problem-solving
Overheard in the Wolfe House #250
Sam (seeing an email address found via gmail search): Do you know how to export that contact?
Peggy: Can’t I just write it down for you on a piece of paper?
Overheard in the Wolfe House #248
Peggy: That was it. We tried to make it too complicated before.
Sam: It’s best to stop when you’re tired.
Fifty shades of attention
Sometimes the best conversations you have with your kids are in the car on the way somewhere, or while you’re working on something together. I don’t understand why it worked, but we’d get revelations from Michael as we did fence repairs for the goats, for example, or from Paige after we’d get going on sewing project together.
Only in the past few weeks did I come to realize that wasn’t really the case for Sam.
Of course, when he was little, and we discovered that giving him our full attention managed to coax more language and social development out of him, we gave it our all. Mark even took a square tabletop off its pedestal leg and put foot-high 2x2s under all four corners for a play table. We spent hours sitting at that play table with him. Sometimes, it became just like a family dinner table in Japan. We cleared off the toys and sandpaper letter cards and other learning materials and ate our meal there (usually in front of a baseball game, we weren’t saints.)
As Sam grew and his language and schooling caught up, there was much less direct time like that together. We chatted at the dinner table, in the car, just like we did with his brother and sister.
In recent years, though, we noticed that Sam often had false starts to his sentences. Paige mentioned her concerns that she might have to wait for him to start and re-start a sentence as much as four or five times until he could finish it.
I wondered if I needed to find a speech therapist to help him. Sam and I talked about it briefly, and he was amenable. He had speech therapy throughout elementary, middle and high school. We didn’t seek it after that. But I told myself, add it to the list, but not at the top. We’ve got bigger fish to fry (and that’s not a metaphor: we’ve been working on cooking and kitchen management this year.)
While reading a new book on mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace is Every Step, I had a quiet revelation. (Reading it as part of my work with Shahla Ala’i-Rosales and our new book on mindful parenting for those who have children with autism) What if I gave Sam my full attention when he started a sentence with me? Would that diminish the false starts?
That meant if he started talking to me while I was filling the dishwasher, for example, I was going to have to stop in the middle of my work, not just keep talking and working at the same time. I’ve been in single mom mode for nearly six years now. I recognized this would be training for me, not for him.
I got plenty of reinforcement for the change right away. The false starts diminished almost immediately. I told Michael about it and he was excited for us. He may even take data on my attention and Sam’s sentence starts next time he’s home, if it isn’t completely gone by then.
Shahla told me it makes sense. Many of us have learned that we can carry on a conversation with another person while they are doing something else. But Sam and others with autism may be less sure of the social cues. They may question whether they are communicating. They may think they are making a mistake, Shahla says.
Oh, no. That mistake was mine.
How to be spontaneous
Sam got an email Friday giving him a day’s notice for a chance to ride on a float Born2Be would have in the North Texas Fair and Rodeo parade Saturday morning. He forwarded the email to me. I replied that I already had promised to run trail with Susan Saturday morning, but this looked like something fun he could do on his own.
When I got home from work that evening, he said he just didn’t think that a day’s notice was enough notice for him. Did he have to go to work Saturday? Did he have other plans? He said no. But, from time to time, through the evening, he would talk about the parade. I knew he was thinking about it.
Finally, I reminded him that in the movie, Mama Mia, the character, Harry, had a hard time being spontaneous, but he saw everyone else being spontaneous, so he wanted to try. Maybe you can try to be spontaneous like Harry, I told him.
Sam decided to call someone at B2B for more information, and went to bed early with a tentative plan of how he would fit the parade into his day. Sam’s right, a person does have to lay some groundwork to be spontaneous.
Saturday morning we all were up early, and he was ready to head out the door to get there in time to meet everyone else. He was home by lunch and said he had a great time.
Photo by my Denton Record-Chronicle co-worker, David Minton.
“I’m spontaneous,” he said.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #241
Peggy (passing the dishcloth): Would you wipe that tomato splatter off the pantry door please?
Sam: Yes. I’ve been doing a lot of that today.
Peggy: What do you mean?
Sam: Upstairs, I had to wipe all the dead mosquitos off the ceiling.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #239
Peggy: So was Dave laughing when he told you what was rattling in the trunk?
Sam (as a smile creeps across his face): A little.
Try the front row
The kids and I sat behind a family with three wiggly boys at Mass this morning. It didn’t take long for Michael, now a coach at Easter Seals, to notice that the youngest one was likely on the spectrum. I noticed, too, and remembered when my children could be that wiggly.
I thought for a moment about tapping the mom on the shoulder and offering her a tip, but then I remembered how I felt about advice from well-meaning strangers and kept my thoughts to myself.
Our church has Mass in the round. The altar is in the center of the room. It provides a good view for everyone, if you’re a grown-up. If you sit in the back, whether at St. Philip’s or at a church with a traditional layout, your kids seen only all the big people around you. But if you sit in the first row — and you have about six chances with a church in the round — all of the proceedings unfold right in front of you.
Mark had a bold idea when our church, St. Philip the Apostle in Lewisville, opened its new worship space in 1997. We wouldn’t sit in the back. We would sit right up front. If the kids wiggled, they would wiggle right onto the floor. And, they could see.
The first couple of times were a little scary. But it worked. The kids actually wiggled less because they could see what was going on. And, when they came back from children’s liturgy, they didn’t have to work too hard to remember where Mark and I were sitting because they only needed to scan the front rows.
I can’t remember when we realized the kids were calm enough that we could sit in other spots. But I do remember we started picking spots that would let Sam avoid the incense during the Gospel reading. He would slip out into the narthex and then slip back in at the end of the Homily, when it was done smoking so much. Eventually, we found a spot where the smell wasn’t as strong and we sat there so he could stay all the way through the service.
On the way home, as we shared our observations of the new Family Wiggly, I asked the kids if they could remember sitting in the front row and whether they liked it better. Could they see better? Did they know we did it so they wouldn’t wiggle so much? None of them could remember a bit of it.
Sam did remind us however, that while it may have been years since we’ve sat in a front row, we did for Mark’s funeral Mass.
Amen to that, Sam. Amen.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #236
Peggy: What’s on your mind there, Sam?
Sam (gazing to the ceiling): I don’t know. Trying to refresh it.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #234
Peggy: … so that would be the plan for worst case scenario.
Sam: Ok. (pauses) And, what makes it worst case scenario is that it usually doesn’t happen.
College for Kids
I’m wondering how many Denton old-timers remember that Texas Woman’s University used to offer “College for Kids,” a summer enrichment program for elementary school children.
All the Wolfe children went every summer for as long as they were eligible. Kids “aged out” in middle school. One of the organizers told me that was because middle school was about the age that kids would start finding ways to get into trouble.
As far as I can tell, the program ended rather unceremoniously in 2002. I don’t know if the people who ran it just ran out of steam or if the kids started “aging out” a little sooner.
Sam went as soon as he was old enough and he went every summer. The first summer we worked closely with the organizers to make sure Sam didn’t get lost going from building to building. After all, he was only a rising 4th grader! We took advantage of several quiet evenings on campus, the week before it started, to practice finding his classes. He did well, only getting lost once, on the first day, (there were four classes to find) and the staff helped him make it right.
The program helped Sam develop some independence and think about school in different ways. They had all kinds of fun classes in topics like rockets and printmaking and magic-making and video production.
Here’s what remains from the video production class. Paige rescued what she could from the copy we had that was getting magnetized.
Sam and Michael liked the magic class so much I’m pretty sure each of them took it more than once.
In one class, Sam learned to write music. I was surprised when he came home at the end of that session with this:
It was and is a sweet little tune.
When I unearthed recently, I put it up on the piano and tried harmonizing it very simply. I asked Sam, did I come close to what he imagined? He told me that’s the sort of thing that he thought musicians should be able to arrange and produce how they want.
I’ve often wondered how much guidance the teachers provided with such projects. Paige was 4 or 5 years old the last time we went to Bear Valley Music Festival. She and Michael participated in a summer art program at the little library that had them making collages with wallpaper samples and objects they found on nature walks.
Paige’s piece took my breath away, with the little bird in a nest perching above the boundaries of her collage. Did the teacher do that or Paige?
I’ll never know.
Bird Nesting on a Post, by Paige Wolfe