Autism High’s and Low’s

It’s Monday and that’s the day that we link a post to Magic Moment’s over at The Oliver’s Madhouse. When Jamie tweeted me to let me know the link was open I had every intention of writing a post about our last visit to the zoo, which was a little while ago now but I have video that I want to share and memories I want to keep. From the title you obviously know that this post won’t be about the zoo!

When writing my blog posts I do try to intentionally write positive posts about Ethan. This is because it helps me when I’m having my down moments. It’s also because I’m aware that everything I share on this blog is becoming public property and I’m aware that Ethan will someday become aware of it’s existence. As his mother I don’t want to share anything that could potentially cause him embarrassment or give someone fuel for bullying. 

Today has been a bad day, a day when I start to feel like I’m a failure as a mother, a day when I feel like I give up too easily, a day when the guilt starts to choke you and drag you down. A day that has included a massive melt down that resulted in the iPad being thrown at me in a hulk like fashion, I can feel the bruises starting to appear as I write this. The melt down resulted in me even placing Ethan on the ‘naughty step’, something I haven’t been able to do before because Ethan would just laugh at me, and to my surprise Ethan stayed there. He must have known it had gone too far!  

I can hear you thinking ‘How can this post possibly include a Magic Moment?!’ Let me explain. 

Ethan returned home from nursery at lunch time and we had some lovely Ethan cuddles. I decided that we would work on this week’s key worker homework of posting and matching. Ethan was happy to do the posting but I lost his attention half way through matching and he decided that he wanted to read on his own in his Ethan way. So I decided to try to engage with him again by reading to him but he just screamed at me and snatched the book from me, I left him to it. I then decided to take him to his room to see if he would like to play with something else with me, but he just didn’t want to know. This was the point that I decided to give up, he just wanted to play by himself today. So I took him back downstairs and this is when we got our Magic Moment. 

I hadn’t put away the objects that we use for his posting and matching task. These items include a spoon, a bowl, a boy, a frog, a snake, a fish, a dog and a brick. Ethan sat down next to them and stated to examine the objects. All of a sudden he picked up the spoon and started to stir it in the bowl, he then put the spoon up to his mouth and PRETENDED to eat something from it. 

Now this is an achievement in itself because Ethan can not feed himself and refuses to use a spoon on his own! So as you can imagine I was gobsmacked. 

He did this a few times as I watched so I asked him if the little boy could have some and I put the spoon to the little dolls mouth. He then repeated this action himself and also fed me. I then asked him if the dog/fish/snake could have some, he put the spoon up to all of them. 

Could it be that my little boy was using his imagination?! Role-playing for the first time?! 

I did have to laugh as he also decided to feed the lego brick too, and I’m sure someone will tell me that this is because he is just copying something he has seen other children do. He therefore doesn’t know it’s meaning, but today on our low day with autism our little high is that Ethan did some ‘role-play’. It lasted for all of five minutes but those five minutes are our Magic Moment for this week.