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Saving The Mattresses

The playground under construction

The playground under construction

One of the things that I have found most surprising about autism parenting is the amount of money we have spent on mattresses. My son is very much a sensory-seeking kid, and he needs the deep joint pressure that comes from jumping and running. He has turned jumping into an art form, and we have discovered that it is possible for a child to break a mattress by jumping on it.

We slowed down the carnage somewhat by investing in a small trampoline to put in our living room. We also decided to do something about the playgroundless state of our back yard. Fortunately I have a husband who knows how to build stuff, and easy access to places like Rona. We put together a playground design and purchased the materials, and we started building.

Over the course of a summer, the playground started to take shape. We built a couple of platforms for the kids to climb onto, and we attached a couple of slides to it. With the basics in place, the kids now had something to play on. Both of them were in heaven. They had a way to expend their natural energy, and my older son was able to satisfy his deep pressure needs without breaking the furniture.

Since we built the structure, it has gradually evolved. We added a climbing wall, and later, a tube slide. Last summer, the kids figured out exactly where to position their pool so that they could use their slide as a water slide. We attached a pirate ship playhouse, complete with a ship’s steering wheel and a telescope.

The kids have found their own uses for the playground as well. One day, I went outside to look for them in the rain, and found them sheltered under a little tent on one of the platforms. They were having a grand old time in there, my older son with his Lego and my younger son with a colouring book.

This playground, which started as something we were going to build to give my son an alternative to jumping on beds, has turned into one of those perpetual projects that will never end. It is fun to see what more we can do with it, especially now that the boys are old enough to have some input.

I look forward to seeing what the next addition will be.

This is an original post by Kirsten Doyle, published in accordance with my disclosure policy. Photo credit to the author.

 

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Getting It Write

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 15 – Writing with style: What’s your writing style? Do words just flow from your mind to your fingertips? Do you like handwriting first? Do you plan your posts? Title first or last? Where do you write best?

The fact that my older son’s childhood development is almost a carbon copy of my own leads me to believe that I am somewhere on the autism spectrum. I had the same speech delays, the same geekiness with numbers, and the same tendency to play by myself in spite of being in a room full of other kids.

To this day, I experience social anxiety, although I have learned how to mask it well enough for other people not to notice. I am not fond of social gatherings where I do not know at least one person very well. During times of stress or conflict I struggle to coherently express my thoughts verbally. Let’s not even get started on the telephone. I am downright terrified of the telephone.

My ineptitude and discomfort with the spoken word is what led me to the written word. Writing is marvelous. It gives me a voice. It provides an outlet for the creativity that I have, to my complete surprise, discovered within me, and it eliminates the problem I have with conversation, where my words frequently get lost between my brain and my mouth.

When I was in high school, I used to get somewhat disillusioned when my creative writing projects were marked down “for lack of structure”. We had it drummed into us that our stories had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We were supposed to rigidly plan our essays and then stick to the plan. If the ending did not clearly tie in to the beginning, that was the mark of a Bad Essay.

The problem was that this whole beginning-middle-ending thing didn’t work for me. I understood the theory, but I couldn’t make my mind work in such a linear pattern. As long as the stuff I wrote made an impact, and as long as my readers were engaged throughout, did it really matter? Whenever I tried to write in the prescribed way , the finished product came across as stilted and awkward, and just not me.

When I started this blog just over two years ago, I promised myself that I would remain true to my natural style. I try to make sure my writing flows, and that it’s easy on the eye. I have a goal to leave my audience with some kind of message, whether it’s an idea, a call to action, or an emotion. How I accomplish that depends on my subject matter and what my state of mind is like as I’m writing. Sometimes my posts do follow a traditional structure, and when that happens, it’s just because the topic lent itself to that.

Many times, I will change direction midway through a post. I will allow my train of thought to drive my writing. In that sense, my blog posts are often a true reflection of how I think. They are a glimpse into the part of my soul that’s open for public viewing. I may struggle from time to time to come up with the first sentence, but usually, once I achieve that, I’m off and running. I don’t always go to where I had intended. My destination can be a surprise even to me.

The journey is always a lot of fun too.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kharlamovaa/6016780468/. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)