January Update

I've been mulling over whether to keep this blog going or abandon it all together, and I really haven't decided either way. I'm not sure what is pulling me in the direction of abandonment. It's true that lately I've felt my time is better used on other pursuits, and frankly, I find regularly keeping up with something like a blog rather draining. When I first started this blog in 2005, my intention was to use it to keep track of Ben's progress using dietary and biomedical changes, and hopefully I would be able to consistantly post about progressions that he made. As I've become more intimately involved with the beast that is autism, I've realized that nothing about it is cut and dry. If you read back into 2005 and 2006, you'll find entries where Ben has made steps and progress that were superficial, and weren't repeated. In fact, that's been his entire story. Ben gains a skill. Ben loses and skill. Ben stops doing one stim. Ben starts up another stim. Something, like Threelac works for a while, progress is made. Then it stops working. In no sense am I ready to give up yet, but chronicling my hopes and disappointments has become taxing emotionally. It's not that Ben hasn't made any progress since last summer - don't get me wrong - he has, academically at least. This is a good place for him, probably as good as we're going to get, short of an enormous financial windfall. He's getting therapy four days a week and his therapists are wonderful. His teacher is wonderful too and he looks forward to getting on his school bus every day. Even though everything is "right", I'm afraid there are no miracles for Ben. New sounds, new behaviors, emerge every day. The spitting is constant. I understand when his extreme behaviors make others not want to be around him and therefore us. It's perfectly understandable. The average person isn't used to the backgroud noise that is a daily occurance in our house. People are freaked out by spit. I wish I could turn it all off, turn off the noise, the hysterical laughing for no apparent reason, the impish moods where he must do everything he knows he's not supposed to just to see if he can get you mad so he can laugh at the funny faces your making . . . . but I can't. I am still searching. Searching for ways to cope, searching for ways to better integrate Ben into our daily lives so that mundane tasks like waiting for the bus with the girls or going to church don't turn into neighborhood spectacles. I've accepted this is the way life is now, but I believe that one day it can and will be better. It's got to be. There's got to be an answer that we haven't found yet that will help. At least a little bit. So I may still periodically update this blog if anybody still reads it. Every now and then I might still have something to say.