look at me still talking when there's science to do

From machineplay (best girlfriend ever!) and magie_05 (fabulous friend, writer and nature-documentary enabler, among other things):

pink elephant caught on camera

spider-man comes to autistic boy's rescue in Thailand eight year old little guy climbed onto a window ledge and a firema-er, Spiderman got him down safely. such a great story (and picture). *sniffle* except that i keep substituting Seaners for the little guy in the picture (because they're about the same age, and then i cry even more. someone clearly needs to call the dork police or something.

brought to you today by machineplay (who is seriously the best girlfriend ever) and cueballex (one of my beloved internet children):

chronic pain hurts the brain, disrupting the default mode network dynamics.

they're autistic and they're in love. i adore this article because it pokes holes in the autism stereotypes. the first developmental pediatrician we saw at Seattle Children's Hospital was very careful to point that out - that autism and affection aren't necessarily contradictory, for one.

wooden sarcophages found in egyptian tomb.

oldest english words identified.

snowed today with possibility of more snow. kid is home today. fortunately all the stuff i had to do outside the apartment is already done. and i resecheduled my therapy appointment. (still do not especially want to go as it eats up my entire afternoon for something that i can't guarantee will work, but ... eh. should probably try it i suppose. maybe it won't be so bad. meh.)

(i was thinking about it, actually: i think one of the things i don't like about it in retrospect is the whole 'passive listening/"witnessing" thing that happened the last couple of times - a lot of affirming that x y z happened and it happens to lots of people and it sucks that it happened to you? and i'm thinking, dude, i can get that for less money from my friendslist. what i was/am looking for is something more concrete, i suppose. this guy's literature bills him as 'stress management'. so maybe that's less with the mm-hmming. i hope so, because i'm not interested in that.)

anyway. coffee nomnom.

Anyone ever hear of something called auditory integration training?

It sounds like something that might help the boychild with his language acquisition/auditory processing problems.

Anyway, we've got a ten-day appointment (two sessions per day, 30 minutes each) with a local therapist coming up in August. So, um, yeah. We'll see.

Also must find: occupational/sensory integration therapist type person, preferably not in the back of beyond. (Why are they ALL in the freaking suburbs? Seriously, it's annoying.)

The school may not need beatings after all. This is good, because beatings are tedious.

What the school DOES need are lessons in appropriate communication. This is not good, because theoretically this is what they're supposed to be teaching my CHILD.

So just after I posted this morning, we got a call from the school nurse. The regular one, sadly. And the school nurse was going to send the child home for lack of a form to give him his eyedrops at school. And lack of the eyedrops - which I hadn't sent, because as far as I knew he didn't /have/ to have them at school if they couldn't do it. (This according to our doctor.)

So I said 'all right, fuck this noise, I am coming down there and we are going to Deal With This Crap Once And For Fucking All.

So I went down there. And I learned some things, astoundingly enough.

First, the whole bloody trip was a result of a miscommunication between the teacher (who thought the eyedrops were needed to be given at school rather than just 'it would have been nice but not if y'all are going to make freakin' paperwork out of it' and the nurse, who thought it was OMGWTF CRUCIAL.

Second, apparently 'we are going to send the kid home on a bus' can, in many cases, mean 'we'll put the kid in a holding pattern for an hour or so whilst you make some phone calls and find backup. we do not expect you to drop everything.' The cases where it can't are generally things like 'your child is bleeding out of every concievable orfice and we're just going to meet you at the ER anyway'. These cases do not bother me. These cases are reasonable.

(I try not to assume reason and logic in cases like this. Most of the time it saves me a step. Apparently not here. Huh.)

The speech therapist is doing a terrible job of communicating his communication system to us. (This fills me with great discomfort.) I saw the actual communication system. It's basically real world objects with print and brailled labels. He knows how to use it. They are using sign with him in the classroom. (What the speech therapist is doing is another question again. Sadly she was unavailable for comment and we'll have to make a separate appointment with her.)

I don't know whether to feel relieved that I don't have to hang beatings on this people or irritated as hell that I wasted my entire morning dealing with this foolishness because they fail at communicating what they're doing. Seriously, I don't know.

Bloody hell.

Dug out the kid's old progress reports.

In preschool, he was using a tactile schedule with five actual objects; it was reasonably effective.

In kindergarten, he's using a raised-image schedule with two, despite the fact that this doesn't, you know, seem to be working.

The SLP's excuse for why she's using raised line images instead of signs?

"Oh, well, the signs are so abstract..."

School emailed me again, bitching about the shoes. I sent them a polite and snippy letter saying that he was having no problems taking the shoes off at home, that we were under the impression that they wanted shoes he would keep ON at school and well, if they want him to keep them on we have to find ones that he'll do that with, and anyway why don't they just teach him how to put them on, isn't that kind of a valuable skill that he might need?

Nothing back yet. Am calling IEP meeting. So pissed off. So, so pissed off. Oh yes.

Random item in one of the gift bags of doom: a giant book/art project, made by The Boy to Mom and Dad. "Things I am Thankful For." is the title/basic premise, with included blindy-kid paintings and collages, labelled in braille and print (with pictures of the ASL signs.) It's awfully cute; the paintings are very Pollock-esque. May take pictures/scans later.

Today we brave the mall (two malls!) because I am an IDIOT and leave things to the last possible minute. Mall crowds + coffee+ lack of sleep + codeine/melatonin-induced narcolepsy == seriously FUN TIMES, my friend. *nods off like Professor Farnsworth, drools*

OMG IT'S HERE FINALLY!~ THE BOX OF WORDS IS HERE!

...

I think our UPS man is high on something. More later.