Sheffield

Gaston has taken over my camera.  It was cute at first, but it's reached the point where I can't touch my Olympus μ 820 unless it's to take a photo of him.

The first time I suspected this could be an interesting development was when we were on holiday in Tasmania.  We stopped at a cute little town called Sheffield, famous (among Tasmanians) for its murals.  When I told G to take photos of them, he did:

He  took photos of other interesting things, too:

And he proceeded to take photos of all the park benches and other things around the place:

If anyone can tell me what these green Daleks are, I'd be curious to hear it.  They're all over Australia and I never noticed them until Gaston took a photo of one:

I told myself I'd give him more freedom with the camera, to get an autistic child's perspective on our holiday.  He would mostly take photos of the inside of the car during the rest of this holiday

Darn it, I'm putting him through the same childhood I had suffered through!

Sometimes he surprised me with clever series of photos.  Here's one he took at the Melbourne Zoo weeks later:

Here's one of his own drawings, a kind of step-by-step guide on how to draw a train:

(it goes on...  best to stop here)

If you're still reading, I won't bore you with the many many MANY photos and videos of  the Lego train set.  Or the boys' favourite toy bus.  Or the names of all the train announcements, which he's copied off of YouTube and written on individual sheets of paper.  Oh, what the heck, here are a couple:

I could go on.  Pictures of Legos, of popcorn, a how-to guide on how to open the front door (not that he needs it for himself), photos he took of himself:

The above photo always brings a tear to my eye.  Oh, how I miss my beloved Olympus μ 820!

Popcorn

Well, this explains why Gaston put his Lego man halfway down the bottom of the bag of popcorn:

If you're about to embark on something big...

...then tell everyone you know.  That way, you'll feel obliged to carry it through to the end.

This week, it will be pouring down rain in Melbourne.  This will probably be our last weekend of forced enclosure before the glorious, hot Australian summer is upon us.  So our plan is to have a "games day".  There, I've said it.  Now I must do it.

My kids don't quite get games, unless they involve pretending a sliding door is an elevator door.  They want the Buckaroo horse to buck.  They want the acorns to drop in Don't Drop the Acorn.  They don't want to Whack-a-Mole or Go Fish.  So we haven't really tried playing board games in a while.

This new attempt is partially motivated by having no idea what to get Rémi for Christmas, partly motivated by the desire for an overdue spring cleaning (meaning selling unwanted toys on eBay) and mostly motivated by our desire to get our kids to play a regular game.  Wish me luck.

Chores

Having two autistic kids and no non-autistic kids can be like being stuck in a time warp.  It feels like they're still babies even though they're five and seven and they both go to school.  They barely talk.  They're not learning how to read and write and do basic arithmetic.  They're not into Batman or Spiderman or Ben 10.  The older one, Gaston, seems to be losing his baby teeth quite late (this has nothing to do with autism but it does contribute to the illusion that he's younger than he really is).

We managed to toilet-train Gaston with some difficulties.  It helped that he was interested in Lego, and I managed to make him a little Lego toilet to go inside his little Lego house for his little Lego man to sit on.  I'm not sure how much this contributed, though, because I often caught him putting the little Lego man on a little Lego table to "change his nappy".  I know he was imagining a nappy change because he said "yuck" in the same tone of voice he might have heard that word while having his own nappy change, though I make no admittance that I ever said that while changing his nappy.  (ahem)

The youngest one, Rémi, is proving more difficult.  He is not 100% toilet-trained:  he refuses to do "number two's" on a toilet, so he still wears a nappy (= a diaper) for that purpose.  He has less language than Gaston had at the same age, so he only learned the toileting skills through hard repetitive work.  We also put a nappy on him at bedtime, just to be safe.

On Thursday, after I'd left for work and while Anne was dragging herself out of bed to get the boys dressed for school, Gaston said "Come on Rémi, let's change your nappy".  He took Rémi back to the same spot in his room where we change him, made his little brother lie down and took his nappy off.

If we can teach Gaston to clean up Rémi's "number two's", we might not bother with the rest of the toileting lessons.

Annoying? Me?

If you google "Annoying Autistic Child" on google.ca (Canada's google), my blog comes up as number two.  I never said my kids were annoying, did I?

Positive reinforcement

"That's a great place to place your empty glass!  Good boy!  Do you know where would be an even better place to set it down?  Somewhere that isn't the edge of the bed..."

It's important to use lots of positive reinforcement when raising an autistic child.