Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Always Vacuuming Mom

For a long time I avoided vacuuming because it would frighten LP. Maybe that makes me a bad housewife......ok not really, but looking back it was a bad idea. Now with Baby Diva crawling everywhere and eating everything off the floor I must regularly vacuum my home.

Looking back, there are a ton of things I should not have avoided when LP was smaller. Had I just gotten him desensitized to certain things when he was smaller , in could avoid WW3 size freak outs coming out of a soon to be 3 year old. As I said the vacuum was number one. The minute you turn the thing on, he sprints to the farthest point in the house....that's now. In the past he sobbed and shook in the farthest part of the house. We are still having issues with bath time, especially with the shower head. Today I actually got him in the shower with minimal melt down....that is till the water got in his eyes. There are a bunch of other issues he has that I babies him through and am Now paying for.

I don't know if I was right or wrong, but I felt because I had a child that was different, I should baby him, protect him, basically let him do whatever he wanted. When he started ABA I was told that wasn't doing him any good. My son is very intelligent and is capable of lots of things....one of those things was manipulating me. I thought that was a teenagers job, to manipulate their parents....not apparently a child with high functioning autism and a brain far beyond his years can leaner to manipulate people.

I didn't see this until he figured out he wasn't going to be able to pull these tricks with me anymore, but knew he could with his grandparents. I would watch my son who had started talking with us become mute at his grandparents house. He would fake thirst for more chocolate milk, he would throw himself to the ground on purpose to get attention, he would grunt and stim 20x worse then at home....what was this???? Oh yea it's manipulation.

They told me it was only a small minority of people who have an autistic child with high iq's and not to expect it (especially since they placed him at a 9 month old receptive level at 30 months)......turns out it scored high average iq on one of those tests and that was with him not talking, can't imagine if he spoke.

Anyway, I've recently just been giving him tough love, and it turns out half of those things that bothered him so much don't really bother him if I don't feed into his bugging out. I wish I knew this earlier. I would have had a cleaNer house, with a cleaner kid, who got a haircut more than once every 6 months and doesn't throw tAntrms when we transition. "bye park, see you next time" he says...all I could think was, wait your not going to throw your self on the floor?

That's my rant for the night. Baby Diva is learning from her brother. Tonight was rough. She had one night where she didn't go to bed in her crib, she was rocked to sleep by grandma. This of course made tonight impossible. I had always heard messing up a sleep schedule would cause chaos but I had no idea it was this bad.

everyone enjoy your 4th of July, be safe, healthy and hug your babies!!

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