Cautionary Tales

Um, hi! [waving tentatively] I'm the mother of a girl on the spectrum and longtime cyberbud of MB. I thought for my maiden post I could function as a horrible warning. My daughter is somewhere in the HFA/PDD/Asperger's range. As one evaluator so clinically put it, she has a "prominent rigid personality." Mommy is fairly ADD, which means planning ahead? Not my strong point. We'd pick some sort of family destination--Hershey Park, say. This is a largish place, if you haven't been, full of opportunities for sensory overload. My daughter's poison of choice was merry-go-rounds.* Like many autistic kids, she likes the sensation of spinning. And like many girls with Asperger's, she loves animals, especially horses. Hershey Park was fairly accommodating about the bracelets for people with disabilities: I do remember having to walk somewhere deep into the park to go to the relevant office with my antsy five-year-old, and then I had a very short discussion with a total stranger about my kid's diagnosis, and then we were given the Magic Bracelet,** which meant we didn't have to wait on line and (very important) didn't have to get off the preferred ride. Which we went on over and over and over. And over. And. Over. As in, for the first day we were there, it was the only ride we went on. I'm remembering that on the second day we were able to get her to try another ride (it must have had animals to sit in, or painted on the side), but pretty much that vacation I just stood there watching her, like Phoebe and Holden, except not.

She's grown, we've grown: now she is much more open to different activities. We've done best on vacations that have structured programs for kids: we're in New York, so we've done our tour of resorts upstate that have camps. They have structure and variety and they bring her together with other kids, and my daughter does much, much better with structure. Bonus: it also means the spousal unit and I get to have a bit of time to ourselves. I take a lot of naps on those vacations.

*I used to know a lot about various parks and zoos in the LI area that had merry-go-rounds.

**I'm going to skip, for now, my musings about wearing those bracelets and suddenly having physical evidence of an invisible disability.