April is Autism Awareness Month - Day 4 & 5

No, I didn't get a chance yesterday to post and that is the subject of today's combined message.

After you have children you hear everyone talking about how important routines are for you and your baby. I agree to a point. Autistic kids love routines and mine are no exception. The problem that I personally have run into is that routines do not help my kids be flexible.

Both Joshua and Kris are comforted by knowing exactly what is going to happen next throughout their day. I run into problems anytime we become to tied to a routine and something changes. When Kris was younger I never told him what we were going to do for the day because once I did it was set in stone (as far as he was concerned) and we could not deviate from that plan.

There are a lot of ideas on ways to help autistic kids with this issue. I've tried schedules that are written in pencil. When something comes up I change his schedule and try to explain that sometimes things happen that we can't control. With Joshua I do the now/next thing. I say now we are doing this and next we will do that. It helps at times like when he is excited about going outside when it's dinner time.

I find the worse cause for problem is going to the Dr/Dentist. My son believes that is the appointment is at 2pm and we arrive at 1:45 we should be with the Dr/Dentist by 2pm. It can cause some massive anxiety with each passing minute. But it's a life lesson.

I know that to some extent all kids deal with this and probably some adults too. It's not exclusive to Autism and is worth dealing with early in life.