Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property wtfplugin_1_0::$package_slug is deprecated in /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-content/plugins/divi-booster/core/wtfplugin_1_0.class.php on line 23

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property Fullworks_Anti_Spam\Control\Core::$freemius is deprecated in /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-content/plugins/fullworks-anti-spam/control/class-core.php on line 64

Deprecated: Optional parameter $post_types declared before required parameter $location is implicitly treated as a required parameter in /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-content/plugins/monarch/monarch.php on line 3783

Deprecated: Optional parameter $content declared before required parameter $function_name is implicitly treated as a required parameter in /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-content/plugins/divi-paypal-master/includes/modules/PaypalButton/PaypalButton.php on line 428

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property ET_Builder_Module_Paypal_Button::$fields_defaults is deprecated in /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-content/themes/Divi/includes/builder/class-et-builder-element.php on line 1403

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-content/plugins/divi-booster/core/wtfplugin_1_0.class.php:23) in /home/thevir17/public_html/hopeinautism.com/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php on line 8
Autism Archives - Hope in Autism https://hopeinautism.com/understanding/autism/ Disablility. Jesus. Hope. Fri, 23 Dec 2022 21:15:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.4 E1 All About Autism and Hope: An Interview with Samuel Broady https://hopeinautism.com/e1-all-about-autism-and-hope-an-interview-with-samuel-broady/ https://hopeinautism.com/e1-all-about-autism-and-hope-an-interview-with-samuel-broady/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2019 03:00:05 +0000 http://hopeinautism.com/?p=30005 The post E1 All About Autism and Hope: An Interview with Samuel Broady appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>

Episode 1

All About Autism & Hope: An Interview with Samuel Broady

A Special Hope kicks off with a very special guest: Samuel Broady. I had the pleasure of interviewing my own son for Episode 1 of this podcast. Sam talks about what it’s like having autism, what he hopes for his future, his faith, trying not to break the TV, and (bonus content!) how to make stovetop popcorn with even more foodie bonus content to follow.

 

All About Autism & Hope: An Interview with Samuel Broady

by Sarah Broady | A Special Hope

Hosts & Guests

Sarah Broady

Samuel Broady

Credits

Producer & Editor: Sarah Broady

Music:
Benjamin Broady

Logo Design:
Tammy Lanham

Stay Connected to Get The Latest Podcast Alerts

The post E1 All About Autism and Hope: An Interview with Samuel Broady appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
https://hopeinautism.com/e1-all-about-autism-and-hope-an-interview-with-samuel-broady/feed/ 1681
The Special-Needs Scrim https://hopeinautism.com/the-special-needs-scrim/ https://hopeinautism.com/the-special-needs-scrim/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2015 23:58:39 +0000 http://hopeinautism.com/?p=520 The sanctuary was dark. The air was thick with grief, tension, and anticipation of what we all knew was coming next. But nothing prepared me for what my eyes were about to behold. I was watching our church’s Easter pageant from the middle of the large auditorium. We had just witnessed the Passion of Jesus […]

The post The Special-Needs Scrim appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
scrimThe sanctuary was dark. The air was thick with grief, tension, and anticipation of what we all knew was coming next. But nothing prepared me for what my eyes were about to behold. I was watching our church’s Easter pageant from the middle of the large auditorium. We had just witnessed the Passion of Jesus as He had been tortured and crucified. The scene was dark, the people quiet. Suddenly, a bright light shone from the stage, illuminating a massive wall of angels from the ground to the ceiling, lined across the entire width of the stage. They were all wearing white and singing with choreography. I couldn’t help but cry at the sight. It was beautiful. But I wondered, how did they do that?!

The secret? A scrim. The image above shows a crucifixion scene set up behind the scrim that is only visible to the audience when lit from behind. If the light behind the scrim was not on, all you would see is the Roman soldier in the blue light, lit by a spotlight in front of the scrim.

Read more about the scrim of disability and the work God is doing behind the scenes at my writing home today, Special Needs Parenting.

How do you see God at work in the heart of your child with disability?

The post The Special-Needs Scrim appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
https://hopeinautism.com/the-special-needs-scrim/feed/ 80
When God Provides https://hopeinautism.com/when-god-provides/ https://hopeinautism.com/when-god-provides/#comments Sat, 31 May 2014 02:55:24 +0000 http://hopeinautism.com/?p=311 “He will not leave you alone.”This is true. We see over and over in Scripture how God provides for every aspect of His creation, from the number of hairs on our head to every sparrow that falls from the sky, to the lilies of the field. Friends, we serve a great and mighty Creator God […]

The post When God Provides appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
“He will not leave you alone.”This is true. We see over and over in Scripture how God provides for every aspect of His creation, from the number of hairs on our head to every sparrow that falls from the sky, to the lilies of the field. Friends, we serve a great and mighty Creator God who cares about His creation. “Cast your burden upon the Lord for He cares for you.” This means that he cares about your child. He cares about their wants and desires. He cares about their needs as it pertains to their daily sustenance as well as their disability…

Read more at my writing home for today at Not Alone Special Needs Parenting.

The post When God Provides appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
https://hopeinautism.com/when-god-provides/feed/ 168
Sense, That Total Makes https://hopeinautism.com/sense-that-makes-total/ https://hopeinautism.com/sense-that-makes-total/#comments Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:59:25 +0000 http://hopeinautism.com/?p=179 Today is THE day. The day that we have been waiting for since November 22, 2013 when the much anticipated movie “Frozen” debuted in theaters. We were visiting family for Thanksgiving and the boys’ grandparents took us all out to see it. (There seems to always be a new movie to see whenever we visit […]

The post Sense, That Total Makes appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
Frozen movie

Today is THE day. The day that we have been waiting for since November 22, 2013 when the much anticipated movie “Frozen” debuted in theaters. We were visiting family for Thanksgiving and the boys’ grandparents took us all out to see it. (There seems to always be a new movie to see whenever we visit together. Sorry Mimi and PaPaw. It’s not like we plan it that way…) Suffice to say, the movie lived up to its hype. Grown adults were laughing and crying. Okay, only the women were crying, but everyone was laughing. My youngest, unaware that this was a musical, kept saying, “What’s with the SINGING?!” Samuel was mesmerized. He kept asking questions. LOTS of questions. I just tried to answer them quietly and encourage him to be quiet or whisper.

Immediately following the movie, Sam asked when he could get it on DVD. I don’t remember when we found out the release date, but when we did, it was at least more than a month away. March 18th was THE date. He looked it up on a calendar and saw it was on a Tuesday. He reminded us it was coming out March 18th. Every day. “‘Frozen’ comes out on March 18th, Mom! Don’t forget! Can we get it on DVD? We can get it on March 18th.” And so March 18th was indelibly written in every crevice of my mind. You cannot imagine the excitement of this child just before he left for school, and as he ran home from the bus stop. Well, you probably can. Think of a cross between an exuberant child who cannot sleep on Christmas Eve mixed with that of a child who was just told his parents were taking him to Disney World, and throw in the thrill of a kid discovering a basket filled with candy on Easter morning. Whatever you’re thinking, you’re probably right. Knowing just how very important this was to him, and being the incredibly awesome mom that I am, I had pre-ordered the movie on Amazon. You better believe I checked and double-checked the tracking on that package! True to their word to deliver by 8pm on the date of the DVD release, we received the movie in plenty of time. I was just happy it came before he got home from school.

Sam’s fascinations with movies and the characters does not just border on obsessive. He crossed the border, naturalized, and built a house in Obsession Land. He watches the same movie repeatedly. By that, I mean that when the movie credits are over (which he watches until the very last credit disappears lest he miss anything,) he presses play again. After watching the movie a couple of times, he then likes to go to the menu, choose a scene, and re-watch that scene repeatedly. As he does so, he asks a lot of questions about it. Why did Lightning McQueen have mud on his hood? Why did Mater laugh when Sally said…? Why is Darth Vader breathing like that? Is he evil? Why is he evil? What is a fjord? Why is fjord spelled with an “j” when that’s not how you say it? Why did Elsa do that? Can you make your hair look like Elsa’s? And on, and on, and on they go. Through every scene.

His obsession does not stop with just watching the movie either. That would be too simple. He has the memory of an elephant and remembers every line, which he scripts. Constantly. And then begs us to act it out with him, songs and all. He remembers the music. To give you an idea of the kind of memory he has: we first saw the movie in November. In January, we bought him the full soundtrack. It had every piece of music you heard in the movie, orchestral music and all. The very first time he listened to the soundtrack, he was able to tell me exactly what was happening in the movie during any particular point in the music. Even the orchestral music. (That was the most impressive part.) The music was not in order of how it was played in the movie, either. Did I mention he’d only seen the movie ONCE?! Two months ago?! That is a gift.

Today was the first day he had the actual movie in his possession and no longer needed to rely on YouTube videos to watch various scenes. He had therapy, so he was able to work for time to continue watching. We made it through to the end of the movie by the end of therapy. After dinner, they all watched the bonus features. He was a bit perturbed, though, because our DVD player quit reading discs a few nights ago. Kyle brought up the one from downstairs that had been given to us – without the remote. When you don’t have the remote, you can’t go into the menu to choose certain scenes to watch… and then re-watch. He was in tears about it. I did not understand that. Why can’t he just watch the movie all the way through?

Sam Frozen

Sam watching Frozen for the first time at home, wearing his new Olaf shirt that says, “Some People Are Worth Melting For.”

And then it dawned on me. As I thought about all the questions he asked, getting up and pressing pause on the DVD player to ask his questions, much to the chagrin of his brothers, I remembered something else. I had read about another boy with autism who was also obsessed with Disney movies.

The boy in the story also kept rewinding scenes to watch them repeatedly. The question on every autism parent (and sibling’s) mind who’s child does this is, “Why do you do that?” The reason is because people with autism do not process things like most people. When I watch a movie, I can hear the dialogue, understand inflections, facial expressions, mood, emotion, body language, etc; all while also noticing the pretty flower in the background, remembering what just happened and why that’s important in this scene. One of the questions I remember being asked when Sam was being diagnosed was, “Does he tend to notice parts of the whole?” For instance, if he were playing with a car, did he only spin the wheels instead of using the whole car as it was intended to be used? The reason behind that is because he can only focus on one thing at a time. The wheels are the most noticeable part of a car – they move. The color and shape are completely insignificant. When reading a book, he focused on one part of the colored cardboard page and did not understand the story as a whole illustrated on that page.

Transfer all of that to watching movies. Movies are not stagnant, like books or toys. With a book or any concrete object, you can hold it close, pull it far away from you, and you can look at it from every angle. It won’t go anywhere, unless you lob it across the room. But not so with movies. Scenes change within seconds of each other. Depending on the scene, the background might be the same, or it might change – like during a song where there’s lots of movement. Typical brains are able to process all of that information at once and just as fast as the movie moves. Not the autistic brain. The autistic brain needs to process everything too, but it can’t keep up with that kind of pace. The autistic brain needs to press pause and take it all in. Examine it all from every angle. Ask questions. LOTS of questions. Sam doesn’t understand why some jokes are funny, so when everyone in the theater laughs, he doesn’t get it and it’s very frustrating. Then he talks loudly to talk over all the laughter and ask me why is everyone laughing? He needs to understand what’s happening in the movie at every point. He needs to understand the jokes and the dialogue. That’s why his favorite feature on a DVD is the main menu. It’s like a “choose your own adventure.” He can go to any scene he wants, pause it at any point, and ask all the questions he has about it. He doesn’t just watch movies. He dissects them. When he has dissected the movie to the fullest extent, fully understanding every last bit of it, he’s done with it.

A light bulb went off as I pieced all these things together. He obsessed over Cars, and then Cars 2. For years. Every time he watched the movie, he was always watching the different scenes, one by one. Watching and then skipping back to watch them again. And then one day, he announced that he was done with Cars. He didn’t watch the movie. He wouldn’t play with the toys anymore. No more reading books or printing out coloring pages. He moved on to obsess over Star Wars. That one was a little different because we only had the VHS tapes and no DVD’s. He watched every single Star Wars tape and struggled through fast forwarding and rewinding the parts he wanted to watch more. He didn’t really watch the movies all that much, but when a friend at church lent him a large Star Wars Trivia book of several hundred questions, he was able to answer them. Correctly. And then one day, he was done with Star Wars too. He did the same thing with Despicable Me… both of them.

I realized that the reason he stopped cold turkey was that he had gotten all he could out of whichever movie(s) he had previously studied. I can watch the same movie a couple times in a row, but really by the third time, I’m done. But if I couldn’t process the movie as a whole until I processed each individual component, it really would take a very long time, requiring many viewings of the same thing. So if you think about it, that makes total sense! (Aaaaand there’s the link to the awkward title of this post.)

Watching him jump up to hit the pause button as he watched “Frozen” for the first time at home triggered all these past musings over why in the world he does what he does. Looking back and understanding the cycle that he gets into with movies, I have hope that we will not forever be stuck in “Frozen.” There will be a day when Samuel finally does “Let It Go.” (You had to know that one was coming!) So in the meantime, I can have a little more sanity and peace as he begins the process of picking apart this movie until he understands every piece of it in its totality. Sure, I might break out into song in my sleep. Or in the middle of the grocery store. But that’s okay, because “For the First Time in Forever,” I’ll finally understand one more piece of the autism puzzle in my son. Besides, it’s not like he’s the only one who does things differently. After all, (sly grin,) aren’t we all “a bit of a fixer-upper?” 🙂

Keeping Calm and Letting It Go,

Sarah Broady

 

(Please note: The reference to “Fixer-upper” is a joke that should not be taken as a serious, or any kind of offense against people with autism. We all do things differently according to our needs. I don’t think Sam needs to be “fixed.” That’s the point of this whole post. He does things the way he needs to do things, and within reasonable boundaries, those things are just fine with me. It’s kind of cool to feel like I better understand him and am therefore better able to anticipate his needs. When you understand something, it’s much easier to accept it and treat it with more grace and compassion than you would if it didn’t make any sense at all. Relax, and laugh a little.)

 

The post Sense, That Total Makes appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
https://hopeinautism.com/sense-that-makes-total/feed/ 72
Remembering From Whence We Came https://hopeinautism.com/remembering-from-whence-we-came/ https://hopeinautism.com/remembering-from-whence-we-came/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:40:00 +0000 http://hopeinautism.com/?p=36 Taking time to remember… Today is World Autism Awareness Day. It is only the 3rd health issue to receive its own day of recognition that was unanimously voted on by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007. Nationwide, city buildings and private residences will be “Lighting it up Blue” in honor of those affected by autism and to […]

The post Remembering From Whence We Came appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
Taking time to remember…

Today is World Autism Awareness Day. It is only the 3rd health issue to receive its own day of recognition that was unanimously voted on by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007. Nationwide, city buildings and private residences will be “Lighting it up Blue” in honor of those affected by autism and to raise awareness of what is now known as a national epidemic in the US with 1 in 88 children diagnosed with autism. 1 in 54 boys are diagnosed, and 4 times more likely than girls to be diagnosed. When girls are diagnosed, their diagnosis is usually more severe than that of boys. Learn more about autism – early signs, symptoms, it’s effects on functioning and skills and treatments here.

Sam baby

Today I want to take a little time for myself and remember. Remembering 6 years ago when all I knew was the sweet love for my precious newborn boy. I remember when disability was nowhere near being a part of our world. We were simply very proud parents of 2 incredible kids. I remember recovering from my C-section because Sam was a few weeks early, breech, labor wasn’t stopping and it was too late to try to turn him around. Once home, I laid on the couch holding his warm, tiny body and we’d stare into each other’s eyes. Kyle and I used to say his eyes pierced our souls. It was as if his eyes were telling a story, full of beauty and mystery mixed with colors of stone grey and blue, drawing me in to search deeper for answers to the sebaby Samcrets only he knew.

I remember how he giggled and laughed and squealed when he was happy and discovering new things for the first time. I remember helping him sit up and stay sitting, which gave way to crawling because sitting still was just too boring. He was a little late in walking, but finally met his milestone barely on time at 15 months. He was non-verbal, though I remember him saying both “Mama” and “Dada” at least once, but then never again. The pediatrician said it was common for toddlers to “master” a word by using it once, and then not using it again for a while. But Sam never had any other language… except screaming.

Ah, the screaming. I like to describe it as velociraptor (think Jurassic Park – the cute little guy in the forest, but who then lets out an ear-piercing dinosaur screech before devouring its prey) mixed with a screech-owl. It was how he cried all the time. He didn’t really have varying degrees of crying like most babies do to differentiate between hunger, need for a diaper change, being uncomfortable or hurt. It was always the same fingers-on-a-chalkboard scream for everything.

I remember how horribly upset he would become at the slightest infraction. If one of his perfectly lined-up toys fell over, or was moved by a second party, his world was upended. He would scream, and the most frightening part of his tantrums was his head-banging. He would run to the front door, or get down on all fours and slam his head repeatedly against the hard floor surface.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

He didn’t seem to be affected by the pain until later. Eventually, I think he realized the wooden door, hardwood floors and ceramic tile kitchen floor actually hurt, so he changed to banging his head against the sofa cushion instead. If the sofa cushion wasn’t readily available, he began using his hands and beating them against his head. It was one of the most painful things as a mother to watch my son purposefully hurting himself.

I remember his incredibly picky eating and extremely limited diet and both the pediatrician and nutritionist said that despite the saying that kids will eat before starving themselves, Samuel was so severely impacted that he truly would starve himself and end up in the hospital from his refusal to eat. We had no choice but to give him whatever he wanted whenever he wanted just to get calories in his body. He still drinks only chocolate milk because he refused regular non-flavored milk for the past 5 years.

I remember coming to my absolute end one day when he was in his high chair refusing my peanut butter sandwich and wanting goldfish instead. I was trying to get him to take a bit of sandwich, then reward him with a cracker. But he began screaming incessantly, wailing on himself with both hands and throwing himself from side to side. In tears, I called the only person I knew who could help, my friend Amy Bruscato whom I knew worked with special needs kids. I didn’t know exactly what she could do, but I figured that of all people, she would know what to do. I cried to her telling her what was happening, fearful of what I might possibly do to my son out of such desperation. She had just had her first baby, but she told me to hold tight and leave him in his high chair if he was safe and she raced over as soon as she could. She sat with him, patiently talking with him, teaching him signs for cracker, please, and more as I watched in awe, and he actually used the signs to communicate instead of screaming.

I remember going through a hearing and speech test at Children’s Mercy Hospital. I remember praying that my son was deaf during the hearing screening that would be causing his delay in speech and non-responsiveness. I thought I could handle learning sign language. I couldn’t handle some kind of neurodevelopmental disorder… or so I thought. I remember learning that at 18 months of age, Sam was at a 50% delay in speech – which means he was operating on the level of a 9 month old.

I remember beginning speech and behavior therapy 6 hours a week and having our lives invaded with words like ABA, manding, signing, stimming, echolalia and more terms that all meant something was wrong with my son. But I also remember – fondly – the sweet Christ-like spirit of our therapists, my friend Amy and her speech therapist friend, Shannon. They were so patient with Sam. They seemed to really love him, and something I had a hard time doing – enjoy him. They taught me how to do that. They listened with compassion when it was too much for me and let me cry. They encouraged me like cheerleaders through holding Sam during terrible tantrums when he tried to hurt me as tears ran down my cheeks. When they praised Sam for his progress, they also praised me. We were learning. We were growing. Sam’s language grew; my enjoyment of him grew.

I remember 5 months after beginning therapy when we received the official diagnosis of autism – moderate/severe borderline. I sat across from the psychologist who made this determination after just two hours of testing and grading, numb to her words. I remember asking what to do now, as I would ask a doctor upon diagnosis of an illness, expecting an answer. She had none, except to say, “Keep doing what you’re doing now in therapy. Good luck to you.”

I remember my husband and I clinging to each other in tears over the cataclysmic change that had just taken place in our lives against our wills. I remember my mom reciting Jeremiah 29:11 to me, that God had a plan for our son, to give him a future and a hope. That he was created just as he was, in the image of God, and that everything would be okay.

I remember a thousand things about the life of my Samuel James thus far, both positive and negative. I don’t think I should choose only to remember the good things, because it’s in remembering all the challenges and seemingly impossible trials we thought we could never overcome that we’re reminded “from whence we came”, and how far we’ve come together. I never thought he would be able to talk in regular conversation with anyone, or know how to express love and emotion (especially appropriately), or read or write, or have friends. Yet he has accomplished all of these things and MORE! God has been so good to our son and to our family. He has caused so many things to work together to bring Sam to where he is now: mainstreamed in 1st grade, smart beyond belief, able to read above grade level, writing very well for his age, funny, many – though obsessive – interests, friends, and even making his own choice to give me a hug and kiss, just because he loves me.

There’s nothing special about our family that would cause God’s favor to rest on us. We have been lavished with grace, and we are so thankful for what we have. I can’t compare our son and his degree of autism with anyone else, whether more or less severe, because autism is still autism in any family. This is our story. It might look similar to others’ stories, or better, or worse. But it’s our story just the same.

I can’t wait for the day when I remember back on this time and the terrible week we had last week, the tears I cried both alone and with my husband because it just hurt so darn much. I’ll have to try harder to remember the times like last night when Sam snuggled against me on the couch and just sat with me quietly.  Or the “normal” conversations we’ve had as a family at the dinner table, or watching him color his flags in utter contentment and the pride he takes in his creations taped to his wall. But I’ll still remember.

I’ll always remember.

The post Remembering From Whence We Came appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
https://hopeinautism.com/remembering-from-whence-we-came/feed/ 43
Christmas Tradition Concessions https://hopeinautism.com/christmas-tradition-concessions/ https://hopeinautism.com/christmas-tradition-concessions/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:39:00 +0000 http://hopeinautism.com/?p=48 I’m a sucker for tradition. I wore my mother’s wedding dress and veil on my wedding day and repeated the same “traditional vows” my parents did to my husband. For every family and close friends’ birthdays, we call and sing “Happy birthday” to them over the phone, even if we see them for their birthday. (Although […]

The post Christmas Tradition Concessions appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
I’m a sucker for tradition. I wore my mother’s wedding dress and veil on my wedding day and repeated the same “traditional vows” my parents did to my husband. For every family and close friends’ birthdays, we call and sing “Happy birthday” to them over the phone, even if we see them for their birthday. (Although we have admittedly not been perfect in this tradition.) My mom made my brother’s and my Christmas stockings from a pattern that she passed down to me so I could make my 3 sons’ stockings from the same pattern because I loved my stocking so much and couldn’t imagine using any other kind. Growing up, we always made fudge to eat with our egg nog as we decorated the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. The beaded angels my great-grandmother made for me were always hung on either side of the tree topper angel at the top of the tree.

christmas stockings1christmas stockings

Every year, my brother and I sarcastically sing the “Christmas Tumbleweed” song in honor of my father and in memory of the live tree he butchered one Christmas Eve by trimming too much off the bottom, then trying to even it out on the top… it wasn’t pretty and we ended up digging out our artificial tree that year and keeping warm by the “Christmas Tumbleweed” used for firewood. My brother and I relished in decorating the tree together with my parents after Dad put on the lights and Mom unwrapped our treasured ornaments. I’m sure things were not always as glittery and pretty and happy as I’m remembering them, but that’s how I remember Christmas. I couldn’t wait to have a family one day to reenact those perfect memories with my “perfect” children, my “perfect” husband, the “perfect” decorations and to create the “perfect” memories.

Anyone who is human knows none of this is actually attainable, whether autism is part of your world or not.  Hardly anything in life really goes the way you want, or expect it to. People let you down. Circumstances disappoint, and you end up making concessions. LOTS of concessions.

“Yes, I’d like Combo #1: a large bag of ‘Not What I Was Thinking’, an iced ‘Dose of Reality’ and a snack bag of ‘SERIOUSLY?!’ with that.”

admitting-defeat-featured

But being the pie-in-the-sky optimist that I am, Kyle dug out the Christmas tree and decorations for me when I asked him to. I bought the stuff to make the fudge. We had the glasses for the egg nog. We had the lights for the tree. And the concessions began. We had made plans to attend the National Christmas Choir concert since our friends who are in it graciously bought us tickets as a gift, but we had no sitter.

CONCESSION #1

Saturday morning, I was out toy shopping (when I had wanted to go the night before, but couldn’t.)

CONCESSION #2

I got a text from my husband saying we had a last minute sitter and to come home NOW. I had planned for that day to be our big family decorating day with fudge and egg nog. Not anymore! We went to the concert, came home and had about an hour before dinner plans with friends (thinking we would have decorated by then since we had no sitter for the concert).

CONCESSION #3

The decorations sat in our small living room, taking up all the space for a few extra days.

CONCESSION #4

Finally, we got the tree up, and Kyle went to do the lights (as my dad had always done our lights), but NONE of them worked.  That’s right.

CONCESSION #5

It was late on a Tues night, and not only could we not decorate the tree, but we also had no fudge or egg nog. I had forgotten to buy the chocolate for the fudge… and the egg nog!

CONCESSION #6

The next night, Kyle stopped by the store on his way home from work, but they didn’t have lights either.  *Sigh.*  Finally, Friday came, and we blocked it off to make it our family decorating day… again.

CONCESSION #7

Kyle put on the lights with Ben’s help, and he got 3/4 of the way up and discovered the BRAND NEW box of lights didn’t work – and the replacement bulbs they included were the wrong size.  *HEAVY SIGH*.

But no matter – the tree was up, lights were mostly on, and I was sick and tired of these boxes everywhere. So I sat down to unwrap the ornaments and hand them out to the kids to put on the tree. Joshua was the most excited, at age 4, exclaiming at every ornament he was handed, “Yay! This one is MINE!” Ben liked digging out “his” ornaments (since we each get an ornament every year to add to the collection). And Sam…. well, Sam was being Sam. Engaged in the world of Cars 2, he was scripting and playing with Lightning McQueen and Finn McMissile and Francesco. I was able to break him away a couple times to hang an ornament on the tree, which he dutifully did, but didn’t seem to get the big deal about it asking lots of questions.

And here we have CONCESSION #8.

Of all the concessions I had to make surrounding this year’s Christmas traditions, this one nagged at me the most. The fudge the kids and I made together didn’t set right, so we didn’t have it as we decorated the tree, and that was a bummer. The top of the tree is dark, but ornamented anyway, and that’s okay. The bottom of the tree is sagging because that’s where the little munchkins can reach to put ornaments on, and that’s okay too. Everything got done a week later than I desired. Oh well. But here I was, with this grand picture of family togetherness, happy kids talking and laughing together, drinking egg nog, talking about the ornaments and who made what and when, who gave that one to us when we moved into our first home, our first baby ornaments, etc… and everything was different because one member of the family couldn’t participate the way I wanted him to.

I think that as parents, we have a lot of letting go to do with our kids. As they get older, we loosen our grip a little more (against our nature to grab a stronger hold) giving them more freedoms, and maybe letting go of our expectations they didn’t meet because they either didn’t want to, or couldn’t. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t get mad. I just let go. My heart was sad because I know that with all this sensory overload and chaos in what we consider “normal” family traditions, I have a son who is going to experience it differently than we do, and because he experiences it differently, so do we, against our wishes and/or expectations. It’s not wrong. It’s just different.

This year has certainly taught me a lot about tradition. Tradition may be what has always been and following in that to keep it the same. But it’s also what you make it to be from here on out. Christmas doesn’t have to look like my childhood – and it won’t! It can’t because we don’t live in my childhood. We live here, in the present – with 3 rambunctious boys, 1 with autism. The present is different from the past. Some things may stay the same – I’ll still make fudge at Christmastime and buy egg nog. We’ll still decorate the tree and hang the homemade stockings and buy new ornaments. But I’m learning not to care so much about the things of tradition. As long as I have my family, and we’re together, that’s all the tradition I need.

The post Christmas Tradition Concessions appeared first on Hope in Autism.

]]>
https://hopeinautism.com/christmas-tradition-concessions/feed/ 71