It's the country life for us

This weekend we visited Allen's relatives living just outside of Bend. Each year on this weekend they have a large family reunion/cook out. I made pie and people loved it. Allen made Derek take a nap and I loved it. The dog ran around like a maniac and we all loved it.

The property out there is a sort of a compound. There's a central single-wide mobile home and several additional trailers, greenhouses, and mysterious buildings. (Tornado shelters?) We slept in one of the RVs. I was mostly grateful that it was horizontal and free, but Derek adored the accomodations. He'd wake up in the morning and chatter on and on about the trailer - the curtain, his bed, the dog's spot, a sink, the light with no light bulb, the mirror, the windows, the doors, the local puppy coming to visit and going in and out and in and out and in and out, oh, oh!! There is not a snooty bone in my kid's body.

Yay for Speech Therapy

I was in a bit of a funk over several things, over a lot of the summer, and was getting a real good funk on when our speech therapists transition from temporary to permanent employee or some such ended and we had our first appointment with her in ages. It brought me out of the funk a bit and helped me re-focus on Derek and get over myself a bit. I saw her be successful interacting with Derek and that gave me some hope that I can also be successful interacting with Derek and not have most of my day consist of yelling "Derek! Bebe!" across the room progressively louder and louder and getting no response whatsoever. I can chase him around the yard with a frog puppet. I can hide toys so he has to ask for them. I can bring a new set of toys in so he can transition from his tired old theme that has me about to stick a fork in my eye to a new and exciting play theme. I have a strategy to respond to him mentioning for the 3,465,987th time that the neighbors cut down their giant tree. (The strategy is to respond like he's sharing a memory - remember that time the neighbor's cut down their tree and it radically changed the shade in and view from and into our yard? Yeah, I do. And it makes me annoyed.)

In other news, my computer is breaking. Today I found the blue screen of death when I came down in the morning. So I'm backing up a lot. Also on our list of new electronic equipment is a digital camera and a printer. They're broken, too.

This weekend we'll be going to my husband's step father's biological father's new wife's family reunion in Bend. Also know as the chase-Derek-in-the-high-desert 10k relay.

Sometimes we're happy

Sometimes we're sad. Sometimes we don't wear pants. Sometimes we're bored to tears and want to stick our heads in the oven. Yay summer!

I know I haven't blogged in forever. Oy. Sorry about that. So here's some brief updates:

Sucky things:

I had big plans for the summer: new health insurance that would get us access to new therapists who would teach me things about how to set up a home therapy program, make realistic, challenging, meaningful goals and then achieve them. Then I ran into an insurance catch-22 and couldn't go through with those plans.

Over the summer Derek seems to have regressed a bit. He's better off than he was this time last year, but not doing some of the things that he was doing in June. I think the change from the familiar routine to practically no structure or routine has him a little disoriented. I was chatting with another mom who has two typical kids experiencing the same disorientation and crankiness, so it's not just Derek, but it has impacted his social and verbal skill gains. Bleh.

Playground pushing. More of it and harder. He pushed a toddler down some concrete steps the other day. And today pushed an older kid over so hard he knocked the wind out of her.

Good things:

Derek is interested in playing catch. We've been tossing a ball and balloons back and forth for several turns, much more than previously!

I've been going to therapy on my own, which has been really helpful, shockingly enough to me. It's useful for me to sit back and look at my own patterns of behavior and the reasons behind them. Then I can remedy the situation.

I've also investigated some support groups of other parents dealing with autistic children in the area, and it looks like that will be a positive experience.

I've been working on Derek's pronoun confusion and it's starting to show. He thinks one of my names is "me" and one of his names is "you". So if he says "Fire on me!" he means that I'm the one on fire, not himself. If he says "It's mine!" he means it's for me, not himself. See how this can get a bit confusing? And it's worse to explain it or correct him. It turns into a "Who's on first?" routine. So the speech therapist and I concocted a strategy to try to show him what he means. When he says "Fire on me!", even though he makes a gesture to throw the fire on me I act like the fire is on him. When he says "Come get me!" and tries to chase me, I act like he asked me to chase him. See? And I've noticed him using the correct pronoun more often, even in interactions where it's just him and me.

The car is fixed.