The Holiday Season is Knocking

As we trotted down the front steps to our blue mini-van the snow flakes twirled around our heads landing on the leaves and melting, but soon the white puffs will stay and our home will fill with a balsam fir and smell of sugar cookies. With a grin across his face, Tristan lowered his voice and asked, "When will Santa come?"

As much as Tristan loves the holidays it does bring a bag of anxieties that we need to sort out like relatives wanting to chat with him about school and all he wants is to discuss the Star Wars movies while hiding behind me. Not to mention the hugging and kissing. I think Tristan wants to participate in the ritual of affection, but has a difficult time crossing over from wanting to doing. While his brothers bounce from one lap to another giving-out hugs and kisses freely, Tristan usually sticks close to my side guarding against any surprise attacks.

We have made improvements in the last few years, I remember one family celebration that Tristan spent the entire evening under a serving table and when anyone came near he would fend off the advances with a kick. That was before Tristan really had any meaningful communication and before his sensory system was regulated.

Now we have strategies:

• We try and down play the holidays because the build-up to the event can cause more anxiety then needed. One year, Peter and I did not tell Tristan it was Christmas until the night before.
• We scale back on all the family gatherings and everyone is invited to our house on Christmas day so that Tristan has all his supports.
• Unless the kids bring up Christmas we don't really talk about it.
• We don't have a TV, so our kids don't get all the commercials about Christmas.
  

In the end we try to enjoy all the rituals leading up to the holiday season like hiking and finding the perfect tree to cut down and bring home or the stringing of our outdoor lights. We create little events throughout the two months that are just as exciting and special, but have less stress involved.

You have to listen to this...

Today on the radio program The Next Frontier, Anne Barbano interviewed the New York Times bestseller author John Elder Robison that wrote Look Me In the Eye. Robison at sixteen dropped out of high school, escaped his alcoholic father and mental ill mother and traveled the country with the band Kiss and built their guitars. Barbano spent the hour long interview prying information any parent of a child with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) would find as valuable as gold, because Robison not only built fire throwing guitars and later talking toys, he himself had a difficult time communicating and socializing and grew-up with Asperger's syndrome.

During the interview Robison explained the spectrum as functional intelligence and that some people lack of functional intelligence not that they are lower functioning. Lower functioning sometimes gets defined as not as intelligent or mentally retarded. If you have ever come in contact with a individual with ASD that has a difficult time communicating (the indicator for functional level) knows that the IQ of these individuals is not factor. I have met children and adults with ASD that are non-verbal, but can write or type or even produce videos (click here to see) that are nothing less than intelligent.

The way Robison describes functional intelligence take the spotlight off whether the person lacks intelligence and on what can be done help that individual thieve in society. Robison convinces listeners that anyone can move forward to a functioning life, as he puts it "(I am) living proof of turning around your life and getting a good result." Not only is Robison a New York Times bestseller, but he also runs his own classic automobile business where he restores everything from BMWs to Rolls Royce.

Anne Barbano's interview Robison is must listen and that I have finished Robison's brother's memoir Running with Scissors (I had no idea they where brothers until this interview, what a family!), I will now go down to the book store and purchase my copy of Look Me in the Eye.