My Autistic Boy And Other Adventures In Fatherhood

Hey guys: I had this comment come through on a blog posting from a couple of years ago, but I think we can help:

In reading your blog i completely felt for you. My son is constantly on the vcr and cable buttons at home and the stemming almost seems uncontrollable wherever we go. At first i thought ‘maybe he’s excited and that’s why he’s flapping so much,’ because it seemed whenever we were at a fun filled place like near a neat carasoul, or like Chuck E Cheese he would just get to flapping and smiling and just get extremely excited. If his sisters and cousins encouraged him to play with them he’d start flapping and running around with them which is awesome he is interacting, but the flapping is always there. AT home same thing, but when he gets extremely frustrated or upset he’d also do it. So it seems he’s always flapping and at the last IEP meeting the teacher informed me that he noticed the increase in the flapping and although they’ve tried different things to divert him from it, it just doesnt seem to work. So steady trying to find ways of redirecting him has been a challenge. His adaptive behavior on his MIS report stated anxiety and that alarmed me because i dont want him to feel that anxiety, but the teacher informed me that there is a broad spectrum of anxiety and autistic children are naturally already filled with anxiety in the overload of sensory and not being able to control so to speak these sensors can be overwhelming for them.

If you or anyone reading this comment has any kind of suggestions or would like to get further information please let me know.. i’d love any kind of input or thoughts or advice i can get.

Thank you!

Guys: if you can add your thoughts and directions in the comments, I’d appreciate it.  Lets help out a fellow parent here, please…..

Earlier today someone posted on my blog telling me they live down the road in Roswell, had a few things to say, and never commented before (was a Kentucky grad). If this is you, please comment again (it was deleted by mistake) to this posting so we can chat 1:1.

Can any of you guys help with an answer in the comments section of this posting, please….

 I’m enjoying your blog as one who has been teaching special needs kids of all ages and areas of development for about a year now. It’s interesting that in my capacity I’ve recently worked with a 10 year old girl who stems quite a bit but she isn’t autistic by any means. She had a severe brain injury as a toddler, yet she exhibits severe stemming like no other autistic child I’ve seen so far. Are you aware of any recent work that has been done in this area? Or perhaps anyone else?

Okay - now I’m getting comments that my comment section won’t let people post - who is having this problem (and how would I know if you couldn’t comment?)

A few of you pinged me yesterday that you couldn’t provide comments to my blog.  So I tested it out on two machines last night (no problem) and using two different browsers (Firefox and Safari…again, no problem).  I pinged blog.com (who hosts this site…and they tested it using a PC with Internet Explorer {again, no issue}).  Finally, I had a Web guru (who will remain nameless) test it also. Here’s his recommendations in his explanation to me:

(1) It really sounds like this person had internet problems. The “you are no longer connected” sounds like his (maybe dial-up) connection timed out, and then because of that he was looking at expired web pages. Tell him if that happens again, instead of using the back button, it’s best to start fresh in the process again, as much of a pain as that may be.

(2) What also could have happened is that he screwed up on the CAPTCHA (stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart…or the small, squiggly numbers and letters) image the first time, and then kept trying to re-submit using his back button, which screwed it all up. If the CAPTCHA fails, best to let it give you a whole nother image to type the letters and numbers for, instead of trying the old one again. That’s to keep the robots at bay that might go through trial and error a bunch of times on the same image.

Try this guys. You might also want to see if your browser needs to be updated to the latest and greatest versions.

Not a very ‘autistic-y’ post today, but I don’t want to miss your spellbinding and deep comments!