This week I gave a presentation at work. It was part of a series called Secrets of Success, in which each employee in the company gets a turn to give a presentation on what they have personally learned about success. I was quite nervous about mine, as it was very personal, but I was pleased that it was well-received.

I had a hard time deciding what I would say for a while. I didn't know what I could say that would be different from what others had already presented. So I started thinking about other people I knew who were successful, and what I've learned from them that I could share. Suddenly, one particular person popped into my mind, and that choice laid out everything I would say, including a rather unconventional opening.

What follows is a text version of the presentation.

UPDATE: On June 9, 2010, this article was featured on the official Facebook page for Autism Speaks. I am truly humbled and appreciative of the many positive comments I have received, both on this blog and on Facebook. However, there has also been a little bit of misunderstanding about the intent of the piece. It is not intended to tell you how to “fix” your autistic child. It is simply about what I have learned about success as I have gone through (and continue to go through) this experience with my daughter. Thanks again, and to those who have autism or love someone who does, “Never give up, never surrender!”

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Secrets of Success

by Robert J. Walker (with apologies to Theodor Geisel)

What is success? Can anyone say?
Is it something you put on your résumé?
Is it big money? Is it great fame?
Is it a building adorned with your name?
We're always chasing success in this biz,
But how do we know what success really is?
There are lots of people who have lots to say,
And it's hard to know whose idea to obey.
So I said to myself, “Self, who can you ask?
Whose success is most up-to-the-task?”
Then finally it hit me. I knew who to call,
The person who'd be my guide through it all,
My guru, my teacher, my insightful sage!
I never thought she'd be four years of age!

My daughter is the most successful person I know, even though by typical standards she has accomplished far less in her life than most children her age. In order to understand why, you need to know a little more about her.

She has autism.

Autism is a neural development disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted, repetitive and obsessive behavior. It affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize. Autism belongs to a wider group of conditions called autism spectrum disorders (or ASDs), which include similar afflictions such as Asperger syndrome. ASDs affect about 1 in 110 people.

Autists frequently have overstimulated senses. A standard fluorescent light can seem like a strobe. A digital watch alarm might sound like a fire truck. A lightly-scented deodorant could smell like someone bathed in perfume. A mild seasoning may taste as strong as garlic or curry. A sweater might feel like bugs crawling on your skin.

Since many autistic children are non-verbal, they can't tell you about what's bothering them or express their needs. Because of this, they tend to behave in ways that are considered inappropriate much more frequently than their peers: screaming, throwing temper tantrums, biting, gouging, scratching, banging their heads and throwing themselves around. Many don't respond to their own names.

Some have low IQs. Others are highly intelligent, yet this intelligence can go unnoticed when they lack an effective way of communicating. Many will rarely smile, laugh, or even make eye contact; and many have few or no friends. Only 4% of autists are eventually able to maintain employment, live independently and have a meaningful relationship.

There is no known cure.

My daughter initially seemed like most other autistic children. When she wasn't screaming incoherently, she was quiet and withdrawn. She wouldn't respond to her name or look you in the eye, and she rarely smiled. You could tell that there were thoughts and feelings locked up in that little mind of hers, but she couldn't share them. She was a lonely island of human consciousness, and that made her frustrated and unhappy.

Now, despite all the challenges of autism, she is beating the odds. While her verbal ability is still significantly behind that of her peers, she is able to communicate many of her needs, wants and feelings. She smiles. She laughs. She makes eye contact and usually responds to her name. She knows her letters, counts to twenty and is even starting to learn to read and make friends. She still has a long way to go, but given the bleak outlook for most autistic children, her teachers are astounded at how well she is progressing.

I'm going to share with you the attributes and behaviors that she demonstrates that have contributed to her advancement, along with some secrets of success that we as her parents have learned along the way. I'm still working on these things, but I've found that the better I follow them, the more successful I become.

Don't you dare give up!

Despair is the true enemy of success. Many parents, when they learn their child has autism, give up on their dreams for that child's future. The child picks up on this, and they give up too. They become two years old forever, firmly entrenched among that 96% who never overcome it. The 4% that make it get there partly because their parents didn't give up on them, and they didn't give up on themselves. When there's nothing to gain by giving up and everything to gain by continuing to strive, for heaven's sake, keep striving!

Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

—Bruce Lee

Have the right perspective!

Nothing changes your perspective on life quite like having a child with a disability. I used to envy the parent who complained about how their kid just won't shut up. For a long time, we begged ours to say anything. So many seemed to take for granted all the simple things that their kids do that we would call little miracles in our daughter.

The right perspective helps you see what's really important and what's not. Perspective is vital to success, because how successful can we really say we are if we focus on all the wrong things? So sit back and take inventory of your work and your life, and ask yourself: What really matters? Why are you doing what you are doing?

Even if your priorities are straight, the right perspective will make your work and life better by giving you an appreciation of what you have. It is something that will buoy you up when things get tough.

Make it work!

Most kids with autism are very literal thinkers. They don't engage in pretend play and they often have trouble innovating or working around the problems they face.

One day, my wife saw my daughter pointing at the top of the refrigerator. Since she often likes people to name the things she points at, my wife looked up there and saw the kitchen timer, so she said “Clock.” She thought for a moment, then gave the word “red” in sign language. That's when my wife realized that she wanted some Doritos, which were in a bright red bag sitting on top of the refrigerator. Typical autistic children don't do this; when an attempt to communicate fails (if they try at all), they just melt down.

This is a simple example, but it has a really important lesson. When things don't work out the way we want, we sometimes “melt down.” We throw up our hands and start complaining instead of doing the productive thing, which is shutting up and figuring out how to make it work. Our minds are fascinating machines, with abilities that are still unmatched by technology. Put that mental horsepower to work on a solution instead of grousing about the problem!

Hunger for knowledge!

For some time, my daughter would frequently sit quietly in a corner with a toy (not so much playing with it as just holding it), seemingly oblivious to the world around her. Part of what helped break her out of this was our discovering her fascination with animals—not stuffed ones or animated ones; real ones. We took her to a park one day, and she saw someone walking their dog. Completely out of character for her, she ran up and wanted to pet the dog. She was completely entranced by the animal.

We took her to the zoo and she went bonkers over it. We took her to the aquarium and she went bonkers over that. We got her books with photographs of animals instead of drawings, and suddenly she was interested in books. This marked a turning point for her: she didn't sit passively anymore; she wanted to engage with the world and learn about it.

Our education shouldn't be restricted to our formal schooling. We should hunger after knowledge and be open to opportunities to learn and improve. Any day where you don't strive to learn is a day of wasted potential. Find an area where you want to improve, and get going!

Find a mentor!

My daughter would not have been able to make the progress that she has without our help, and we would not have known how to help her if we hadn't looked to others to guide us. Once you know how you want to improve, you can benefit from the guidance of another who is more experienced.

How do you choose a mentor? Think of the people you know who have the knowledge and experience that you're seeking. Accepting instruction and correction from someone else takes a bit of humility, so your mentor should be someone you trust and respect. Your mentor needs to be someone who cares about your advancement, someone who wants to see you succeed. Both you and your mentor must be willing to devote the time and effort that will be required for the mentoring process.

Once you've found someone who could be your mentor, ask! You might be nervous, but if they decline you're no worse off than you were before, and most people are flattered that someone wants to learn from their experience.

Success is not what you achieve. It is what you overcome.

It could be said that my daughter has not achieved much thus far in her four years of life. Most people can't understand what she says, she's still in diapers, and she still has a fair number of behavioral problems. But what she has overcome is more than many adults ever have.

Most of us aren't forced to face those kinds of challenges. We spend large parts of our lives without having to struggle against anything nearly so difficult. But if success is measured by what we overcome, that life of comparative ease may very well stand in our way of our success. Overcoming challenge causes us to grow in ways that just aren't possible when everything's easy. You can't coast towards excellence, you have to get out and push.

So if challenge isn't coming to you, you have to go seek it out. You'll sometimes have to do difficult things when you don't have to, things that are hard enough that failure is a real possibility. You'll work, you'll strain, you may even fall down and cry more than once, but you'll rise stronger, wiser and better than you were before.

My four-year-old daughter has shown me the way.
Success isn't something on your résumé.
It isn't big money. It isn't great fame.
It isn't a building adorned with your name.
Success isn't anything that you have done.
It's not what you achieve. It's what you overcome.

To Facebook or Not to Facebook

So it seems like more and more people are on Facebook these days. (And migrating away from MySpace, thank goodness.) In the past, I'd never really felt the need or desire to have a Facebook account. I mean, I already have this blog, in which I talk about what's going on in my life (when I remember to write in it), and I in turn, follow the blogs of my friends and family.

Except... a lot of them seem to be migrating to Facebook as well. My wife is on Facebook, and some of her friends there are people she met through me. Recently, she showed me some of the people that they're connected to, and I found several family members and a lot of old friends from high school.

And on top of that, my mother is now on Facebook. When I learned that, my brain needed a few seconds to overcome the cognitive dissonance. Mom's on Facebook, and I'm not. I work in the computer industry, and my mother is more wired, more down with the social media thang, than me. You turn your back for one minute, and the world goes upside-down on you.

So that's the question before me: should I break down and get a Facebook account? I don't know. Maybe those of you who have one can give me your opinion. Here are the pros and cons, as I see it:

PRO: Facebook would let me restrict what I write to just family and friends.

Everything I write here is out in the open. I'd prefer the discussion with family and friends be a bit more closed. Facebook would keep my updates within my circle of friends and family, and easily brings their updates to me.

PRO: Facebook would help me reconnect with old friends.

I'd love to find out what those pals of mine are up to these days. It's apparent from one glance at my wife's profile that Facebook would definitely help with that. And unlike a blog, I could initiate what would become a two-way connection, instead of me just blasting updates out into the ether and wondering whether it would ever cross the eyes of some of those old friends.

CON: Facebook seems oriented towards “stream-of-conciousness” posting.

From what I understand, there isn't a blog feature. Instead, there's the wall, which seems to be a stream-of-consciousness affair, kind of like Twitter, except that your friends posts and reactions are interwoven into the flow. The thing is, I don't think that I'm fascinating enough for anyone to be interested in my consciousness stream. I feel like I need to put some thought into it before I could expect anyone to bother reading it. That usually translates into less frequent posting, but when I do post, it tends to be at least a couple of paragraphs and about something other than what I ate for lunch. But do people want a multiple-paragraph entry on their wall, amongst all the one-liners?

CON: What about the other topics?

Facebook's ability to restrict the audience works against me when I want to talk about something more that just updates. This blog is pulling double-duty: not only to I give family updates here, but I also write about other things. And unlike the updates, I want people I don't know to come and read those posts. Sometimes I will write something and someone just shows up out of the ether and posts a reply, which is gratifying. I want some of my writing to be public, and some to be restricted to my friends. Facebook doesn't seem to make this very easy. And is Facebook really the kind of place for that more public writing, anyway? Would it be worth the trouble to keep a blog separate from Facebook just for that kind of thing?

PRO and CON: Applications

The applications seem like a powerful way to extend Facebook, and things like photo-sharing are nice. However, it seems like most of them are pretty frivolous, and worse, they insist on spamming your friends about your activity in them. I'm not particularly interested in keeping up with how much time anyone is wasting feeding nonexistent pets or throwing nonexistent snowballs. I know that you can block an application, but I'd personally prefer that all applications be blocked by default, and then have the opportunity to unblock ones that I actually find useful.

CON: Loss of control

It seems that you don't have total control over what appears on your page: your contacts show up and scribble all over it, with their profile photo next to it. This is fine when you're reasonably certain that all your contacts will behave in a gentlemanly or ladylike fashion. But sometimes there's someone out there with whom you'd like to keep in touch, but they don't exactly show much discretion in what they post. I know at least one person where this would be the case. It's bad enough to deal with that yourself, much less exposing my family and friends to it whenever they view my wall. I don't know, maybe I'd just have resort to holding my Facebook friendship with them hostage until they clean up their act. That brings me to the final point...

CON: The perceived offense of not “friending”

So say I decide, for whatever reason, that I don't want to accept a “friend” request from someone. If the request is from a stranger, no big deal; I couldn't care less what they think. But if it's from someone that I know, turning down the request can have undesirable consequences. They may want an explanation. The reasons could range from “You seem nice, but I don't know you well enough to say that you're a friend,” to “Sure, you're a relative/friend, but you don't exercise proper discretion with your online behavior and I don't want to expose my friends to that,” all the way to “I'm actually trying to reduce contact with you, thanks.” I could deal with this, certainly, but it's not been something that I had to be concerned with up until now.

So what do you think? Should I make the leap?

Money

We hosted Thanksgiving this year for my parents and my sister-in-law. Gorgeous Wife did a great job on the meal, and I suppose I did a reasonably okay job watching kids while she made it. The turkey, in particular, won high praise from all.

After the meal, my son went to bed, and the rest of us went downstairs to chat. At one point, Gorgeous Wife pointed to my mom and asked my daughter, “Who's that?” “'Amma,” she responded, which is about as close as she gets to the word “grandma” right now. Then Gorgeous Wife pointed at my dad and asked, “Who's that?” We expected something like “'Ampa,” but instead, without any hesitation, she said, “Money.” Several more trials indicated that she clearly believes that her grandfather is “Money.”

Watch out, Dad.

Weird Sleep

We do not sleep normally at our house, for the most part. I'm a night owl, although less so than I used to be. Gorgeous Wife always gets sleepy before me, especially with her fibromyalgia medication. My daughter doesn't complain about going to sleep, but she will often stay awake for a while making funny noises and apparently trying to wake up our son. She also will sometimes wake up in the wee hours screaming at the top of her lungs. My son usually sleeps fairly normally, but it's disconcerting to wake up to him crying at night, go in his room and see that he's still fast asleep.

A funny thing happened last week. If something goes wrong with servers at work, we get a notification message on our cell phones, and we take turns being the primary “server babysitter.” Last week was my week, and shortly after we went to bed, an alert came in, warning about a minor issue. As I picked up the phone to look at it, Gorgeous Wife, who was sick and therefore even more tired than usual at that hour, told me that the light from the phone was going to keep her up. I told her I would try to make it quick. She rolled over and, one minute later, with the light from the cell phone still shining in the dark, she was asleep.

Odd sleeping habits run in my family. There were times we'd discover my dad asleep with the television blaring. If you turned it off, he'd wake up and say, “Hey, I was watching that.” As a small child, Sister used to sleep with one arm hanging upright in the air. One of my brothers once sleepwalked out of our room, down the hall, into the family room, up two flights of stairs, into the kitchen, down another hallway, into my parents' bedroom, around the bed to the wastebasket, dropped his pants, took care of business in the wastebasket, then went back to bed.

So if you're a guest at my house or that of one of my relatives, be prepared for a little weirdness at night. And having a plastic liner in the garbage can wouldn't hurt.

Talking to the Others

My daughter is turning three years old this month and is starting preschool. It is a class especially for kids with autism, with expert instructors trained in helping them with their particular challenges. We're hoping this will help with a number of issues that are troubling her.

One of the big ones is that she feels an obsessive desire to close doors, not in the sense that she feels that any open door must be closed, but that if a door is going to be closed, that she must be the one to do it. Usually, if someone else closes a door instead of inviting her to close it, she'll have a meltdown. She's also very picky about her food. We'd really like for her to have more variety in her diet, but the introduction of most new foods results in a lot of screaming. The preschool will hopefully help her with these issues, as well as with things like social interaction and potty training.

The biggest issue, however, is talking. She is slowly showing more and more desire to say words, but it's still more of a game with her and she doesn't use them much to actually communicate. We've had the opportunity to use some software that offers several activities that help promote skills related to speech, but her reaction to them is mixed; she's enthusiastic about some and averse to others. The inability to communicate verbally is the biggest obstacle to her learning and progress, so if nothing else, any improvement the preschool can help us achieve in this area would be a big win.

Some good news is that she is much more proactive than before about asking as best she can for what she wants. She can easily and effectively communicate that she is hungry, needs a diaper change, wants you to play with her or is ready for bed. She also no longer resists taking medicine or going to sleep. It's amazing how seemingly small advances like these can make such a big difference. She is generally a lot happier now than she was a year ago, when she was so frustrated because she didn't understand why nobody knew what she wanted.

I try to imagine what the world has been like for her. I picture her in a cell with transparent walls. All around her, she can see people looking in at her, and can hear their voices through the walls. She tries to call to them and ask them to try to get her out, or at least stay and talk with her for a while, but she don't realize that the walls somehow let sound in but don't let it out. All she gets are uncomprehending stares and looks of pity.

She soon realizes that for some reason, the Others, as she's come to call them, can't hear her. As the days go by, she eventually gives up trying to talk to them. Sometimes, the frustration gets the better of her, and she screams and cries and kicks the walls and throws herself around the room. Other days, she just sits despondently and listens to the Others talking.

One day, she wakes up and sees something new inside her cell. Somebody has installed a device with a button on the wall. She pushes the button. A light comes on briefly, but nothing else happens. She pushes it again and again, with the same result. This doesn't help at all! She screams and hits the device over and over, and quite accidentally, she hits the button again. Suddenly, the Others react with surprise. Something happened! A little experimentation results in a discovery: when she's holding the button down, the Others can hear her! She doesn't know it (because nobody's been able to teach her), but this device is a called an intercom.

The button is faulty, so the signal is laced with static and frequently cuts out. Communication with the Others is slow at first, and nearly as frustrating as not being able to talk to them at all. It takes a lot of patience and learning on both sides: she has to learn how to apply just the right amount of pressure to the button to get the light to stay on and keep the signal from cutting out, and the Others have to learn to decipher her words amidst the static. But slowly, comprehension replaces confusion.

There's still a long way to go. It'll be some time before they get good enough at communicating that they can plan together how to get her out of the cell. There are still some days of screaming and crying, but not as much. She's no longer alone.

You Ruined Everything

So I know that I said I probably wouldn't post in the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to share a thought I had. Yesterday, we got a babysitter and went to my company's Christmas party. We don't get out much since having kids, even more so due to my daughter's autism. We found ourselves out to dinner, without the kids, but as is common with parents the world over, we ended up talking a lot with others about the kids.

The thought caused me to reflect back on life with Gorgeous Wife before the kids. We stayed up late on the couch to watch movies together. Or we went out to watch movies together, or dance, or eat out, or whatever. We had more energy and less stress, more time and fewer bills. Yet, like most parents, we'd have the kids all over again if we had the choice.

Ronnie Shakes once said that to know if you loved somebody, you simply had to ask yourself, “Would I mind being destroyed financially by this person?” Nerd musician Jonathan Coulton wrote a song about the subject with regards to kids, with a chorus that just about perfectly describes the sentiment: “You ruined everything/In the nicest way.” His background info on the song is a tongue-in-cheek description of that strange transition from living your own lives to being at the beck and call of a little diapered dictator, yet somehow being okay with it:

I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling - I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don't feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it's not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that's how it was for me. At any rate, it's complicated.

Keep ruining everything, kids. For some strange reason, your parents don't seem to mind.

Merry Christmas!

So I probably won't be posting for the next couple of weeks. We've got Gorgeous Wife's mom and grandma coming late tonight, and with the holiday I imagine I'm just not gonna find time for blogging.

I'm sure you're all screaming “Noooo!” at your monitors right now. Fear not; I'll tide you over with a picture with adorable kids in it:

(My son wasn't actually smiling in that picture; I cut his head out of a different picture where he was smiling and pasted it in there. Thank you, GIMP!)

Long Day, Good News

I took Monday off work to take the kids places they'd rather not be. I got up at early o'clock in the morning to take my ten-month-old son to an MRI appointment at 6:30 a.m. All things considered, he behaved remarkably well. He even smiled and cooed at the nurse while she was prodding him during the pre-scan evaluation. He only started crying when it was time to hold him down to get the IV put in, and that didn't last long. The hardest part was the administration of the sedative and his insertion into the machine. I held him as they gave the sedative. It acted surprisingly quickly, and it was only about 30 seconds before I had to support his head to keep it from flopping back like a newborn's. He fought to stay awake, but within a couple of minutes he'd gone limp.

Then I had to stand on a mat in the control room, just outside the scan room, and watch through the doorway while the nurses took him from me and placed him on the scanning bed. The noise of the machine was enough to make him wake up and cry a bit, so they had to give him an additional short-duration sedative to keep him asleep. They attached monitors that would ensure that he was not having an adverse reaction to the sedatives (pulse, blood pressure and oxygenation), and an oxygen line, since the sedatives cause his breathing to be more shallow. When they returned, I had to leave and wait in the sedation recovery room while they curtained off the control room and performed the scan.

As irrational as it is, a parent can't help but imagine the worst while waiting during a procedure or test, no matter how minor. The scan itself really only took about half an hour tops, but the minutes seemed interminable as I sat in a chair next to an empty hospital cradle. I soon gave in to temptation and began pacing the room. Finally, the nurses pulled back the curtain and brought him out. With them came the radiologist, who told me that he still needed to do a thorough reading of the scans, but from what he had seen they looked normal. The nurse laid him in the cradle and again attached monitors to him, along with a saline drip to keep him hydrated, since he was required to be fasting for the scan and had not had anything to eat or drink since he went to sleep the previous night.

Thus began the 90-minute wait for the sedative to wear off enough to wake him. This was almost as nerve-wracking as the scan, thanks to the list of things we'd have to watch for over the next 24 hours that the nurse gave me. If we can't wake him, call 911. Make sure you don't allow his head to droop during the ride home, since it can impede his airway. Don't let him curl into a ball while sleeping or otherwise position himself in any way that could constrict his chest or airway. Watch him carefully while awake, since he may have trouble holding up his head or maintaining balance while crawling or sitting. Keep him on clear liquids for several hours, since the sedative can make him sick to his stomach. If he throws up, try to prevent him from aspirating any vomit, as that can cause pneumonia.

I kept checking his breathing over the 90 minutes, even though I knew perfectly well that a monitor would start screaming bloody murder if he stopped breathing. It seemed unnatural that he was so still. He somehow looked smaller, sleeping with a pre-warmed blanket over him, almost as if he were a newborn again. Perhaps I was unconsciously recalling the last time he was in a hospital cradle, just ten short months ago.

At last it was time to wake him. Fortunately, he woke up readily and immediately started protesting that his tummy was empty! He greedily chugged down 14 ounces of juice and gave a vigorous burp, to the amusement of the nurses. After that he seemed pretty happy and fairly normal, except for his head being a bit wobbly. He was discharged and I drove us home while he napped.

That afternoon, I took my daughter to the school district headquarters to be evaluated, in order to determine whether she is eligible for special education services. For most of the two-and-a-half hours that we were there, she was inconsolable. Something about the place just set her off and she screamed like someone was killing her. My time there was mostly spent answering long questionnaires about her behavior with my right hand while holding her in my left arm and rapidly going deaf in my left ear.

Eventually it was determined, to nobody's surprise, that yes, she does indeed have autism and yes, she is qualified to receive special education services. A good thing, since I was not really wanting to get into a big battle with the school district should they have taken it into their heads that she didn't need the services. As soon as I took her hand and told her that we were “going bye-bye” she immediately cheered up, smiled and waved at the people she'd been screaming at the whole time, and literally skipped out of the building.

Final note: Yesterday, we received word that the final reading of my son's MRI scans showed no abnormalities. This leads the pediatrician to believe that the most likely cause of his strange manner of crawling is simply preference for the right over the left, and that with time it should straighten out. Good news, but it does mean that we now have to wait and see if that pathetic-looking crawl of his really does work itself out.

It Just Keeps Raining...

My son has finally started crawling. Sort of. While he does have use of his left side, he doesn't use it much when crawling; he sort of drags it. We've already had a therapist coming to see him because of gross motor skill delay. She was concerned about it and suggested that this should be evaluated by his pediatrician. So yesterday the doctor looked him over and said that muscle tone on his left side is less than his right. There could be many different reasons for this, anything from simple preference all the way to a prenatal stroke. He's got an MRI scheduled for December 1, so we'll see.

Gorgeous Wife also had a doctor visit yesterday and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. As there is no cure, she will have to control it with exercise and medication for the rest of her life.

Cross your fingers for our boy. He's the only hope this family has left for having at least one member that doesn't have an incurable medical condition.

Progress

T-minus nine days until the move. The blog has been rather quiet (as my time has been taken up with work and moving preparations), but I thought I should give people an update on my daughter. She's been progressing rapidly, to the surprise and delight of her parents and therapist.

Her favorite subject right now is letters. She knows them all; show her the alphabet and name any letter and she'll point to it. She has a set of cards which show letters of the alphabet on one side and an object beginning with said letter on the other. You can lay them out in front of her, letter-side up, say the name of one of the objects on the opposite side, and she will pick up the corresponding card and turn it over to reveal the object. She can do it in reverse, too; put them object-side up and say a letter, and she'll give you the right one.

Even more exciting is that she's beginning to say the names of some of the letters verbally. Some are clear as a bell, such as A, F, M or T; while with others she tends to say the sound rather than the letter (like B). She's also enchanted with Wheel of Fortune. Recently, she watched as a contestant called out the letter M, then she turned around, looked me straight in the eye, and said “Emmm.” Then she turned back around and pointed to the letter when Vanna revealed it and said “Emmm” again. (She also applauds along with the audience, spins in place whenever she sees the wheel spinning, and quite sensibly refrains from laughing when Pat Sajak makes a lame joke.)

A really interesting incident happened yesterday: Gorgeous Wife saw her pointing in the general direction of the top of the refrigerator. Since she likes to point at things to get you to say their names, Gorgeous Wife thought that perhaps she was pointing at the kitchen timer and said, “Clock.” She looked confused for a bit, then signed “Red.” As it turned out, she was trying to say that she wanted some Doritos, which were in a bright red bag sitting on top of the refrigerator. She pointed, but when that didn't get the desired results, and she didn't know the word for the thing she was pointing at, she circumlocuted. Maybe not a big deal for a typical kid, but from what I understand, it's huge for kids with autism.

Anyway, so things are looking really positive for her. The therapist has been astounded by how well she's been doing. (She resorted to using full-sheet note forms instead of the half-sheets; there was just too much progress to document!) Now that she can communicate somewhat better than she used to, she is a lot happier and seems to have a voracious appetite for learning new things.

Finally! A Buyer!

So it looks like we've got a buyer for our condo. It's not certain yet—the buyer's loan still has to be finalized, for example—but this is very encouraging for us. We aren't getting quite as much as we would have hoped, but in this market, nobody's paying asking price. Maybe we'll make that up on the buying side. Anyway, assuming all goes well (knock on wood), we should be closing on September 25. Now we're scrambling like mad to find and buy a new place!

Talk to the Hand

My daughter has learned a fair bit of sign language to help her overcome the communication barrier due to her autism. By itself, spoken words give only one sensory “bridge” between the word and the concept; signing gives her three: auditory, visual and kinetic. It seems to be (slowly) working, as the few words she does say vocally are the ones that she's been signing the longest.

Just like spoken languages, you encounter local variations in ASL. It's been kind of frustrating to look up signs on the Internet and discover different sites teaching different signs for the same concept in ASL. Anyway, after some searching I ran into Lifeprint.com, which at least tries to document the variations and give you an idea of what's the most common.

Anyway, below are some signs my daughter knows. She doesn't always spontaneously make the signs when she wants something, but she will usually make them if you say the word or show her the corresponding object. Try them out on her the next time you see her!

• Mom and Dad (She tends to just point at the top of her head for “Dad.”)
• Baby (She rocks her whole body back and forth instead of just her arms.)
• All done
• Milk (Easy: Think of squeezing a cow's udder.)
• Eat
• Drink
• Cup
• Cereal
• Water (She loves this sign. If she makes it, it's not because she's thirsty. It means she wants you to turn on the faucet so she can play with the water!)
• Potty (Not potty trained yet, but she understands the sign.)
• Sleep
• Please
• Thank you (Still working on this one!)
• Help
• Stop (She doesn't really understand this as a command yet. Signing “stop” and “go” is mostly a game at this point.)
• Go
• More (We're teaching her to use this one in conjunction with “Please.”)
• Cat
• Dog (Multiple variations on this one; the one she knows is slapping the thigh then snapping, although she doesn't actually snap.)
• Bird
• Duck (She just uses the first two fingers and the thumb.)
• Cow

Smiling All the Time!

Huuh.

My 2½-year-old daughter stands in front of me, arms stretched out from her sides. “Huuh,” she says.

“Huuh” is special. A “huuh” is a hug, and it's one of the few things she actually asks for. In fact, it's one of the few things she can express verbally, because my little girl, standing there with her arms stretched out for a hug, is autistic.

We've suspected something like this for a while. We'd become increasingly concerned about her reluctance to talk, as well as other behavior, such as not responding well to her own name, some compulsive/ritualistic behavior and selectivity about food. Our pediatrician and a speech therapist have evaluated her, and have come to the consensus that she is mildly autistic. I know that the term mildly ought to be comforting, but it's hard to feel that way right now.

To some extent, I understand what she will have to deal with as she grows, having myself grown up with attention-deficit disorder. The frustration of struggling with things that come so easily to others is something to which I can definitely relate. To this day, I must take extraordinary measures to remember things like appointments or tasks, or to make sure that I don't lose things. If I am given a task, I am strongly inclined to just do it right then and there, because I know that the odds are high that I will otherwise forget it. For about a year when we moved into our new home, I had to maintain a ritual of tethering my keys and wallet to my belt until it became a habit to always put them back in my pockets instead of just leaving them in some random place. It's upsetting to see other people able to do these things with far less effort.

Fortunately, the prognosis for our daughter seems fairly good. She doesn't talk much, but she does say a few words, and she's slowly learning more. She also understands some sign language, and there are a number of common autism difficulties that are mild or absent in her. Nothing is certain at this point, but it seems that, despite some struggles, she will likely be able to live a relatively normal life, much like myself.

I look at my little girl, and I can tell there are thoughts and feelings trapped in that little head that she wants to tell me. I want to come home and have her tell me about what she ate that day, or the funny thing that Elmo did on Sesame Street, or the game that she played with Mommy. It may be some time before that happens.

But what she can tell me is, “I love you.” She stands in front of me, stretches out her arms, and says “Huuh.”

Anyone Looking for a Condo?

So I'm moving. At least, I'm reasonably certain that I will be moving. It is, of course, dependent on my selling my current home and purchasing another one. I've got great credit and a great Realtor, so I'm pretty confident that it will happen before too long.

I think that getting a mortgage may be the most frightening thing I have ever done, and now I'm lining up for a bigger one. (“Please, sir, I want more!”) I don't deny that it's probably a good idea for us to move at this point in our lives, seeing as we're kind of outgrowing our current home, but the whole experience fills me with an irrational trepidation which I somehow twist into a more rational caution.

We aren't moving very far, by the way, in case you were worried (or maybe relieved) at the prospect of us leaving the state. We're still planning on staying in the Salt Lake Valley.

Breaking Radio Silence

Sorry for the lack of updates. As might be expected, life got a lot busier after our son's birth. You may have heard that at his two week appointment with the pediatrician he was believed to be experiencing tachycardia, but when he had an electrocardiogram on Monday his heart rate seemed normal. We're still waiting for the official word from Primary Children's Hospital regarding the results, but it looks hopeful.

The other reason for the recent neglect of my blog is the fact that I have been spending a lot of time the last couple of weeks working late and muttering curses at web browsers under my breath. Turns out it's quite difficult to make an audio player widget that 1) works in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox and Safari; 2) detects Windows Media Player or QuickTime and uses either; and 3) can be dynamically added or removed from a page.

The infuriating thing is that this shouldn't be my job at all; the browser ought to be smart enough that I can just hand it some audio content and it will just figure out how to play it. The W3C and WHATWG finally got their heads together on the HTML5 standard which supposedly makes embedding media easy, but I'll probably be dead before support is widespread enough that I can actually use it.

Creature Descends on Salt Lake City

SALT LAKE CITY — Reports have surfaced of an unusual creature which showed up at Intermountain Medical Center at Salt Lake City early yesterday morning. It seems to have a strange effect on the minds of those who see it: almost invariably, they begin to talk about how small or cute it is. Occasionally it has been heard to emit sounds which immediately provoke a sympathetic reaction in those who hear it. Experts from the hospital theorize that these may be mechanisms that allow the creature to survive and infiltrate a society.

It permitted itself to be examined by scientists. They found it to be male creature weighing 6 pounds 9 ounces and measuring 21 inches in length. A woman who came to the hospital complaining of abdominal pain apparently discovered the creature during her stay and decided to take care of it, as it seemed quite helpless. She and her husband intend to bring it into their home, although hospital officials have warned the couple against possible effects, such as insomnia and negative reaction from the couple's toddler.

PREGCON 1

I repeat: We are at PREGCON 1. Details to follow.

Browsers... *grr*

I've fiddled with the site template a bit. I got rid of the Blogger header bar and moved some of the things that were on it into the sidebar. Didn't really care for the date headers, so I got rid of them, and I also cleaned up the CSS so that it should look good in the latest version of pretty much any browser now. The sidebar still looks lousy in IE 6. (Hang them, anyway, I say!) I'll try and clean that up at some point, but for now I'm liking it.

Still at PREGCON 2 for the moment. We were thinking that the baby would probably come this week, but the contractions she was having before have mostly stopped, so who knows? We will, of course, keep you posted.

We Are at PREGCON 2

A friend of mine has unintentionally shamed me into posting again. I haven't seen him in a good six years at least, but through the magic of “teh Interwebs” I've found his blog. In one post, he indicates that he doesn't feel that he has posted as often as he should. Ha! He has only to look at my pathetic corner of the “blogosphere” (I cannot use that term without irony) to see a case of true posting neglect. I resolve (famous last words) this year to post more regularly. After all, as this incident has shown, I can't expect old friends to find me in the online wilderness if I don't leave some footprints.

So during my multi-month radio silence, Gorgeous Wife and I managed to find time to make another baby, and he's due “any time now” according to the doctor. So we are, as I have indicated, at PREGCON 2 at our home. If you would like the full PREGCON scale, as I'm sure all of my readers (i.e. my mom) are, I am happy to oblige:

• PREGCON 5: Not pregnant
• PREGCON 4: First and second trimester
• PREGCON 3: Third trimester
• PREGCON 2: Early labor
• PREGCON 1: Active labor

So we're probably going to be heading rapidly to the hospital sometime in the next couple of weeks. When I get a chance after he's born, I'll be sure to post some pictures here.

(You are reading my blog, right Mom? Mom?)