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When I saw my clients accessing food banks in August I knew this would be a bad winter. I have a birthday party for myself this weekend, and I have new rules that went with the invite: no cards (unless homemade), and no presents, but guests must bring canned and non-perishable foods. I've done this several years now, and I am amazed and the GREAT food people bring (when they know that their friends will be seeing what they bring to my annual party). I provide great cake and they all get to feel good.

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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I have one daughter in special ed and another in TAG. Having struggled with public schools for 10 years with my special ed daughter, I thought having a TAG daughter would be so easy. It's worse, because there is no federal protection, such as IDEA or ADA (or even interested in TAG students!). My district's solution to TAG was to move my then 5 year old into first grade. She is now in the sixth grade and ready to move up another grade, but instead of regular public school I have moved her into an on-line district charter school and am basically homeschooling her with some other friends for art and music enrichment. It is not an ideal solution, her homeschool co-horts are generally 12-15 years, and she is 10 years old. Her social co-horts are generally their younger siblings closer to her age. All I know for sure is that I've given up try to match academic ability with chronological age. Also, I have given up with regular public school. I can't afford private schools, so I'm doing the best I can. To my surprise, it's a better job than regular public school, but then I have a couple of college degrees and am in grad school right now.

posted 5 years, 4 months ago
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I am a nurse who works with pregnant women and also the mother of an adopted daughter with autism. To me there is no statistical link between age of mom and incidence of autism. However, the idea that there is a higher incidence in the NW is interesting to me, because that matches the pattern for SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). The rates of SIDS are lowest as you go east in the US and south, and higher as you go west and north, so the highest SIDS rates are in the Pacific Northwest. That may be of some interesting future research.

Frankly, I do not see autism as a problem. People on the ASD have helped to develop computers and the IPOD. If there were not people on the planet with autism our day-to-day quality of life would be significantly lower (I think Einstein and Bill Gates on are the spectrum).

The problem, as I see it, is not the people with autism, it's all the other people around them. How do we appreciate, respect, love, and live with people with autism? How can be best bring everyone's talents into play to making this a better world? (not just people with autism, everyone!). Why can't be better appreciate all the beautiful variances that people have?

I'm not pollyanna about this! I do live with a daughter with autism and there are challenges to this because she needs lots of structure and order, which I have had to develop. She is a concrete thinker, and I am very abstract. There are many challenges! But there are also many many gifts! She has superb sense of humor, and she makes me laugh every day. She loves squirrels and is kind to animals. She actually loves animals more than people because, as she explains, people can be very mean. And she is so right! What is so terrible or so wrong about this? Why is this considered a problem? I just don't get it.

posted 5 years, 4 months ago
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