Category: Autism

I feel for those with littles

How are you parents with little ones with autism doing?

I was at Sam’s Club the other day – we needed some oranges and apples. I decided to grab a bag of rice for good measure. I had wanted to do order pickup, but they wouldn’t let me order almond milk, so had to go in the club.

Once I got home and was putting groceries away, I realized that we are down to one spare box of Honey Nut Cheerios. And I remembered noticing that there were absolutely no boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios at Sam’s Club – usually there are pallets. We have plenty of other food in the house, but my autistic son has had a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast every morning since he was old enough to have Cheerios for breakfast. That’s a little over 17 years!

That made me immediately start praying for all of you with young kids with autism. I remember how I always had to have the exact right brand and exact right flavor of that brand to make sure that my son would eat. When a food manufacturer made the smallest change to a product, my son would be able to detect it immediately, refusing to eat the altered edible.

When he became four years old it was a little easier to cajole him to try new foods. We were able to bribe him with computer time. Also, he was old enough to understand feeling hungry. I could tell him, “Well, you don’t have to eat this, but you are going to be hungry.” That, thankfully, often got him to at least try a newly updated variety of food that he used to like.

Praying for miracles for you! Praying that you can find that pack of their must-have food. And praying for miraculous growth in your little one’s ability to be flexible and in your ability to patiently cajole.

I am not looking forward to helping my son figure out a new breakfast routine in a week or so if I can’t find more Honey Nut Cheerios. But he has learned how to move on, after a moment of freaking out. So hopefully it won’t be too bad!

And remember, God knew that you and your child would be on earth at this time. He will help you through it. He has great plans for you and your child, and all of us!

I had no idea!

Ok, so when I wrote my post in November using my autism as a way to explain why we should also treat gender dysphoria as a disease, not just a state of being, I had no idea that a larger than normal percent of people with autism also struggle with gender dysphoria. Just google it and you will find a lot of information out there.

Of course, the information is being used as proof that gender dysphoria is also genetic because autism is genetic. People are being told that this just means that we need to support autistic people in their gender dysphoria.

But I propose something different – something that would have been the norm not so long ago – that this is another indication that gender dysphoria comes into people’s lives as part of something else that is not right in their lives, that it is not a state that a healthy person chooses to live in.

Again, as someone with autism, who has had to struggle through some gender dysphoria myself, I am here to say that gender dysphoria is the symptom of some other problem in a person’s life.

With proper understanding of who God has created you to be all dyphoria goes away. Only a joyful expectation of what He has in store for you remains. Yes, like Job, sometimes there is pain and suffering involved in that path, but, also like Job, greater blessings than you can ever imagine await!

Everything is a video game!

videogaming

Last night I had my teenage son help me prepare supper. We were making Chicken Étoufée, so there was a lot of: cook this for a while, then add this and cook it some more, then add this other thing, etc, all while stirring continuously.

At one point, I was stirring, and asked him to add the next set of ingredients. He picked up the container of diced vegetables and tipped it over the pan. He then started to jab at the mirepoix with his rubber scraper, flicking little bits of it at a time into the roux.

“You could turn your scraper to more efficiently…,” I began. Then I heard the giggling and saw how the mini vegetable bombs were just missing my stirring hand, the container trying to get into rhythm with arm.

“You turned this into a video game, didn’t you?” Louder giggling. “OK, just be more careful not to get it on the neighboring burners – stoves are a lot of work to clean!”