A while back, I mentioned social issues but never dug in. Some individuals on the spectrum have intellectual and/or physical difficulties, but in my opinion, the social difficulties outweigh all of the others.

A guy getting hit in the crotch with a football is funny (unless that guy is you of course). Every time. I think it’s hard-wired in the brain, at least for males. Perhaps it’s a caveman mentality holdover – we have lots of these, by the way. A rival who receives reproductive trauma might not end up as a rival at all, at least in the genetic rat race. Those cavemen were pretty sophisticated.

Isabella is in a ballet and tap class. No, they don’t do both at the same time, though that could be pretty cool…. She doesn’t exactly love to go to dance, probably because everything happens too fast. While she’s just figuring out how to shuffle, the others have already ball-changed on to the next move. We may pull her out soon since she doesn’t care for it, but I really want to find something that she likes to do. I want to find her “thing,” be that a sport, an instrument, whatever. We haven’t found it yet, unless reading books counts.

Allergies have been killing my girls for the past few days. We had an entire Sunday afternoon to fill up, though. Hmm, what to do. It had to be indoors, it should hopefully provide exercise, and it had to be cheap (or better yet free). I may not have mentioned that last (cheap) part, though those who know me should take that as a given. I had a brief daydream (aka unreachable fantasy) of sitting in a comfortable chair and reading while the girls played games on the floor, periodically pausing to run over to me and give me a hug and tell me how much they love me.

Okay, so we’re in a bit of a rut with the story telling. As I’ve mentioned, Isabella likes to jump in during my storytelling. Lately, though, all of the stories must be of the “a witch turns a boy into something” ilk. For example:
“Daddy, tell me a story about a witch who turns a boy into a tree.”

Holy cow some stuff is hard. Opening anything with my teeth, for example. Carrie either files her teeth to a razor’s edge or has multiple rows of them like a shark, because she can’t be stopped when she puts her teeth to it. Bag of chips? Rrrrip -> open. Indestructible plastic wire thing that holds tags on clothes? Chomp -> detagged. Metal chain? Clank -> not yet tried but I wouldn’t put it past her.

Telling a story to Isabella is a challenging, interactive experience. It’s like the “progressive” story that a group of us writers wrote at a convention this weekend in which each person writes one or two sentences, then passes it to the next person to add to it. By the end, you have a story -- a confusing, disjointed mess of a story, but a story nonetheless.

Somehow, Isabella has got a natural vacuum in her head. No, not literally – them’s fighting words! Rather, somebody, somewhere, discussed “natural vacuums,” and now it’s stuck.
“Natural means nobody made it,” she told me the other day. “Except for God.”
“Right,” I said, that being the correct reply to the majority of her questions.
“A natural vacuum is a vacuum that no one made.”

It was a good Easter, with a bunch of family in town. The best part of it for Isabella (besides the chocolate) was seeing her two girl cousins. One cousin is Madeline’s age, and one is a year or so older than Isabella. Of course they paired off by age. In the past, the younger cousin wanted to hang out with the older girls, but this time around, she stuck with Isabella.

As I mentioned, there can be a lot of guilt involved with raising a child with autism. What I didn’t mention, though, is the guilt from having a child with autism.