Who I Want To Be When I Grow Up

There is a little-old lady that I see almost every weekday on my way up to the church. I always see this lady on my way up the hill. She's about 4 ft. nothing and about 75 lbs. She's a tiny little thing. It doesn't matter if its summer or winter, I usually see her. She bundles up in a puffy down coat when its cold. She has jet-black hair that she clearly has done about once a week. She often wears these gray camouflage pants which I find hilarious. It shows a bit of spunk. She appears to be in her 80's although I can't be certain about that. I know where she lives because I see her out cleaning up leaves and sweeping/shoveling snow off of her walks. She goes for a walk every morning. She usually carries a walking stick. She looks like she is walking just as fast as her little body will carry her. She always stops to regain her balance and catch her breath along the fence by the cemetery. She stops for a moment holding on to the fence and then off she goes. I think she's amazing. The walk is clearly a struggle for her, but she keeps at it. She has a lot of drive to keep on keeping on. I love this. I want to be just like her when I get to be her age. She's on the go. She stays active. She's great! I don't want to curl up in my rocking chair when I reach my golden years. I want to be a busy, healthy, active person in camouflage pants. Which means I should probably start now so I will look as good as this lady in another 40 years.

We Received Guy's Official Diagnosis Today

So drumroll please . . . The formal diagnosis goes something like this . . . A Typical Autism - more specifically some variant of PPD-NOS with a secondary diagnosis of a Cognitive Disorder Not Otherwise Specified which is not Mental Retardation (say that three times fast). So now we know what we already knew but have it on paper for all of the agencies that require such a thing. Our boy is just as unique and interesting as we have always believed him to be. ;)

There are other more specific things we were told and specific recommendations for school and such. For instance he processes information very slowly. He will always do so. But, we can make appropriate accommodations for that. In some areas he is very delayed but he can and will improve with the appropriate interventions. He already receives a lot of the help he needs. It will just need to be adjusted and fine tuned.

He has very low verbal cognition but average non-verbal cognition. So less talk and much more visual presentation. We will have to stop talking the poor boy to death as this isn't very useful. All these years of him looking at us like WTF? now makes much more sense. Poor kid. We will have to come up with more visual and hands on stuff. We must also break information down into bite sized tidbits if we want him to remember it. Too much input at one time and he pretty much stops processing. Go figure. We have also discovered that if we make information personally relevant he will retain it with incredible recall and detail. (Seriously the kid can remember an infinite amount of crap from when he was two years old.) However, if we just shovel in novel information and it has no meaning to him personally, he doesn't have the ability to even store it, let alone recall it. This last bit we didn't realize. We will have to come up with new strategies to get the mundane information into that handsome head of his.

I really find this all quite fascinating from a psychological stand point. The brain is amazing.