Since last year, when my sister showed me how to use my Snapchat app the kids have been obsessed with taking daily snapchat photos and videos. My kids really love getting on my phone and sending snapchats to our family and friends. So I’ve decided to have a little bit of fun showing off some of the fun Snaps my kids and family have made.
The school year started for us back in July. I didn’t know really where to pick back up since my last post was eons ago. I became very ill after our summer vacation to the west coast. Long story short, I started having agonizing pains that came and went randomly. It took us over a year to find out that I was having serious gallbladder problems. I finally had it removed this summer before the school year began and I’m just now getting back to feeling like myself.
Note to readers: pray you never have to have any type of surgery while raising kids. Since Ryan is a teacher, he was available to help full-time around the house while I was in recovery from surgery. And while my husband was absolutely wonderful, I couldn’t help but cringe when he wouldn’t do my “job” the way I did, LOL! He did literally everything for me during my recovery, and I had to just watch as my household plunged into a less than typical chaos. I am extremely grateful, both to A) have a husband who has the summers off of work and B) have a husband who is 100% a team player (I mean he tried really hard to fill my shoes). Hahaha, that’s seriously the hardest part of recovery if you’re a parent; watching someone else cover for you without being able to help or do it yourself.
Both Dylan and Gabby have started second grade this year…I have double second graders!! That’s basically second grade SQUARED. At the beginning, they were pretty stoked about moving up a grade level. Dylan was excited to finally be leaving 1st grade behind, as we held him back a year. Gabby was just happy to be going back to seeing her friends. We’ve only been back at school for 3 months and we are already having crisis interventions from the school. Both kids are off to a rough start for different reasons.
Dylan was held back in first grade at our request because he was so far behind with learning how to read. He did much better his second time in first grade, but still struggled with his reading and comprehension. We found out at the end of the school year that he has several vision problems: astigmatism, hyperopia, a binocular dysfunction, an accommodative infacility, and oculomotor dysfunction (Translation: basically his eye muscles don’t work together with his brain). He is receiving vision therapy weekly from an ocular 
specialist, and is slowly making improvements with the vision games they send home to help train his brain and eyes to function as a team. Dylan actually is developing an interest in reading even though trying to read on demand still stresses him out. He’s also kind of lazy and hates doing anything that is appears the slightest like “homework”. Something tells me that hating homework or work of any kind is a typical kid behavior that he’s just going to have to get over. I hate doing housework, but it’s my job and it keeps my home from looking and smelling like a petting zoo! I’d trade jobs with my son in a millisecond if I could, even with all that common core math we have nowadays; I just need to make Dylan see that there are worse things than being stuck doing ones homework every night!!
Dylan has been getting bullied at school by some of his peers who tease him. He’s the kind of kid who wears his emotions on his sleeve and other kids have picked up on it. If he’s having a difficult time with his work and gets upset, the kids start ribbing him about being a crybaby. He reacts by internalizing his anger about being teased until he finally explodes like a volcano. So far, he’s had 2 disciplinary referrals for kicking chairs in class during incidents where he was being teased. My husband and I are working on getting Dylan to get him to just laugh off mean things kids say to him. Hopefully that approach will work and help keep him out of trouble.
Gabby on the other hand is the complete opposite of her brother. She is never bullied for anything! The kids at school are too scared of her meltdowns to ever tease her. I think the school told me at one of my weekly meetings with the school appointed the
rapist that my child is on a shortlist of children with extreme behavior problems at the school. She has already had several disciplinary referrals for not following directions, meltdowns, or violent outbursts. Thankfully, Gabby doesn’t have any learning disabilities so we know she is capable of doing well in school.
The only unfortunate thing about having a child who has tantrums frequently is that these behaviors keep her out of class pretty often. As a result, she has to be isolated from her peers and misses a lot of classroom instruction from the teacher. Gabby’s grades suffer because she gets less time to finish tests and assignments due to being pulled out of class for having a meltdown. Things are also made more difficult by the fact that her meltdowns are very hard to predict. One day this sets her off and the next day she’s okay with that, which makes tantrum prevention very tough on the staff at school. All of the school staff members have been doing a fantastic job in dealing with Gabby’s behavior issues. Gabby gets social stories throughout her day to help her with transitions from one subject to another. She is rewarded for her good behavior with a sticker chart. Her sticker chart has two types of rewards: short term and long term. Short term rewards consist of prizes like a piece of candy or a small knick-knack at the end of each day. Long term rewards are specially arranged meetings with a friend who is in 1st grade, lunch with a teacher/adult, or a game on the computer. She has so much support from behavior specialists, occupational specialists, therapists, school psychologists, and special education teachers who are really working with her to get the best behavior out of her.
Positives about 2nd Grade:
Negatives about 2nd Grade:
Both kids are improving as the year goes on, but I already know we have a long, trying school year ahead. Bring it on!
After spending the last 5 days driving from Indiana to California I was extremely exhausted. We had just driven across 8 states in less than a week with my daughter in tow; I honestly never expected to do something like this without having a nervous breakdown along the way. Surprisingly we didn’t have too many meltdowns from Gabby on our trip. I attribute this to the fact that Nanny was in the back seat with her…and she also slept through a lot of the driving. So we have now arrived in Anaheim; first night here and we get to go to the rooftop of our hotel to watch the fireworks display at Disneyland! What a wonderful treat!!
Disneyland fireworks seen from our hotel rooftop
Day 6: We visited the Queen Mary in Long Beach. I can’t begin to explain how dysfunctional this trip ended up being. We took the self-guided tour, but my mother in-law, Mary, only wanted to see the Princess Diana exhibit. She abandoned the tour in favor of this exhibit, and from there everyone just pretty much did their own thing. Ryan and I walked around the decks with the kids who weren’t really interested in learning the history of the RMS Queen Mary through the self-guided tour. My father in-law, Ray, stayed close by waiting for Mary to finish her exhibit. My sister in-law, Natalie, trailed along with her mother to see the Princess Di exhibit. My sister in-law, Allie, and her boyfriend, Billy, are the only people who continued the self-guided tour. I didn’t really get to learn much or explore much of the ship, but it was a great experience just to be able to walk onto a ship that has so much history that I normally would not get to see.
Day 7: Our first trip to the beach was at Santa Monica Beach. This was a really fun day for us. It was the first time Dylan and Gabby had ever seen the Pacific Ocean and the first family trip taken to any ocean. We buried Gabby in the sand and gave her a mermaid tail, we dug in the wet sand looking for sand crabs, we saw a guy feeding seagulls, and we got to use our boogie boards in the water. We were so burned out after playing on the beach and in the water that we didn’t get to go to the pier for the rides. We had a BLAST!!
Day 8: Our trip to the happiest place on earth, Disneyland!! This trip was most definitely a successful adventure. We had to get a family fast pass for Gabby since we knew she couldn’t handle waiting in a long line. We didn’t get to ride everything, but I’m completely okay with that. We went on the Finding Nemo ride, Space Mountain, Disneyland Railroad, Matterhorn, Snow White, Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain, and Pirates of the Caribbean (several times). Unfortunately, Gabby wasn’t tall enough for the Indiana Jones ride. I guess we will have to make a return trip to Disneyland one day. We got to meet Thor from the Avengers; Gabby asked him lots of questions. Dylan was picked for Jedi Training where he had a lightsaber duel with his hero Darth Vader. I was almost certain he’d try to join the Dark Side! We tried on many hats at the Mad Hatter’s hat shop. We allowed for each child to pick out something special to take home from the gift shops. Dylan built his own lightsaber, red of course, like Lord Vader. Gabby bought herself an Anna/Elsa doll. We stayed at the park until closing time and left wishing we had one more day to explore.
Day 9: Anaheim Angels game and a trip to Huntington Beach to see the old house. My in-laws took Dylan and Gabby to their first Angels baseball game while Ryan and I checked out my hometown together. We saw the house where I grew up when I lived in Huntington Beach, and drove by all the places I remembered as a kid. It was a nice trip filled with many memories and a ton of nostalgia. Not a lot has changed since I left…which is really surprising since I haven’t lived there in more than a decade. We also had to make a stop at Carls Jr. for some fried zucchini. Sounds strange I know, but there is no Carls Jr. in Indiana and I had to complete the nostalgia journey, LOL! It was worth it!! This day was also my mother in-laws birthday, so we also had dinner at Bubba’s Shrimp Co. Then we headed back to Huntington Beach to spend sunset as a family at the pier.
Day 10: Hollywood Walk of Fame and The El Capitan Theatre. We went to Hollywood with only one purpose. To find Peter Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We are really big nerds and I am a huge fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. My dream would be to one day make it to New Zealand for a family vacation just so we can go to Hobbiton. We found PJ’s star pretty quickly, so we decided to see a movie that Gabby really wanted to see at a 89 year old theatre called the El Capitan. It was well worth the money we paid for the tickets. Inside Out was a great movie, we had such a great time! It was a little overwhelming with all the people dressed as fun characters like Capt Jack Sparrow, Spiderman, Batman, and minions and then asking for money for photos or high fives. We ended up telling the kids not to talk to anyone because we didn’t feel comfortable with all of these random people just walking up to us wanting some money in return and the kids really didn’t understand that the people in costume expected money for photo ops and high fives!
Day 11: Whale watching experience at Newport Beach. Well we didn’t get to see any whales, but we did get to see dolphins and some seals on a buoy. It was pretty cool. We ate breakfast on the boat that tasted fantastic. The kids really liked being surrounded by dolphins who were following the boat. It was a little difficult at times to keep Gabby calm since we were on an enclosed space and it was not easy to take her to a quiet place when she became upset. She really just didn’t understand why we didn’t want her walking all over the boat; it wasn’t something she saw as dangerous.
That was our last day in Cali. After the Whale Watching we started our drive to our next vacation destination to visit with family in Arizona.
Our Trip to California this summer!!!
The Family at the peir in Huntington Beach, CA
So we packed up our Toyota Corolla at the end of June and headed west. Our ultimate destination was the beautiful sunny coastline of Southern California. We had previously arranged to drive with just myself, my husband Ryan, and my grandmother (aka “Nanny”). Nanny hadn’t had a vacation in years and I needed a driver to switch off with, so she happily agreed to go with us. The kids were both supposed to be flying with my in-laws to Vegas and then driving the rest of the way with us to Cali. However, two weeks prior to our trip we decided that we weren’t sure if Gabby was ready to fly (with her anxiety of new things) so we cancelled her ticket and added her to our car passenger list.
Our 2 hr traffic jam
Gabby getting a tour of a semi
Day 1: We left Indiana after a late morning start due to last minute unpreparedness about our schedule. We ran into some issues as soon as we made it to Illinois. There was apparently a very serious accident on the section of I-70 we were traveling. We ended up trapped on the freeway for 2 hours with a 6 year old with severe behavioral issues and very little patience. The first obstacle with this was the almost immediate need for her to go potty. We had to convince her that the only way to go was outside in the flora and fauna alongside the freeway. It was a very difficult task to get her to finally agree to pee out in nature, but mission accomplished! Then boredom set in after she decided that she had no interest in the coloring books, video games, or movies that we brought for our journey. This was alleviated when a trucker who was also trapped in gridlock asked my daughter if she’d like a tour of the truck cab and get to blow the horn. The rest of the time was passed by letting her pick wildflowers along that stretch of shutdown highway. That was fun! After leaving our highway incident behind, we traveled all the way through Illinois, Missouri, and most of Kansas before calling day 1 a night.
beginning of the Rockies
Gabby in the Rocky Mountains
Day 2: The following morning we left Kansas and made our way into the Colorado Rockies before nightfall. It was a beautiful sight, but letting my 70 year old grandmother drive our not fully paid off leased vehicle through the mountains was scary as hell!! We made it through the worst part of the mountains before dark and when night came I took over and drove the rest of the way out and into Utah where we booked it hoping to make it into Nevada overnight. It was good that the speed limit in Utah is like 90, we made good timing and I thought we were going to make it into Nevada before the next morning, but then exhaustion began to hit me. We ended up stopping at a gas station near the end of our Utah journey and sleeping until morning in the car. Having not anticipated how long the Utah section of our trip would be we failed to make plans on finding a hotel. We all slept pretty well for being crammed in a small model car and being at a gas station/truck stop area; I think it was mostly due to exhaustion and frustration.
Beautiful Colorado Rockies
View of the Colorado Rockies
Day 3: We woke up in the car at the truck stop, at dawn! Not at all surprising when considering our situation. I was very determined to get us to our next stopping point which was Las Vegas!! We got to drive trough some of Arizona on the way to Nevada. The desert is one of the least likely places I’d ever think to find beauty, but the scenery there is quite spectacular! I saw backdrops I’d only seen in paintings during our drive through the deserts of Arizona and Nevada. We finally made it to our hotel in Las Vegas where we were to stay for the weekend before heading to Cali.
Desert in Nevada
Desert in Arizona
Day 4: We met up with my son Dylan, and my in-laws, and my husband’s sisters who flew in from Indianapolis. Dylan loved his 1st airplane ride; he didn’t get sick and wasn’t bothered by his ears popping. We stayed in a very small 1br hotel with a pull-out sofa; it was quite cramped. We had Ryan, his mom Mary, his step-dad Ray, his sister Natalie, his sister Allison and her boyfriend Billy, and my daughter Gabby and I in this tiny hotel room. Luckily, Dylan and Nanny stayed in a hotel with my step-mom and sister who drove up from Arizona to spend some time with us in Vegas. We spent the evening at one of our favorite Las Vegas hangouts, Circus Circus Hotel & Casino. Dylan and Gabby really enjoyed the game area and the performances! We just happened to be visiting Sin City during EDC Las Vegas and the funniest thing that happened from our time in Vegas was when my 7 year old son, Dylan asked me if we had traveled to a country where people don’t where as many clothes, LOL!! He had never seen so many scantily clad women in his life, and we had to explain to him that this is just how people like to dress in Las Vegas. A drunk woman dressed in not much more than a string bikini actually apologized to my son in passing while we were out after seeing how distressed he looked at the sight of her!
Dylan in the window seat
Fun at 30,000ft
Day 5: We left Sin City in the afternoon and made our way to California, making a special trip to Running Springs to drop Nanny off at her cousin Wally’s cabin where she was going to spend the week. We stayed for a little while catching up with Wally and his wife before we headed back down the mountain and back on the freeway towards our hotel in Anaheim.
Beautiful View from Wally’s Cabin in Running Springs, CA
Regression is one of those things that I’m sure every parent of a child who has autism hates to go through. The other day our daughter’s therapist told us she thinks Gabby may be going through some regression. We’d been seeing signs of her slipping back into some of her old behaviors for a few weeks now. It still stinks when they tell you that she can’t help it and we don’t know how long it will take to get back to the progress we had been making. As a parent, it makes you find yourself asking “what could we have done to have prevented this slip backwards?”. I wanted to cry when the therapist gave her answer, “Nothing”. According to her, children with spec trum disorders often regress into many past behaviors. It’s just like a phase or a cycle that Gabby is going through right now. To make it worse, the therapist also said that regression can last days, weeks, or even years.
I felt so heartbroken. To think that we’d made all of this progress with Gabby, and now we are moving backwards and starting over. . . this isn’t Candyland, where you have to go back to the start or Monopoly where you go back to Go and don’t collect $200! This is real life; how could this be happening! It is the worst feeling when you realize you just spent the last three years correcting all of these issues and getting your child on track only to be right back where you started. It just doesn’t seem fair!
In the last couple of weeks, Gabby has been experiencing an increased sensory overload. This is where, the sounds and sensations she is feeling overwhelm her and she can’t handle it so she has a meltdown. It happened at her birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese. We were in line to get her prizes and there was a crowd of people building up behind us. When it got to be her turn to pick her toys, she froze and didn’t respond. So I said, “Gabby, tell the lady what you want, there are other people waiting”. She spent a few more seconds and started showing some signs of distress (whining, covering up her ears) and then she just exploded. She yelled out “It’s too loud and all of these people won’t shut up and I can’t think!”. We had to move her to the other side of the prize area so she could pick out her toys without a ton of people encroaching on her and talking about what they wanted. She even melted down about being moved to the other prize area, until she realized that 
the prizes on that side were the same as the others. I know Chuck-E-Cheese is a noisy place, but it still surprised us that she reacted like that because it had been over a year since she had experienced any sensory overload like this. I kind of put this incident behind me and thought maybe it was just a fluke or that it was in fact way too noisy for her in there. Then last night during therapy, her brother decided to run around the house pushing his toy truck and it happened again. She started screaming telling Dylan to stop, telling us he was being too loud for her to color in her workbook. Even when Dylan tried to slow down and play with the truck quietly, she still just couldn’t stand it.
We have also been seeing an increase in Gabby’s tantrums. Anytime something dissatisfies her she has reacted by having massive meltdowns. I had a doctors appointment this week and had to have my in-laws come over to see the kids off the bus. Unfortunately, Dylan’s bus comes earlier than Gabby’s and she knows that too. That morning when my mother-in-law called to confirm that she would be there in the afternoon, Gabby became instantly upset. When I asked her what was wrong she pointed out the fact that Dylan would get to spend more time with Grandma Mary. She was crying and very emotional about it. I did my best to calm her but I was interrupted by the bus arriving to pick her up for school. That afternoon I got home just as Gabby’s bus was arriving to drop her off with Grandma, Grandpa and Dylan waiting for her. Just as I had anticipated, the second she stepped off the bus and saw them with Dylan and me already home from my appointment she became distraught. It was so bad that she didn’t stop crying until they left. No matter how much Grandma Mary promised that she’d get to spend more time with her on the weekend or that they didn’t really spend that much more time with Dylan, nothing helped to calm her. She was so angry and upset, her face turned a shade of deep red, she was stamping her feet, and would tense up becoming very rigid and stiff every time Grandma would respond to her. She would go back and forth from being “lucid” for a few seconds and then right back into meltdown mode. It got so bad that I had to scold her for the way she was speaking to her grandmother. And like many of her tantrums she shut off her waterworks, her screaming, and her meltdown like a light switch the second her grandma walked out the door. To her it was like nothing had ever happened. These tantrums can occur over the most minor happenings. Some examples of some of the things that can set her off include: her brother getting to pick his own show to watch, her brother needing alone time, getting the wrong color plate at dinner time, her not being able to get her writing or a drawing just the way she wants it to look, if Dylan’s craft looks better than hers, and my personal favorite is when the marshmallow to dry cereal ratio in her Lucky Charms is inadequate therefore rendering them inedible. Even a broken crayon can seem like the end of the world to my daughter. No matter how much you tell her that we can peel off the paper and it’s still the same crayon, to her it is simply unusable and must be destroyed.
Another really awful regression we have been seeing is her selective hearing. Sometimes when we are trying to get her attention she just doesn’t seem to hear us. I can be saying her name over and over again but she looks on and doesn’t acknowledge one word I’ve said. If we didn’t know any better, we’d think there was something wrong with her hearing. This happened the other day when I caught Gabby mindlessly eating one of her crayons. I yelled out her name to get her attention, “Gabby”. No response, not even a blink of her eyes. I said her name a bit louder “Gabby!”. Still, nothing, still shaving off little bits of colored wax into her mouth. I finally walked over to her and had to physically remove the crayon from her hand, “We don’t eat crayons, Gabby, they are for coloring on paper only”. A couple minutes later I had to take the crayons away after catching her chewing on another wonderful wax-flavored color of the rainbow (sigh).
I know it’s only three slips of regression but add to it that we are still dealing with her day-to-day behavioral issues, and you can understand how overwhelming this situation feels. The current issues include: needing her meals to be a certain way, needing clothes to be just so, wanting to be on schedule for every little thing with absolutely no room for deviation, her need to talk incessantly to express herself and her often very abrasive opinions, and her needing to run, stand, and be in motion basically during all waking hours (this includes meal times – she simply cannot sit still). As parents, Ryan and I will have to revisit our past ways of defusing tantrums, correcting her selective hearing, and making sure we prevent her sensory overload as often as we can. All that on top of the work we already have been doing to keep her well behaved, well adjusted, stress free, and most importantly happy; it’s a lot to take on.
I suppose when you are a parent raising a child with autism you kind of have to be prepared to change gears at a moments notice. I know I feel super overwhelmed at times with all the sudden changes and new information we are learning everyday about autism. I admit that I think that the regression is a horrible thing that I wish we didn’t have to experience, but I honestly think that living through all it is making us better parents than we ever thought we would be. My daughter may exhaust me and stress me out like no other child, but I also couldn’t be more proud of the little person she is becoming. And I like to think Ryan and I have a huge part to play in how far she has grown in her six years on this planet. Gabby is an intelligent, creative, loving, well spoken albeit opinionated, and sometimes wise beyond her years six year old. What parent wouldn’t be proud of that!
I thought this would be an appropriate throwback since we are currently finalizing our plans to take a summer vacation trip to Las Vegas and California. Having spent many summers and a few of my school years growing up in Huntington Beach, California, I’m really excited to go back. I can’t wait to show my kids the house where we lived, the streets where I walked to school, and the places we would go with my family.
I’m hoping we can afford a trip to Disneyland while we are there. I have some wonderful memories of the happiest place on earth and I want our little family to have some good memories there as well. I think the kids are going to love it, and I won’t even mind riding “It’s A Small World” over and over as long as we can do some of the big rides too. My personal favorite was always the “Pirates of the Caribbean.” I heard it has changed since the last time I rode it; I hope it’s not too different. I’m also looking forward to eating some Churros at Disneyland.
If we can’t afford Disney, I know I wouldn’t mind going to Knott’s Berry Farm. That’s a cheaper venue with just as many fun times to be had. Snoopy can be just as awesome as Mickey, right? I always loved the ghost town area there.
I can’t wait to take the kids to the beach! I’m looking forward to seeing their faces the first time they see the Pacific Ocean. I want them to build sandcastles, dig for sand crabs, walk to the pier for some ice cream, and maybe try some body surfing.
I also can’t wait to see Las Vegas again. I was just a kid the last time I was there, so I have never officially gambled; unless you count spending a couple hundred dollars at the midway at Circus Circus as gambling. It is kind of like throwing money away and you can walk away with a nice teddy bear collection.
I have so many great memories of both places. . . it’ll be good to go back and make new memories with my family.
It’s been a while, but families are always about being busy. 
I thought I would give everyone an example of a typical day in our lives. Here we go. . .
5:30 A.M. : My wonderful, loving husband gets up with his alarm and promptly hops in the shower for a quick 15 to 20 minutes. Then he gets dressed, raises both kids from their beds, hands out their early morning meal, and typically has them dressed all before I’m even batting an eyelid. Ryan often deals with a feisty, Gabrielle, trying to gently push her to eat her pop-tart/cereal, get dressed, or even go potty. We struggle with her most in the mornings, it takes the smallest deviation to set her off into a full-on “terrible two year old meltdown”. For instance: we run out of her preferred cereal or flavor of pop-tart, or she all of a sudden no longer likes that cereal or flavor of pop-tart. Sometimes the meltdowns are fashion and accessory related: I don’t want to wear pants, I wanted to wear a dress, I don’t like tights, I already have socks, or mommy already picked out something for me. Even a task as simple as “now, go find your shoes/jacket/backpack” can lead to an emotional breakdown if she’s not in the mood to look for them. Believe me, this struggle is real for parents of a child on the spectrum. I think he deserves some sort of an award for that right there.
6:20 A.M. : Ryan wakes me. Sadly, is the absolute latest I can ever sleep in on a weekday. I throw on some pants and a t-shirt, grab a granola bar, and we head out the door.
6:40 A.M. : We pile into the car. Usually, there is a personal struggle between Gabrielle and her seat belt. The seat belt often wins and we have to listen to a meltdown about how she simply can’t do it. At which point, Ryan, exits the vehicle and assists Gabby with her seat belt. If we are lucky, we make the long drive to Ryan’s job without any further meltdowns. Making it without meltdowns is very rare and we usually see a meltdown or two over things like: car territory disputes (my kids fighting over the vast space in the back seat of the car), siblings talking (Gabby gets angry with Dylan if she doesn’t agree with things he says), siblings looking at each other the wrong way (there are mornings where Dylan just looks at Gabby in a way she finds offensive).
7:15 A.M. : We drop Ryan off at his school. Ryan says his goodbyes as he prepares to plunge into a day of dealing with unruly, unpredictable teenagers. Things can be devastating for us if he forgets to say goodbye to Gabby. She has also been known to request hugs and kisses through the car window, and if this doesn’t happen then we often have a critical meltdown.
7:25 A.M. : Back to the freeway. This is probably the worst time for me personally because I’m alone in the car dealing with rush hour traffic conditions and two occasionally arguing children. It sucks to be without Ryan as my backup because I simply can’t whip around and correct the disputes between my kids. Gabby has been known to get physical over her disagreements with her brother. Sometimes I feel so bad for Dylan when he’s trapped in a car sitting next to an exploding Gabby. All I can do is threaten time-outs or toys/activities being taken away; threats that aren’t instant usually don’t mean anything to a 6 year old.
7:50 A.M. : Drop Dylan and Gabby off at school.
8:00 A.M. : Now the kids will go to class and eat their “Second Breakfast” (our school system offers a free breakfast to students, so 2 hours after eating breakfast at home they get to eat another one), and I will head home. Ah, finally my morning running is complete! I can now be at peace. I drive home, sit down to relax and oh wait. . . there is still so much stuff to do. I have dishes, laundry, bathrooms to clean, floors to vacuum, kitchen surfaces to clean, trash to take out, and random knickknacks to put away! “Well, this crap isn’t going to clean itself”, I guess I’ll pick an activity and get to it. When I’m alone is honestly the only time I can clean, free of distraction and chaos. I hate trying to clean a house when everyone is running around doing their own thing. I’m like, “Yeah, destroy the area I’ve just spent the last half hour picking up, thanks for that”. At least if I clean while everyone is away, I’ll get sometime to enjoy the house looking nice.
12:30 P.M. : Lunchtime. I use this time to a.) eat and b.) catch up on one of my favorite shows. This is generally my “ME TIME”, a time of peace, stuffing my face, and Downton Abbey or whatever.
2:00 P.M. : What! How is it 2:00 already!! What happened to my “ME TIME”, it can’t be gone that fast. Time to get up and fix the kids their after school snack. No idea why, but the school system feeds my kid at like 10:30 in the morning. Therefore, when they come home it’s like they could eat a whole meal. I try and stick with healthy snacks so he doesn’t ruin dinner. Lucky for me, the kids love eating fruits, vegetables, cinnamon/jelly toast, yogurt, and cheese sticks.
2:40 P.M. : Pick the kids up from school. Sometimes we get a meltdown or two if I ask the kids about their day. If Gabby has not had a good day at school she will become very angry or aggressive and may take it out on her brother if he had a good day. So I have learned to only ask about the school day if both kids appear to be in high spirits when they get in the car.
3:15 P.M. : After snacks are eaten, one kid gets to watch a show while the other kid does their homework. I don’t know why, but it seems to work out best this way. It’s just less fuss if I can give 100% of my help/attention to only 1 kid. Dylan’s homework can be stressful, especially when there is reading involved. He sometimes gets so frustrated with his poor reading ability that he will break down in tears. We try to encourage him to sound out the words and keep going but the pressure can get to be too much for him. This is typically the only time we see whinny/upset Dylan. Most of the time he is a pretty laid back and relaxed kid. After homework and a show, the kids either play outside if it’s nice and sunny, or they play in their rooms, or the quiet room to look at books or color/draw pictures. I usually try to check on the kids outside or in their room every 20 minutes or so. Gabby has “PICA”, a psychological condition where she will literally eat anything. I mean anything from rubber balls, erasers, crayons, styrofoam, blankets, rocks, sand, grass, flowers, soap, etc. In fact, you name it, Gabrielle has probably tried to eat it at some point. We think it’s part of her autism, but we aren’t sure and the doctors haven’t confirmed that PICA is part of the spectrum disorders.
5:00 P.M. : Prep and cook dinner. Sometimes I will also be giving the kids a bath at this time, especially on days when Gabby plays outside and gets herself muddy. She likes to dig holes his our yard; a habit Ryan and I would like to break her of; especially considering that the previous owners of our home told us they have a dog buried somewhere in the back yard.
5:30/6:00 P.M. : Serve the kids dinner. They have about 30 minutes to eat before we have to leave to pick up Ryan.
6:30 P.M. : On the road again. We hustle to get socks, shoes, and jackets back on in order to jump into the car and leave to pick up Ryan. Sometimes this activity is absolute chaos as Gabby and/or Dylan doesn’t want to leave the house; naturally they’d rather spend more after school and before bedtime, playing.The rush of getting the kids ready to head out immediately after dinner can sometimes lead to the kids skipping a step like actually putting on the socks and shoes. We’ve stopped at a store before after picking Ryan up only to realize that one kid didn’t put shoes on before jumping in the car.
7:00 P.M. : Get Ryan. We now have Ryan and are able to head back to the freeway and go home. This is often the only time of day I get a chance to talk to my husband about how his day went/how my day went. We spend much of this conversation time being interrupted by our kids and sometimes Gabby will interject her own opinion into our conversations. She thinks she knows best, and her opinion is never wrong. Challenge something she believes is fact, and it could lead to a meltdown. For example: we once had a heated debate over what time of day the kids wake up to eat breakfast. I was talking on the phone to my grandmother and Gabby overheard me telling her that Ryan gets the kids up at 6:00 in the morning to eat breakfast. Gabby immediately interjected with “No, Ryan wakes us up at 6:00 at night”. I corrected her a few times before I realized that she considers anytime where the sky is still dark to be night time. We laughed at her observation and set her straight on the truth, but she never gave up on her own point of view. She still wants to believe that Ryan wakes her up at 6:00 at night.
7:30 P.M. : Home at last. We get home and immediately start getting the kids ready for bed. They brush their teeth and go to the bathroom. Ryan reads a bedtime story from whatever book they are working on, at the moment it’s Aesop’s Fables.
8:00 P.M. : Adult time begins. After the kids are tucked away in bed Ryan and I get to re-heat and eat dinner, and spend some quality time together. We usually end up watching a show like Top Gear UK, Star Trek TNG, Heroes, Dr. Who, The Walking Dead, or Hannibal.
10:30 P.M. : Bedtime. We usually get to head to bed together. However, since Ryan teaches sometimes he has some grading or planning to do at the end of the day for an extra hour or so.
11:30 P.M. : Sleep. . .Zzzzzz. . . sleep now, rest while you can. Tomorrow the chaotic journey begins all over again.
I am Shannon. I just recently hit the big 3-0 milestone, the dirty 30. I am married to an early college professor, and we have two beautiful children together. I am a history fanatic, the family historian, the family photographer, and the family chauffeur. I’m also a self proclaimed nerd who loves BBC shows, comic book movies, Tolkien, Star Wars, The Walking Dead, Star Trek, and anything Science Fiction related.
I met my husband, Ryan, in 2005 but didn’t get an opportunity to date him until 2012. We were married on my sister’s birthday October 25, 2014. We love to be giant nerds. We enjoy cooking together, discussing life and hypothetical topics, discussing zombie apocalypse scenarios, watching British Television, watching documentaries, and going to the cinema. He is mostly blind because he was born with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease. Despite this, he teaches English Composition and Philosophy to high school students at a college prep school. Since he has only a 13% window of vision I have to drive us everywhere. Every weekday morning, I get up and drive him with our two children in tow to the school where he works; it’s about an hour drive there and back.
My son, Dylan, is a typical boy: he loves video games, superheroes, Legos, TMNT, Dr. Who, Star Wars, Batman, playing music on his guitar or his piano, and teasing his little sister. He is our family’s clown, always trying to make everyone laugh by acting goofy. He’s already a nerd and that makes Ryan and me so proud! He is also one of the most caring and polite little boys ever; I always get many compliments on how well behaved he is. If I could only get him to do some homework every once and a while, he’d be an absolute perfect child. And I may be biased but he is also super handsome! I mean, I think we’ll be in serious trouble when the teenage years get here. We recently discovered that he may have dyslexia and are in the process of having him tested. We are currently working to have him held back in 1st grade since we are just now learning that he has problems with his reading, comprehension, and difficulty with his writing. As parents, we just want to make sure he gets the support he needs to master all of the skills needed to pass 1st grade.
My daughter, Gabrielle, is. . . well she is a drama queen. She loves to be bossy, is incredibly stubborn, and beats up her older brother. We found out recently that she has high functioning autism/Asperger’s. We have known that she was “different” since she was about 9 months old. She simply wasn’t meeting the milestones we thought she should be meeting. She had very delayed speech: she was 3 years old before she could call me mommy, and she would just whine or cry to address her needs. She was a late walker, was often clumsy on her feet, and had other delayed motor skills. At the advice of a fellow mom, we took her to the school system to be tested. They immediately wrote her an IEP (Individual Education Plan) and enrolled her in Developmental Preschool. It took us two additional years to get the pediatrician to finally diagnose her as being on the autism spectrum. Apparently high functioning autism is pretty hard to diagnose. She is super intelligent, so there is nothing delayed mentally, but she has a really hard time dealing with and understanding other people. We are reading lots of books and learning how to adjust our parenting to accommodate all of her behavior issues. It’s been really tough and stressful, but I’ve discovered that many of her autism behaviors make her really special and unique compared to other kids. I don’t know anyone else who has a kid so obsessed with Frozen that they memorize all the songs in other languages or who can draw such detailed artistic drawings (all of Elsa, of course)! It’s sometimes difficult to understand many of her behaviors and it’s even more difficult to explain to people who don’t see her everyday that she acts the way she does because she is on the spectrum. Every day with Gabby is a new day, filled with new challenges. Sometimes we get things right and have zero meltdowns and sometimes we have days with many explosions of emotions. On the bad days I tell myself, “we just have to take a deep breath, count to ten, and move forward.”
Our lives are super busy keeping up with behavioral therapy, transporting people here and there, and still finding time to spend as a family on the weekends. Sometimes I just want a break from all the chaos that goes on in our day to day lives. However, I am beginning to accept the fact that my life is probably always going to feel like living in a jungle.
welcome to my jungle: a spectrum journey 