So, in case you didn’t notice, this weekend was the “spring forward” time change. I’m pretty sure the sole reason for the time change existence is to mess up the lives of families dealing with autism. We were already dealing with a sleep issue from Handsome’s late afternoon nap a couple of weeks ago…I digress.
Hey, we moved! We closed on the house and got moved in last week.
Let me tell you, moving is really hard work! I’m so tired of moving. Also, it’s cold up here. Cold enough that my skin cracks open and bleeds. The cold, dry air, plus handling cardboard boxes has been horrible on my hands. I truly hope we never move again. Basically, I hope this is the house we die in.
Did I mention it was cold here? We got another small snow fall immediately after our stuff was delivered by the movers. That’s a chunk of ice my boy is holding. That would be a pot of soup cooking on the fire insert because we also lost power! And yes, the cat is laying on the vent to warm up from the heat that is on.
Moving with autism has, of course, been challenging. On one end of the spectrum, we have ASD #1 wondering exactly how many boxes we have and exactly how many minutes will it take to unpack them and exactly what time will the closing be done. ASD #1 manifests itself in anxiety, repeating questions and needing assurance, and volume. And I mean volume in every sense of the word. Both in sound, and in quantity.
ASD #2 on the other end of the spectrum is actually quite simple to interpret, decipher, and engage. All he needs to cope is a tablet and headphones, his juice cup, and crunchy carbs. He’s good to go! And lest you think that he’s slacked up on his shenanigans, he’s still keeping me and the washing machine busy! The day before closing/moving in, he gave me a nice, healthy dose of poo smearing that required 8 loads of laundry to clear up. Good times.
Borderline ASD #3 is pretty easy, too. Give him a specimen jar and he’s good to go! He loves exploring the yard, woods, and the creek below. You’ll see more about the high quality specimen jar a little further down.
Spring has sprung though, and in desperation of springiness, I picked up some plants because I happened to see them. In the past, every time I have gone to buy lavender, it has been sold out, so when I saw an entire rack filled with lavender, I picked up a bunch.
I mentioned to one of my boys that I found lavender and tulips at the store. And in the most spectacular display of autism I had witnessed in a long time, the boy answered with, I counted 16 lips. I’m just going to leave that one right there….
Handsome is enjoying his new home, too. He likes to be outside if it isn’t too cold. He dumped out a box of his toys and has been quite happy with that. He has been getting a lot of tablet time lately, with us needing to appease and accommodate him through stressful transitions. He mostly only gets the tablet when we are out running errands. Hence the shoes he brought to me and so graciously laid on my bed. The sellers left us their beat up truck and all of the boys love it!
The house is getting organized and lived in. I cannot believe how much stuff we have. It’s embarrassing.
We are also already getting started on new projects to start around the house. Building stuff and doing things with wood and power tools. And hauling trash to the landfill. The sellers left us the original architectural plans for the house. Wow, what an awesome find!
And finally, as you can probably accurately guess…we live in the woods, so finding spiders and other creepy crawly things will become part of the norm. I actually caught this spider in the hot tub. While we were hoping to unpack the bug identification book, we kept it in the specimen jar. While in the jar, the spider built a web and molted it’s exoskeleton. How awesome is that?! So that’s actually just one spider in the jar. I will admit, it freaked me out knowing that there was only one spider but at a quick glance suddenly there were two. The spider is fairly harmless, so we let it go out in the yard. I’m holding the molted version, not the live one by the way. We also found a false black widow which really did creep us out. We also ended up letting that one go, unintentionally…it was too quick and got away when the jar was opened to dispatch of it.
So, that’s been our lives these last couple of weeks. A whole lot of stress, a whole lot of not sleeping all night and starting the day at 5 am, a whole lot of cold and wintry weather, and a whole lot of autism sprinkled throughout the day.
I’ll be back soon to share more about how homeschooling through transition is going. Oh, I’ll just go ahead and tell you now rather than take up a whole post for it. It’s not happening. We’re on an extended spring break! 😛
Take care!
autism and salvation 