Friday

Has it been a week? Indeed.

We have gotten home and settled again, only to begin packing for Sacramento on Sunday. It is our annual clerks' conference and we'll see a bit of the wine country and visit with David's second cousin with whom he stayed during my first semester of SLC -- a long time ago. David goes to lots of meetings and Julia and I visit museums, zoos, playgrounds and the hotel pool. After weeks of therapy, I am looking forward to the alone time with Julia. I am hoping to sneak in more attachment work than usual.

Julia.

Um, where to start . . . .

I can see a difference, a falling backwards, after 5 day away last week. Julia was more into make believe -- I did not even see this until this week. From what I see, the therapists are trying to take Julia from play that is mostly about make believe to play that is more about doing activities. They would rather she draw, play with her clay, blow bubbles, put a puzzle together, etc. Julia, of course, loves her doll house, her little pets and her animals. The therapists were making some headway before we left for Jersey, only to be brought back to days of make believe. Julia also complained and shouted at her therapists most this week than I've heard before and I attribute that to her growing comfort with them - any honeymoon is officially over. But although there was backsliding in type of play and Julia's moods, Julia's transitions were pretty good.

I am not a believer in continuity of this therapy. We will not leave again for more than 3 days after this vacation for a long time.

When we were in Jersey, Julia brought me her pile of sight words and a new book to read. So, now we are reading Follow Me, Mittens. I bought this book with the intention of using it to learn to read, so it was a very good choice on her part. Although it is billed as a learning to read book, it is not a instructive as Green Eggs and Ham -- words are used once or twice and never appear again, and there is very little in the way of patterns for Julia to hook into. Still, she is making her way through the pages, grabbing onto some of the words and catching a few more each time we go through the book. If I get time tomorrow, I will make some sight word cards to go on vacation with us. (I wondered how Julia would do with the last set of cards. Instead, of introducing the cards 3 or 4 at a time, I added 10 cards to the list, and although it took a bit longer to learn the 10 than it would have taken to learn 3 new words, the time was still pretty short. )

Last night, she wanted me to read "Hop on Pop" at bedtime. In the beginning of that book, Julia has already learned many of the words. She asked if one of the pages was from Green Eggs. She learned the words on that page while reading Green Eggs. She also recognized words from the words families that we've worked on. Even when she tells me that she doesn't want to read, or that it is too hard for her, she usually changes her mind pretty quickly.

I have been giving Julia a bottle once a day and using that to get into cuddling. Julia definitely wants to be in control -- she tries to hold the bottle, shift her head and her body. Anything to avoid laying like a baby and looking into my eyes. We struggle over control with me telling her that we need to do this to build a strong family, to make us a great mother and daughter team. Sometimes she will echo what I am saying and agrees to do what I ask. Also, the girl is getting so tall -- it is getting hard to hold her like a baby with the long legs and arms.

I have given into Julia's desire for rice three times a day. She is eating a few other things -- fruit and vegies and ocasionally some fish or meat. She is still eating eggs in the morning, and tuna or hot dogs for lunch. Some diet! As soon as we are back from vacation, I am finding a rice cooker. As long as I am making it every day, I should have the right tools. I wonder about this rice, many times with water, and whether it has the ability to comfort Julia.

Two weeks ago, I told Marilyn that if Julia needed life long help and our support, I didn't know whether I could do it. Almost immediately, I picked up Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism, by Clara Claiborne Park. It tells the story of the autistic daughter in a family of scholars and ambitious people. Park does not have one drop of self-pity for herself or her daughter. Instead, she hits challenges and issues right between the eyes, and glories in each milestone that her daughter reaches whether it is at 8, 15, or 40. Park admits to the hard work, the disappointment, the repetitions that go on for years, and she admits to all of it with optimism because she loves her daughter.

How could I not be right there, in the same space?