Look At My Cool Duds!

Glad We're Over That!

Ben was sick last week and that was no fun at all. He was also a little sick this weekend, so I kept him home from school on Monday. But lately he's been doing great, and woke up this morning with a smile on his face. He eagerly waits by the door for his driver to come and take him to school. School has had good reports, his eye contact has gotten better and he's calmer. I started a new supplement, Pro EFA by Nordic Naturals. There's been a research study done on autistic children and over the course of 3 months, this supplement helped all of them at least a little bit, some of them it helped a lot. It's really just fish and borage oil, the basic Omega 3's and omega 6's but the combo of them seems to be benefitting Ben. Still waiting for all the ABA stuff to fall into place, but it looks like it's all going to work out. Ben had an egg noodle the other day, and within an hour, Ben was bouncing off the walls right before bedtime. He seems to get over the infractions fairly quickly, but it sure does make difference when he has gluten. Milk products don't seem to affect him as much, but I keep him away from them for the most part. I may start experimenting with milk products combined with the enzymes and see if he tolerates it. I give him a calcium supplement daily because he doesn't have dairy. I've got a couple of other things I want to try, but I'm going to spread them out over the next few months.

Something to Think About

I read an article on Autism Web about Social Security benefits and autism. Autism alone might break the Social Security system, never the baby boomers. What's going to happen when one out of 166 eighteen year olds claims Social Security disability benefits for the rest of their lives? Autism qualifies one for disability but I don't think our gov't is going to be prepared for the wave of autistic individuals it's going to face in less than 15 years. We're going to, as a nation, be responsible for taking care of all these individuals for the rest of their lives. Do you think there's going to be enough group homes for them all? Probably not. Enough sheltered workshops? Autism is 5 times more common than Down's Syndrome. You'd think the gov't would be trying to figure out how to stop autism and for heaven's sake, giving the children who already have it the very best, most intensive therapy and interventional education it can so that they don't have to support the kid for the next 70+ years of their life!!!

Refrigerator Mothers

I don't know if most of you already know this or not, but a long time ago, in the 50's, 60's and 70's, if your child had autism, it was considered to be your own fault. Doctors actually thought this. Imagine being told your child has this rare (back then, it really was rare, only 1 out of 10,000) severe developmental disability and worse of all, you caused him to be that way. It was all your fault, because you didn't love him enough, and ignored his needs and was "cold" to him, causing him to turn away from human interaction. So many moms were frankly told that, and I can imagine that more than a few of them went into a depression. Perhaps even became suicidial. It gives me the shivers to think about it. Today, there are so many people thinking about autism, why it happens so often nowdays, how to cure it, if it can be cured, who's kid is higher functioning than who's, how to get the insurance company to pay to the treatment that is needed, that frankly, it exhausts me. Sometimes I get sick of thinking about it. Sometimes I think I don't think about it enough. It looks like I am going to be able to get Tricare to pay for some ABA therapy for Ben. Now. Two years into our assignment here, I finally get all the ducks in a row and find out that there's a qualified provider of ABA therapy and consultation in Cary, and Tricare is willing to shell out for Ben to use her. Sometimes I think I stumble onto critical information like this by pure accident. Rob found out about ECHO from a magazine article, not from any helpful tricare person. I found STOMP, this great resource of military families with children with disabilities by chance, not by design. It makes me wonder what I still don't know about and how much time is slipping away because of it. Of course, if we lived on base, I hope they would have given us more guidance than I've gotten on my own, here. Better late than never I suppose.