See Sam Fly
Sam hopped on a plane and flew to Salt Lake City to stay with my sister and her family.
Within minutes after his arrival, he sent me a text about how beautiful the weather was.
(Yeah, just rub that one in there, buddy.)
This is Sam’s second trip to Utah and about his sixth or seventh time to fly on his own. I don’t need to accompany him to the gate anymore, nor does anyone need to meet him there like we did when he first flew on his own.
I did not do a single thing to help him pack, not a prompt about the web check-in or anything. When we got to the airport, I asked him, “do you want to hop out at the curb or do you need me to come in?”
He asked me to come in and stay until he was got in the security line.
But he thought about it for a minute. He really did.
Love Letter to JK Rowling
My daughter and I have tickets to opening night of the final installment of Harry Potter Thursday. The kids have gone on opening night before; this will be a first for me. We’ll see part one and part two back to back. It seemed right to do it. Paige, my youngest, heads off to college this fall.
I don’t know how my kids would have grown up without being able to do it alongside Harry Potter. Ours is a happy house, overall, one that often looks like the Weasley’s burrow, although my clock doesn’t keep very good track of the kids and I must wash dishes myself.
But their world has become a dark and scary place more than once, and there were times it seemed only the wisdom in those pages got them through.
When love didn’t go as planned, there was Harry and Ginny, and Ron and Hermoine, to remind them that respect and friendship comes first.
After their father died suddenly — and they felt all alone knowing that no one else in their world knew what they knew — along came Luna, who reassured them that she sees the thestrals, too.
And when the mother-of-all-battles came home to burn the burrow and destroy the school, they recognized how to sort the world into the truly courageous and those who can only feign bravery.
I doubt, actually, I could have communicated to Sam what is needed to get through the next few years without those final chapters.
Thank you, J.K. Rowling, for being there for my kids when all I had left to offer was the wisdom of the best coming-of-age story ever told.
Texting
With the upgrade to iPhones, Sam and I can now text each other. I’ve watched Sam play with spelling and language on Facebook and knew that he could handle some communication shortcuts. I’ve watched him use some numbers in place of letters. I was curious what our first crash-and-burn would be like texting.
Our first crash and burn came from the auto-correct.
Me: “Maybe charge the tractor when you fervor from work and let’s try to start it again tonight.”
When I pressed send, I saw that “fervor” was in place of “get home”.
(Awesome guess there, by the way, Mr. Auto-Correct Editor.)
Immediately, I followed that with: “Stupid auto correct. Get home, not fervor.”
Within 30 seconds, my phone was ringing.
“Mom, I did not understand your text message AT ALL.”
I didn’t even try to explain or translate.
“Sam, please just charge the tractor. I’ll explain what happened with the text when I get home.”
Damn You, Auto Correct.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #113
Peggy: fast, heavy sigh after playing a bunch of wrong notes on the piano
Sam: Bless you. (pauses) Wait, did you sneeze?
Peggy: Nah. But thanks.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #112
Peggy: How was work today?
Sam: We tested a circuit board I’ve been building.
Peggy: And?
Sam: It worked!
Peggy: Alright. So what’s it for?
Sam: A scoreboard. Someone is getting a new scoreboard.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #111
Peggy: I packed your lunch again today.
Sam: Oh, thanks. I need to get in that groove.
Peggy: I packed chicken, carrots and blueberries. Is that ok?
Sam: I was afraid to eat the blueberries yesterday. I thought they would poison me.
No Surprise Here
Stanford has come out and said the environment is a significant factor in autism causation.
This is not a surprise in the Wolfe house.
At one time, Mark and I hoped that we could be included in a class action suit being filed against those who had polluted on the east side of Sacramento, including Aerojet and Mather AFB. The same law firm that had pursued the hexavalent chromium case against PG&E, the story that become the movie Erin Brockovich, had found a cluster of autism and thyroid disorders there.
The problem for us was, we were living in an apartment complex one street too far west. We couldn’t be in the class because we weren’t living in the Rancho Cordova zip code when I became pregnant with Sam — or so the pre-screening went.
I pushed back hard on the legal clerk who interviewed us. Really, just one street over?
Really.
I learned that day that science and law are two very different things.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #110
Sam (belching): I should get all this air up and out now. (pauses). That’s better than the air getting out down later.
That All May Read
Yesterday we mailed back the digital playback machine from the Texas State Library. Sam has been a client of the Talking Books program since elementary school. Many nights the boys put in a Harry Potter book, or Hank the Cowdog, or Lemony Snicket, and fell asleep as the story unfolded.
That doesn’t really work for Sam’s life anymore. He’s working two jobs and, come fall, will be taking two classes online — just 12 more credit hours, four easy classes — and he’ll have his associate’s degree.
I bought him a Kindle two Christmases ago, in hopes that the Kindle — which has the capability of converting text to speech — would fill the gap in his life.
It helps when a textbook is available as a Kindle edition. The book can be read to him and that improves his comprehension. We can’t expect the Talking Books program to keep up with that kind of need.
But book publishers don’t want to cooperate with the e-reader formats. They likely consider what happened to the music industry as a cautionary tale. His most favorite books aren’t available, probably because the most popular authors know that where they go, is where the e-reader goes.
We’d pay for the damn books if they play nice with Kindle, which had the decency to offer text-to-speech. We’d buy another e-reader if they would quit buckling to the audio book market and enable text-to-speech.
While everyone else waits for market dominance — or, in the case of JK Rowling and PotterMore, apparently positions for the continued chaos — people like Sam can’t participate.
It just shows how little we really think about people when our vision is clouded by money.
Working Title
So, yes, I’m working on another book. My longtime friend, Shahla Alai Rosales, an applied behavior analysis professor at the University of North Texas, and I are putting together a parenting book on decision-making.
We recognized that parents make decisions for their young children everyday. But parents of children with disabilities often make more decisions, and sometimes for the duration of their child’s entire life. We wanted to put together timeless information for parents, guiding their decisions so that they result in lifelong happiness and satisfaction for their child and their family.
I told my co-worker, Lowell Brown (with whom I’d also like to co-author a book on the Barnett Shale someday) the working title for our parenting book:
Between Now and Dreams: A Parent’s Guide for Every Decision You’ll Ever Make.
Lowell’s deadpan response, “You think that’s comprehensive enough?”
Absolutely, dude. And we’re going to pack it all in a skinny little book that you can carry around in your brief case or purse.
We’re going to change the world.