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Fearmongering at Daycare, News at Eleven
Jan. 13th, 2007 03:50 pmHa ha! Well, gee, Gemma, what did you do on your one day off this week? Oh, started a flame-war amongst my RL friends, destroying the only peer-group I have left: Stuff like that.
Otherwise: Went to the doctor about my various aches, got/took drugs. Got an x-ray. Yes, it’s probably a pinched nerve; yes it’s a bit better now. Next Thursday I get to go back and find out what the x-rays revealed, if anything. My biggest hope right now is that it doesn’t turn out to be somehow psychosomatic, though I don’t really think it can be.
On Friday, after the Diners fooferaw came to its inevitable head, I came home from seven straight hours of teaching to discover that Mom had gotten frightened by one of the Daycare people, who’d decided that Cal’s apparent inability to make eye contact with and/or interact with the other kids (let alone walk where you want him to, sit when you want him to, eat what you want him to, come when his name is called, etc,) might mean he’s somewhere on the autistic/Asperger’s spectrum. She wanted me to read up about it on Wikipeia, so I did, and got a bit frightened myself. But…okay, yes, I’m his Mom, so I’d be likely to think it was’t so, and yet:
A) He hasn’t been around other kids on a regular basis for, like, his entire life, so that might be a lot of that right there. Steve and I have already decided to move him from two half-days a week to three or even four, and we’ll see how that goes.
B) He’s VERY responsive otherwise to people he knows (me, Mom, Steve,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agincourtgirl), and even to people he doesn’t when he’s in the right mood.
C) He understands and reproduces other people’s emotions, and laughs and cries spontaneously.
D) He has no violent attachment to any sort of set routine, or aversion to physical contact.
E) If you take the time to make him look at you directly and don’t take nothing for an answer, he will eventually say "hi" or "bye". We’re now working on "yes" or "no", as opposed to just pointing at stuff and crying.
F) He can make preferential choices between objects, as proven last night, when he chose Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late over How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night, which he suddenly doesn’t like anymore.
Yes, he repeats things over and over, but he also uses those phrases communicatively, and improves on them—I see this as a series of stepping stones to forming sentences of his own. Yes, he engages in repetitious behaviour with extreme concentration, but you CAN distract him. He learns new actions and words all the time, picking them up from everywhere. We’d been worried about the fact that sometimes he seems disinclined to feed himself, but that was before we introduced him to little boxes of raisins. He’s an odd damn kid, but I think the Daycare people are being just a tad quick off the mark here, as they’re probably trained to be; if bumping up Daycare frequency doesn’t produce a result, we’ll have him assessed, and if there’s a real problem, we’ll find ways to deal with it. Nothing is written in stone, especially at less than three years old.
All of which is just a bit more important and personally relevant, to my mind, than anything to do with internal politics amongst my former Friday Night dates ever could be. Which certainly isn’t to say I don’t want to see any of them anymore, but I think they understand that…the ones who matter, anyhow. You know who you are.;)
Which reminds me: Happy early 40th,agincourtgirl! I won’t be able to see you on the day itself, obviously, but I hope it’s grand. Let’s try to clear some quality time next weekend for talk and presents, shall we?
Meanwhile, in the world of work—
On Lilim, which one of my former students is interested in showing to his producer, I’ve finally managed to format all the dialogue. The script has swollen to 111 pages, and will need a thorough gutting before I show it to anybody professionally, but it seems like we’re into the home-stretch…thank God. And after that, it’s over to "The Speed of Pain", for real. At the moment, I’m amusing myself and shoring up the backstory by writing copy for Veruca Luz (Tim Darbersmere’s ultimate fan/cyberstalker, the "pale girl with a bolt through her septum" of "The Emperor’s…")’s nonexistent website: A bibliography, plus sections of biographical articles, essays, book reviews, etc. Writing all these quasi-pretentious, quasi-British scifantasy titles, their publishing dates slightly cribbed from J.G. Ballard’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry, has been a lot of fun. But I don’t want Tim to be nothing but Ballard (I never did), so I’m having to branch off into other directions—fun of another kind. You’ll have to read the Loonie Dreadful to catch up on all that, however.
Okay, c’est fini for now. Onward, downward.
Otherwise: Went to the doctor about my various aches, got/took drugs. Got an x-ray. Yes, it’s probably a pinched nerve; yes it’s a bit better now. Next Thursday I get to go back and find out what the x-rays revealed, if anything. My biggest hope right now is that it doesn’t turn out to be somehow psychosomatic, though I don’t really think it can be.
On Friday, after the Diners fooferaw came to its inevitable head, I came home from seven straight hours of teaching to discover that Mom had gotten frightened by one of the Daycare people, who’d decided that Cal’s apparent inability to make eye contact with and/or interact with the other kids (let alone walk where you want him to, sit when you want him to, eat what you want him to, come when his name is called, etc,) might mean he’s somewhere on the autistic/Asperger’s spectrum. She wanted me to read up about it on Wikipeia, so I did, and got a bit frightened myself. But…okay, yes, I’m his Mom, so I’d be likely to think it was’t so, and yet:
A) He hasn’t been around other kids on a regular basis for, like, his entire life, so that might be a lot of that right there. Steve and I have already decided to move him from two half-days a week to three or even four, and we’ll see how that goes.
B) He’s VERY responsive otherwise to people he knows (me, Mom, Steve,
agincourtgirl), and even to people he doesn’t when he’s in the right mood.C) He understands and reproduces other people’s emotions, and laughs and cries spontaneously.
D) He has no violent attachment to any sort of set routine, or aversion to physical contact.
E) If you take the time to make him look at you directly and don’t take nothing for an answer, he will eventually say "hi" or "bye". We’re now working on "yes" or "no", as opposed to just pointing at stuff and crying.
F) He can make preferential choices between objects, as proven last night, when he chose Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late over How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night, which he suddenly doesn’t like anymore.
Yes, he repeats things over and over, but he also uses those phrases communicatively, and improves on them—I see this as a series of stepping stones to forming sentences of his own. Yes, he engages in repetitious behaviour with extreme concentration, but you CAN distract him. He learns new actions and words all the time, picking them up from everywhere. We’d been worried about the fact that sometimes he seems disinclined to feed himself, but that was before we introduced him to little boxes of raisins. He’s an odd damn kid, but I think the Daycare people are being just a tad quick off the mark here, as they’re probably trained to be; if bumping up Daycare frequency doesn’t produce a result, we’ll have him assessed, and if there’s a real problem, we’ll find ways to deal with it. Nothing is written in stone, especially at less than three years old.
All of which is just a bit more important and personally relevant, to my mind, than anything to do with internal politics amongst my former Friday Night dates ever could be. Which certainly isn’t to say I don’t want to see any of them anymore, but I think they understand that…the ones who matter, anyhow. You know who you are.;)
Which reminds me: Happy early 40th,
agincourtgirl! I won’t be able to see you on the day itself, obviously, but I hope it’s grand. Let’s try to clear some quality time next weekend for talk and presents, shall we?Meanwhile, in the world of work—
On Lilim, which one of my former students is interested in showing to his producer, I’ve finally managed to format all the dialogue. The script has swollen to 111 pages, and will need a thorough gutting before I show it to anybody professionally, but it seems like we’re into the home-stretch…thank God. And after that, it’s over to "The Speed of Pain", for real. At the moment, I’m amusing myself and shoring up the backstory by writing copy for Veruca Luz (Tim Darbersmere’s ultimate fan/cyberstalker, the "pale girl with a bolt through her septum" of "The Emperor’s…")’s nonexistent website: A bibliography, plus sections of biographical articles, essays, book reviews, etc. Writing all these quasi-pretentious, quasi-British scifantasy titles, their publishing dates slightly cribbed from J.G. Ballard’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry, has been a lot of fun. But I don’t want Tim to be nothing but Ballard (I never did), so I’m having to branch off into other directions—fun of another kind. You’ll have to read the Loonie Dreadful to catch up on all that, however.
Okay, c’est fini for now. Onward, downward.
