The kin folk said, "Jeff, move away from there...."

They said California is the place I ought to be....

Ever since I moved out to the heartland in 1992, my parents have thought (hoped) that I'd move back to the "Golden State." When I got divorced, they just knew I'd be heading back soon.
Sixteen years later, their feelings might finally be changing. After their visit here this month, they not only understand why we like living here, but more importantly, that this is the environment that will allow Elijah to grow and thrive.

The visit didn't start out great. My mom got motion sickness on the train (yes, they took the train here) and injured her hand as well. When I picked them up at the train station, my mom was queasy, and her hand looked like a purple claw. I insisted that she go to the emergency room, which led to their first surprise.

My parents love watching TV. One of their favorite shows is "ER," and I know they didn't expect to see George Clooney when I took them to a nearby hospital, but they thought there would be blood and trauma situations lined up to the door. Instead, it was quiet, clean, quick and efficient, which eased some of my parents' worries.

Once we took care of my mom, we came back to the house, and Elijah really enjoyed seeing them. In fact, later in the day when some pain pills my mom had taken caused her to doze off, Elijah got right in her face and said, "WAKE UP GRANDMA!"

Since they had been here before, the visit didn't really involve that much sightseeing. They did go to a children's farmstead (an area with all kinds of attractions including farm animals, a pond for fishing, a gorgeous butterfly garden and a turn-of-the-century schoolhouse) , which really is an amazing place considering it is in the heart of one of the richest counties in the nation -- and is totally free. The weather cooperated, and they seemed to enjoy themselves. What was more important was that Elijah got to know his grandparents from California and saw them in his environment, which made him more comfortable.

My parents got to see his school (and the fact that there are more peer models, therapists and instructors in his class than special-needs students) with its large library and large grassy areas (remember, I grew up with blacktop playgrounds that had rubber mats). They also attended one of his "sponsored" (i.e. free to us) speech therapy sessions at the university that he has been getting over the past couple of years. These sessions are among the reasons we believe one of his speech problems -- pronoun reversal -- has improved dramatically.

But most importantly, they watched him create and draw, laugh and demand (usually tickles and Oreo cookies) and jump all over the place. They got to see him as the little boy he is, who, despite some quirkiness, loved being with his family (grandparents included) and interacting with them (on his terms, of course!).

The day my parents left coincided with our neighborhood's annual block party. There was delicious BBQ, clowns making balloon animals and, most importantly to Elijah, a moonwalk he would not get out of, even with lots of other kids inside. (Another milestone -- in the past, he could not stay in a moonwalk if there was more than one other child inside.) It seemed the perfect coda for the symphony of not only why we live here, but why the lifestyle suits us so well. Could Elijah get all the services in Los Angeles that he has here? Maybe, but I don't think they would be as good, and I know they wouldn't be as cheap (free!). Would the faster pace of life in L.A. pass Elijah by, leaving in its wake some moment when growth and chances of development are lost? I don't know. But I can honestly say that this is the best place for us, and after this last visit, my parents will agree.

And to show how important grandma and grandpa had become in his mind, Elijah insisted on placing two of his most prized possessions on the bed in the guest bedroom. As he told me the day after my parents had left, "Woody and Jessie are sleeping just like grandpa and grandma" and he hasn't moved them since that night.

One last point: Mom, at nine o'clock at night, when there are twenty cars on the major road to get from our house to downtown, that is not traffic. I hesitate to ask how long your trip from the train station to the Valley took during rush hour. In fact, have you gotten home yet?

Rocket Man

My apologies to NPR.

Several years ago (as in, pre-Elijah), I was listening to Talk of the Nation, where the topic was brain differences between boys and girls. Though I was not a parent, even I could see that, yes, they certainly did seem to be quite different creatures. (I realize this is a matter of great controversy, mainly because some people seem to think there's something inherently sexist in pointing out these differences. To those people, all I can say is -- get a life.)

I don't remember much of the program, but one comment by a child development researcher did stick in my brain: "Boys have an innate need to move objects through space."

This sounded so ludicrous that I nearly snorted out my latte. (Back when gas was $2 a gallon and lattes could be had for a mere $2.50, Starbucks was a big part of my life.) Other than laughing over it, though, I didn't really think much about it.

Then I had a boy.

So now it can be said: NPR was right, and I was wrong.

If you happen to be the mother of a young male of the species, you might well have made the same mistake I did: Repeatedly buying toys that sound fun to YOU, a former little girl, without stopping to think that your intended gift recipient isn't just from Mars -- he's probably from another galaxy altogether. (The whole Mars-Venus thing might apply to men and women, but certainly not to boys and girls. Mars and Venus are much too close to each other for this metaphor to work with 5-year-olds.)

Anyway, I eventually came to the realization that games, puzzles, books and such really don't hold much appeal to someone whose idea of torture is sitting quietly and, heaven forbid, taking turns in a socially cooperative atmosphere. I began to notice that when we visited the homes of friends with little boys, Elijah was absolutely overjoyed to be in the presence of projectile toys that could be launched through the air like rockets, particularly if that air happened to be indoors, increasing the likelihood of something being hit. It was all I could do to drag him back home to a house filled with quiet, introspective toys intended to develop his "creativity and problem-solving skills." (Yes, that's directly off the box. Several boxes, actually. I think there exists somewhere a random toy-marketing phrase generator, and this is one of its most common outputs.)

This "innate need to move objects through space" actually goes a long way toward explaining the typical male's fascination with sports, a fascination that frankly baffles me. I'd rather watch paint dry than sit and watch a game of any kind. (At least if I were watching paint dry, that would mean that we were making home improvements.)

So for our little male's most recent birthday, I finally caved in and bought -- as cheaply as I could manage -- a toy involving things flying through the air. I kid you not when I say that this gift, which I spent all of $5 on at Target, produced more excitement per penny than perhaps anything he's ever received (granted, he doesn't get electronic things like GameBoys and XBoxes and Wiis, so that may be a factor here). It was nothing more than a bunch of long, skinny balloons and a pump-style inflator. When the balloons are inflated and then released, they go zooming around and around and up and down until they're deflated, which usually takes about 10 seconds. But wow! Is that ever an exhilarating 10 seconds! And as a value-added feature, they also make disgusting human-body noises as they go zipping around! How cool is THAT???!!

I would love to post photos here of the joy on the faces of the 5 boys (including the guest of honor) as they leaped around the backyard at the party, chasing the balloons
that were repeatedly inflated by increasingly tired but devoted dads, while we moms all sat around drinking wine. (This is my idea of what a birthday party should be. Not just because we moms deserve a drink, but because in an era filled with birthday party "activities" like inflatable moonwalks, arts and crafts, clowns, balloon artists, scavenger hunts and pony rides, I'm the anti-Mom. One child at this party actually came up and asked me, "When are we going to do the activities?" I pointed to all the toys spread across the lawn and said, "See those toys? See that yard? There's your activities! Now go be active!")

Where was I? Oh, yes, the photos. It turns out that the excitement level was such that even the "kids and pets" setting on our features-laden digital camera -- specifically designed for subjects that refuse to be still for a second -- couldn't focus fast enough to get any good shots. So you'll just have to take my word for it. These low-tech, cheap and simple balloons were a HIT.

You're probably beginning to wonder what the point of this story is. It's basically to illustrate that, based on an incident that happened just yesterday, I STILL have not learned my lesson about the differences between boys and girls.

Elijah and I needed to make a stop at the grocery store on the way home from the gym. Grocery shopping with him is never a pleasant task, mostly because there are way too many potential projectiles in these stores. Just think about the produce section alone!

Anyway, we had just stepped inside when I spotted a mother and daughter beginning their shopping. The little girl couldn't have been more than 3, so I figured that, if he were having a really good day, 5-year-old Elijah MIGHT be almost as mature as her. He was climbing all over the cart, demanding to be pushed while he found increasingly dangerous ways to hang off the front, edges and sides of the thing while simultaneously begging for Oreos and ice cream.

The little girl, meanwhile, was proudly pushing one of those miniature carts designed to start children on their path to consumerhood at an early age. Wow, I thought. Perhaps if I get one for Elijah, he will stop hanging off this cart and I can get some shopping done.

I really don't know what I was thinking. I can only say that I had just worked out, and my blood sugar was perhaps a bit low, influencing my powers of reasoning. I got the little cart, gave it to Elijah and instantly unleashed a force of potential devastation on the entire store. After all, here was the ultimate projectile -- it had four wheels, would roll for a really long way really fast if you gave it a hard push, and there were all sorts of incredibly cool things to run into. Displays full of glass jars! Towering stacks of peaches! A big shelf full of freshly baked bread!

Needless to say, the entire experiment lasted less than three minutes. Thankfully, nothing got broken or severely damaged, but in those three minutes, Elijah managed to ram the cart into three display cases, partly dismantle it while trying to determine what exactly was holding the sides together, knock it over onto himself while trying to propel himself down an aisle as he stood on the lower bar while gripping the handlebar, and nearly fall out of it after he climbed into the center of it and bent over, hands firmly on a wall, preparing to push himself as hard as he could across the produce section.

So, once the "Mommy's little helper" cart was returned, more or less in one piece, to the cart stacks, I proceeded through the store in our usual manner, constantly telling Elijah to slow down, put that back, pick those things up off the floor and please quiet down about the Oreos and ice cream. As usual, the most stressful part of our journey occurred in the frozen foods aisle, where he opened each display case door and drew pictures in the fog that forms on the inside. This is by far his favorite grocery store pastime. He could literally spend all day drawing pictures in frozen-food display case fog.

On several occasions, we crossed paths with Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes. She was primly prancing behind her mother, carefully pushing her little cart, which was filled with (I swear I am not making this up) fresh produce and organic snack foods. I tried to point her out to Elijah, saying things like "Look at that cute little girl! I'll bet she's just 3 years old! Look at how nicely she's helping her mommy! And I'll bet she's going to eat every one of those vegetables when she gets home!"

He wasn't buying it. And, truthfully, neither was I. But it is my duty to try to channel my action-loving little boy's energy into civilized behavior, so I gave it my best shot.

Truthfully, though, I've come to appreciate his love for projectiles over primness. He is a boy, after all, and I think way too many people want little boys to be like little girls (see also: Ritalin, Concerta, Aderall, etc.).

I don't know when my little rocket man will calm down enough to make grocery shopping a pleasant experience.

But I think it's gonna be a long, long time.

We won!

OK, so it's not Powerball. It's not the Oscars. It's not even a penny slot win at one of our local casinos. But still .... I won something!

I must give credit to Jeff, though, since he's the one who insisted we enter a photo contest sponsored by a studio where we got some artsy black-and-white portraits done when Elijah was a baby. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Jeff NEVER turns down an opportunity to enter a contest. I usually just roll my eyes and go on about my day, which is what I did this time while he searched diligently through the hundreds of photos we've taken this year (no pre-2008 photos allowed!) to find an entry. I think the theme was travel or vacations or something along those lines, and as luck would have it, we actually took a vacation this year! Fat chance that'll be happening again anytime soon, thanks to a constellation of economic ill luck that has befallen us along with much of the rest of America (thanks, subprime mortgage lenders!)

Anyway, he decided on the following photo, which honestly has a few "issues" but apparently caught the judges' eyes anyway:



It was taken on the Celebrity Millennium cruise ship last winter, when we escaped subzero Midwestern temperatures for a week in the sunny Caribbean. It's supposedly the original "Love" sculpture that has been copied in many forms over the years. (You've no doubt seen it on paperweights, posters, coffee mugs, etc.)

Our prize is an "instructional lunch" with the photographers at the studio, which hopefully will result in my being able to take more photos that I'm proud enough of to post here. Since I work with professional photographers on a daily basis, my standards tend to be a bit on the high side (quite honestly, I could tear apart this photo -- the crop on the right is awful, it's not a true silhouette, it should have been taken in black and white, and on and on....).

But who cares? It turns out there IS such a thing as a free lunch! And ever since those subprime mortgage snakes ruined our economy, we'll take any free lunch we can get!

Especially if I can get some usable tips on taking professional-quality photographs on a decidedly unprofessional-quality camera. All I want is a little depth of field. "Flat" photos, with background matter in focus, drive me crazy. (As of the date of this posting, the photo you see at the top of this page is a perfect example of this. Honestly -- is it even possible to look at it and not be distracted by all that lettering in the background? It's just awful! Please note that I was NOT the photographer.)

So, once again, Jeff's mania for entering contests has borne fruit. Thank God it's not another set of Springsteen tickets!

The magic word

"Mommy, I want something to eat."

It's a pretty basic sentence, probably spoken millions of times all over the world on any given day. So you might think it's odd that I'm writing an entire posting (and probably a long one) on how exciting it is for me to hear that sentence.

The magic is in the second word.

Yes, I know that the traditional "magic" word is "please." But if you happen to have much knowledge of autism, you know that "please" is easy to teach to these kids. It's one of those rote, memorized words that, quite frankly, those of us who are raising such kids would love to hear less of.

Whereas a pronoun -- such as "I" -- used correctly is not far short of a miracle.

Like many autistic kids, Elijah has a number of speech/language problems, the most frustrating of which is pronoun reversal. It's exactly what it sounds like: He calls himself "you" and other people "me." (A bit of unsolicited advice to anyone out there with an infant or young toddler: If, when your child begins speaking, he or she does this, don't laugh it off as something cute. Get that child evaluated for autism IMMEDIATELY. Trust me on this.)

The reason for this particular disability is actually very simple and has to do with the way people with autism learn language. Unlike the rest of us, who learn what individual words mean and how to arrange those words in various ways to form sentences, autistic kids learn language in chunks, often entire sentences at a time. It's called gestalt processing, and it makes for quite a few challenges in communication. For instance, when Elijah asks for milk, here's what he's been saying for the past eight or 10 months:

"You want vitamins in red and silver milk."

Actually, since he doesn't perceive these as separate words, it's more like "Youwantvitaminsinredandsilvermilk." He picked up this phrase one morning when either Jeff or I was pouring his milk into a red and silver sport bottle (his only acceptable vessel for the consumption of milk) and added a couple of liquid vitamin drops to it. That particular phrase was uttered in the form of a question posed to him, and it seared itself into his brain as what has to be said when he wants milk. This phenomenon is called echolalia. Once he gets a phrase in his head, he repeats it exactly the same way every time the situation comes up again, with identical intonation, pitch and syllable stress markers. In other words, he doesn't understand that phrases and sentences are made up of individual words that can be rearranged and spoken in a different tone to give different meanings.

And heaven help anyone who tries to explain that, despite what the boneheaded Mommy or Daddy said, the milk really isn't red and silver. The sport bottle is. The milk is white. See? Look right here! MILK IS WHITE!

This is especially frustrating when you consider that the kid started reading before age 2. (Another bit of unsolicited advice to parents of infants and toddlers: If your child begins reading before age 2 and is absolutely obsessed with letters and numbers, get him or her evaluated for, yes, autism. No, we didn't know either that these things are considered major red flags. If you don't believe me, go to Google right this second and type in "hyperlexia.") You'd think that any child who could read could clearly see that words are individual units that can be used in different ways. I've even tried writing each word of his many echolalic phrases on a separate flash card, then rearranging them to give him a visual representation of how language works. He'll have none of it.

This brings me to the pronoun reversal. Since Elijah has always heard people call him "you" while referring to themselves as "me," it only makes sense to him that he should call himself what other people call him. And there is no way to explain pronouns to someone who just doesn't get it, because you have to use so many actual pronouns in the process: "Elijah, when I talk to you, I call you 'you,' but when you talk about you, you should call yourself 'I.' And I call myself 'me,' but you can't call me 'me,' because when you say 'me,' it means YOU!"

Yeah, right.

So our attempts to correct this over the years have involved making him say the right words during what inevitably turns out to be a painful conversation like the following:

Elijah: "You want to sit on my lap."

Me: "Honey, please try to say that the right way."

Elijah: "I want to sit on my lap!"

Me: "That's almost right! Try again"

Elijah: "You want to sit on my lap."

And so on. The problem is, even when he gets it right, he doesn't really "get it." He's just parroting back an answer he was fed in an earlier coaching session. For instance, when he says something like "You want to go outside," I often say, "WHO wants to go outside?" His brain clicks on the fact that when I ask "who," I want him to say "I," which he is happy to do, even though calling himself "I" makes no sense whatsoever to him. But he'll do it just to humor Mommy so he can go outside. Which is fine, until the subject changes entirely:

Me: "Elijah, who sat next to you at circle time today?"

Elijah: "I sat next to me at circle time today!"

After all, "I" is the correct answer to questions beginning with "who," right?

It's all enough to make me want to ..... oh, I don't know, go sit at the computer and write a painfully long blog post about it.

But my reason for writing this is not to wallow in despair about my child's language disability. It's to CELEBRATE, because in the past two weeks we have made a major breakthrough in the pronoun struggle!

Don't ask me how or why. It could be something his therapist at preschool is doing. It could be the computer game he plays at his therapy sessions at the university that is specifically designed to address pronoun problems. It could just be the magic of turning 5 years and 3 months old. Or it could be the cumulative effect of three years of near-constant nagging (um, I mean, at-home therapy).

But whatever the reason, he suddenly seems to get it, at least when it involves simple sentences with just one first-person pronoun and one second-person pronoun. He's calling himself "I" or "me." He's calling other people "you."

He still slips fairly frequently, especially if he's tired or really excited, but the difference is huge. Just two weeks ago, his pronoun accuracy rate in a 45-minute therapy session at the university was just 20 percent. Last week, it was 80 percent. And the progress appears to be holding.

Of course, this is just one language battle, not the war. We have many battles to fight, including several more involving pronouns. Try a pronoun-laden sentence like this out for size:

I want YOU to take ME to the park so WE can play with THEM.

Think I'm gonna be hearing that from Elijah anytime soon? Not a chance. There's also not much of a chance that we'll be hearing correct gender pronouns soon -- Elijah can't fathom why some people are called "he" and others are called "she." The head of the university's speech/language department recently told me about a teenage boy she worked with who still doesn't get it. I don't even want to consider that possibility, so I just choose not to think about it!

Actually, I have reason to believe he will get the whole gender thing. This is based on a rather humorous conversation a few months ago that began with Elijah dashing into the bathroom just as I was stepping out of the shower. As one of those conservative mothers who began covering up when he was about 2, I was a little taken aback, but not nearly as taken aback as he was!

In the interest of good taste (as well as to preserve the dignity of both parties involved), I will not repeat our conversation verbatim here, but I will say that Elijah used anatomically correct terms to grill me about what he perceived as my anatomical INcorrectness. And I'll also say that he was quite worried about Mommy's well-being ("What happened to it? Did it got broke???!!!!)

It was hysterical, and actually I was quite proud of him, given that until he was about 4 1/2, he didn't have the language skills to ask even the simplest of questions. (My last bit of unsolicited advice to parents of infants and toddlers: When they go through that phase of asking "Why?" all the time, be grateful. Many of us have children who may never be able to ask why something is the way it is.)

So we are making progress. And if you happen to see me in line at the checkout counter, happily buying Hershey's bar just because my little boy said, "I want chocolate!", think twice before you jump to conclusions. A scene that, to you, looks like an overindulgent parent catering to the whims of a demanding child might actually represent a major developmental breakthrough for that child.

Remember, you don't know the back story.