventions, depending on the child’s needs. Give them the tools they need so they can communicate and understand; but I’m not one of those who insist on a cure. Our children have various gifts and instincts that might well be changed if they no longer had autism—I don’t want to lose those. Help is available if you know where to look, sometimes in the blogs of other parents.

Anything you else you wish to share?

Please PLEASE, when you’re dealing with this, don’t let the disability consume you. Take time for yourself, develop interests that feed you and give you positive strokes. And laugh. A lot.

Thank you, Babs, so much for doing this.  Please go visit her today!


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. cerebral therapy on June 8, 2008 3:05 pm

    cerebral therapy…

    The 10 people who were exposed to solvents but had no CSE symptomsshowed similar reductions but to a lesser extent. Both groups showedreduced levels of choline (which plays a role in neurotransmission) in thefrontal grey matter of the brain….

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