Little Reminders...

A fight broke out in my living room bright and early this morning. S and J were playing cars happily while I packed lunches for school. The next thing I knew J was lying on the floor, facedown, crying.

"S, what happened out here?!" I asked.

"I didn't do anything. He's just mad I pretended my car was an airplane and he punched me." said S, matter-of-factly.

Indeed, this sort of thing is pretty commonplace in our house.

J wailed from across the room. "He made his car an airplane!!! Cars can't fly, cars can't fly!!!! He can't make it an airplane!!!"

I picked him up off the floor, stood him up, and held his face in my hands so he would look at me. "J, S was just pretending his car could fly. That's fun! You need to let S play with the cars the way he wants to play with them and you play with the cars the way YOU want to play with them."

"No no no! Cars can't FLY! He can't DO that!!!" he insisted.

Again, not unusual. Some days, everything is going along just fine and then someone sings the wrong words to one of J's favorite songs, or puts something in the wrong place, or makes a car an airplane... and he loses it.

There was a time when B was little where I figured all parents dealt with freakouts of this nature. I gradually started to realize that wasn't true, but just assumed I had more challenging kids than other people.

Now that these types of behaviors have been pointed out to me over and over again as part of the ASD, it seems SO blantantly obvious to me. I always wonder how we all missed it for so long with B.

In fact, just last night, B, who has grown out of so much of the behavior that, years ago, would have easily classified him the same as J,  had a baby tooth hanging by a thread. EVERY loose tooth brings drama for him, even at 10 years old. He doesn't like the way it feels, he's anxious about pulling it out, he doesn't want to touch it or even wiggle it and definitely doesn't want anyone ELSE to touch it... but at the same time, wants it OUT. So he just cries and cries and worries. "What if it falls out while I'm sleeping? What if it bleeds? I don't like the way it feels when it's loose. I don't like feeling the hole after the tooth falls out!" It went on and on.  And just like that, it's as if he is five years old all over again.

All in all, these particular incidents were small blips in otherwise relatively easy days, but still, they were reminders that there are challenges we will always, ALWAYS deal with, even when things are going fairly smoothly.

It's actually a relief to me to finally know that we don't just have "more challenging kids". that we have more challenging kids for a reason, and that reason being that they process the world around them differently.  I have to be honest, for awhile there, I thought we were just REALLY doing something wrong.

Not that knowing WHY J screams at his brother for calling a car an airplane makes that any less of a rough start to a morning.... but it at least I have a context with which to understand it now. :)