G’s Place

Last night I had a weird dream. Brian thinks it’s about work. I think he’s on to something. Here’s the dream:

First of all, throughout the entire dream I was making pasta from scratch. Rolling out the dough, and cooking the dough.

The main part of the dream was about this huge machine that was located in a secret warehouse. The machine was round and flat (think wheel of fortune shaped), and about three stories high. There were steps going all around the machine, and at the top center there was a platform.

The machine gave people superpowers. But only a select group of people got the superpowers. These people would walk up the steps of the machine, stand on the platform at the top, and get zapped with a blue bolt of energy that inoculated them with the powers. The powers were designed and written into a codebase. The group would come get the new powers that had been engineered by getting zapped with the machine’s blue lightning when the codebase was revisioned.

In my dream, the villains (all superheroes have villains you know!) hacked into the codebase and got the latest revision of the superhero inoculation code. This was bad because the villains had their own superpower machine, and when they got the superheroes’ code they knew how to counteract all the superheroes’ powers, as well as how to write their villain code to defeat the superheroes!

In my dream, we were racing around to find all the superheroes, and tell them to get to the machine and get the latest revision of the powers (which was Rev 19) because this had the fix that would block all the things the villains had learned about the heroes.

That’s the main part of the dream. Also, while we were looking for the superheroes, we kept ending up at a mountain. There was a big piece of stone that jutted off the mountain, and there was shell-shaped indentation in the middle of that piece that was jutting out. If you stood or laid over that indentation, the winds would hit you just right and you would fly. Well, hover over the indentation, but it looked like flying.

Brian thinks it’s about work. I keep sharing my big ideas about social media with my group, and I get told that we can’t act on the ideas. But I am starting to see neutered bits of my ideas popping up as projects, and I am not allowed to be involved with these projects. So, the machine’s code is my ideas, the villains are the people preventing me from working with my ideas, so I need to keep coming up with new ideas to go do the work I want to do.

I don’t know about the pasta dough.  The issue with the pasta dough is that it was taking so long to cook the fresh dough, about an hour. People were getting annoyed with me for that. Maybe I just need to keep coming up with my ideas, and be more patient?

The only thing I can think of for the flying part is that when people stepped on the indentation, they could fly - defy gravity. Just like Elphaba. The words in the song where she finally takes flight just ring very true for me sometimes!

What do you think my crazy weird dream means?

The panel at AANE about Asperger’s Syndrome and college went pretty well. There were two moms on the panel (I was one of them), two students (one a MLS candidate yay!!), two college representatives, and two social coaches.

Larry Welkowitz, one of the college reps gave a very thorough wrap-up over on his blog. Larry’s been working with the topic of Aspies and college for several years, and it was great to meet him in person!

I talked about using technology to help your kid when they call you freaking out. If they text you instead, you can help them figure out that next step they need to take. They won’t have to leave the room, deal with language, etc. They can just text back and forth with you, and look like any other normal college kid.

Maybe I need to write a short course on Texting for parents.

Tomorrow I am speaking at AANE’s panel about college students with Asperger’s. I am one of the parent representatives on the panel.

I am working out what I am going to say (I have eight minutes).

Here’s the key points I want to make:

• Find a social skill coach. Someone who does not work for the University. This person should take your place as your child’s advocate. It should be someone you can work with, but someone who will be your child’s confidant (in other words, sometimes they may not tell you everything!)
• Realize that some of the feelings you have when your child goes away are normal “empty nest” feelings.  Now, these feelings may be amplified because all of a sudden you are forced to be out of the loop. I think it’s important to let go, but it’s important to realize there aren’t books or articles or anything to help us (parents with kids on the spectrum) figure out if it’s really time to let go.
• Take everything the college tells you with a grain of salt. They are so scared of “helicopter parents“. To an administrator who doesn’t understand Asperger’s Syndrome, we may seem like parents who are too interfering.  If you encounter college officials like this, make sure you have the social coach. Let the social coach deal with the college. It will be better for your child if they learn how to rely on someone else.
  Also, call every day if you need to. We were told at orientation not to do that, but my daughter called every day at 9PM. It helped her settle down. I also would go and see her, and stay overnight with her, at least once a month. We stayed in a hotel, out of the dorm, and gave her a chance to settle down a bit. She found coming home a little too much of a schedule and environment change.

I don’t know what else to say tomorrow. Hopefully it will go over well. My daughter will be there to keep me honest.

Someone on Twitter asked me for links about Asperger’s Syndrome. I thought I would compile something quick.

• The best resource I use is the Asperger’s Association of New England. They have resources for children, teenagers, college kids, and adults. They also have resources for people in an aspie’s life. If you are in New England, you should really consider joining. It’s pretty inexpensive.
• I like reading Asperger Square Eight. It’s a blog by a woman with Asperger’s. I take what I read from her and see if my daughter sees things the same way.
• I’m in a Facebook group called When Days When an Asperger’s Kid is not fun.  Our kids are amazing, and when you finally get to the place where you can see how they come at the world differently it changes everything. You can advocate for them, you can help them learn to advocate, you can communicate with them and it helps  with the family situation. But they are still kids, and they will make you crazy. On top of that, family and others won’t always understand why you have changed things to accommodate your child. That can drive you crazy too.
• My daughter wasn’t diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome until the summer between her senior year and college. One resource I used while she was in school was the NonVerbal Learning Disorder site. The have articles on advocacy (or how to become a partner with school staff and still fight for your child’s rights, and definitions on the assessments used (there are general articles that help you understand the terminology).

Those are the resources that come to the top of my head. Maybe I should add intuition. You know what your child is capable of. Don’t let people discount that information.

Anyone have any other resources to add?

This tweet  and subsequent twitter conversation made me think about a story of my son and the early days of social networking sites for kids.

This story happened when my son was about 8 or 9, and now he’s  19. His sister, who is 2 and a half years older than him, used to frequent a site named girlz dot com (which is now a porn site!!). She and her cousins (I think, it may have been her step-sisters) would monopolize the computer with the girly website.

Kenny, the only boy relative at the time, hated the girly website. He proclaimed that it was not fair that there was a girlz dot com, and when it was finally his turn to play on the computer, he said loudly that he was going to boyz dot com. Boyz dot com has ALWAYS been a porn site. And the site was a pretty typical 90’s porn site, lots of rapid fire pop-ups with some very graphic stuff.

So Kenny loads up the site, and the girls are all right there, and they all start screaming when the porn site starts spewing its stuff all over the screen. Kenny was in a panic trying to close down windows. I think we turned off the monitor and sent everyone away.

It was actually pretty funny.

A new house rule was born that day: if you have never visited a URL, you must google it first to determine the content of the site.

As the start of school gets closer, there are more and more searches such as “best school in Florida for Asperger’s”. There seems to be a real need for that sort of information.

Well if you are in Tallahassee, and your kid is going to middle school, stay away from RAA whatever you do! That is where the evil principal is.  I would imagine school is still what you make it, and as a parent you’ll have to do alot of educating of school staff.

The other thing I think is needed is some sort of information for parents on how mentor their children to advocate for themselves, and then to let go. How to let your kids fail a little so they will be more prepared for life. It’s hard if you have someone you need to protect from so many things, to think about little your kids fly a little. I never saw guides on how to know when to do it, how to know how much to let them go, etc.

That is a hard thing for a parent to learn in any situation, but when you have been the advocate for so long it’s really hard to know how and when to step back. I’m still learning that lesson.

Too busy to blog. I’ve been keeping up over at Adventures in Corporate Education, and I never stop twittering anymore.

So what’s up?

• Grad school summer semester’s almost over (I should finishing some of that work right now..)
• Work - finishing a big project (coming to ATL in August), and working on social media as a process on the side
• Kids - Bri is looking for a job, Kenny is just all over the place this summer (in Philly this weekend for a conference)
• Fall Semester - getting myself and Kenny all set for the new semester
• home- well the house is falling to pieces. And I haven’t been able to put anything up, hopefully I will at least get some pickles done before I go to GA.
• Planning to go see Stacey in NYC in Aug
• I think I need to plan a mini-vaca!!

What’s up with y’all?

I have been neglecting this blog, blame it on midterms.

But I wanted to post this story about how Autism Speaks lobbied back-room deal that made a bill to ensure insurance companies covered treatments for autistic kids pretty much useless. The autism community rallied around the PA House Speaker, the one who introduced the bill (who has a nephew with autism btw).  Apparenty Autism Speaks was playing political games to get a national insurance policy in place (would that too be watered down? Is this what happened in FLA - where autism services are horrendous?)

Wow. Autism Speaks has an “Autism Votes” initiative. They are a very powerful lobbying agency.  And they think people like my daughter need to be cured. Very Very Scary.

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Originally uploaded by gminks

Look at all the strawberries! It’s hard to tell from the pick, but that is about 2 quarts. There are tons still on the vines too. Are they called vines?

Anyway- cool!

An autistic person on aspieweb.com created a t-shirt that says: “Autism Speaks” can go away - I have autism I can speak for myself.

Autism Speaks contacted Zazzle.com (the online store aspieweb was using to sell the shirts) and had them pull the shirts for copyright infringement.

So, have they actually copyrighted the term “Autism Speaks”? Or are they just bullying the autistic folk who are sending out a negative message about the charity?