The Countries of The World, from One Citizen

 

Ask Incrediboy to identify a country’s flag from a field of flags. Any country. I dare you.  I warn you, however, that you’d better be certain, because he knows them all.  After a busy day of school and daycare and ABA therapy, he’d rushed over to the toy drawer that held his art supplies and started pulling out coloured cardboard, because he needed (not wanted) to make some flags.

The flags you see  in the photo are Japan, North Korea and Brazil. When Incrediboy was telling me what shapes and colours we needed to make the flag for North Korea, I tried correcting him, but he was insistent. I finally resorted to Google to resolve the dispute, and had to admit that my six year old son was right, and I was wrong (I had been picturing the flag for South Korea in my mind.) How many six year olds can draw flags from memory? How many adults can do so?

Flags, countries and nationalities are Incrediboy’s current “hobby”. It’s been fun with World Cup going on, as flags are being sold on nearly every street corner and cars are adorned with the occupants’ country of choice.  A long car trip was much easier with Incrediboy gazing out at the passing cars, calling out the flags on the cars as they whizzed by.

I wondered, at first, if this was just another form of perseveration, the mind’s inability to move from one task to the next, which is often a challenge for those on the spectrum, or those with other neurological disorders. Maybe this “hyperfocus” on countries is just a passing fancy, and soon another youtube video will trigger a new fascination.  It’s perhaps too soon to tell,  but I am enjoying it for now.

It’s a nice break from all things Hot Wheels, Avengers or Spiderman, because this is a sign of him looking outward at the world.  Recognizing the symbols of a flag, and connecting it to a country and its people, and (just recently) it’s language.  Flags are a concrete concept, but countries and nationalities, when you are one small person of six years of age, is a pretty big abstraction.  The world is a big place, and that can be frightening, but if you can get to know it better and  know your place in it, then maybe you can find your way through.

Especially if you’ve already figured out the map function on your mom’s phone 🙂

Pretty Letters All In a Row

Incredimom here to share with you the story of the picture decorating our Blog – all those pretty letters all in a row. At times, I’ve loved this photo, and at other times, I hated and feared it, for what I thought it represented.

It was September 2011, and Incrediboy was on the verge of starting school (half day of junior kindergarten). We’d gotten a package of foam numbers and letters for the little guy, and he loved to play with them in the bath, in the living room, everywhere.  When he managed to arrange them in alphabetical order, we were so pleased and proud of our smart little boy – so ready for school! We took the picture, posted it on Facebook, and thought very little of it.  Looking back, though, I think I looked at it as reassurance that everything was fine, and we were worrying for nothing.

We’d been worrying for so long about the elephant in the room. Our serious little guy had always been fairly quiet, but then again, so was his father, Incredidad. “He doesn’t talk much,” we’d tell the doctor, and the problem was attributed to the near constant fluid in his ears from the constant ear infections. Two sets of tubes and several rounds of speech therapy later, he had perfect hearing (just try whispering “ice cream” from another floor of the house) and an expanding vocabulary, but something still wasn’t right. It was the SLP at Toronto Preschool Speech and Language that gently suggested that we have Incrediboy assessed for developmental issues, as his behaviour was still atypical.  This was in early 2010. After several false starts and a few wrong steps waiting for the public system to grind Incrediboy up to the top of the assessment waitlist (another post for another day), we paid for a private assessment, and just before Christmas 2011, we received the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

By then, I had already begun to read everything I could on autism, and man, was it frightening! I was learning a whole new language, and looking at Incrediboy under a microscope. Now his affection for letters wasn’t cute or a sign of cleverness (after all, he hated to have us try to read to him), it was, much like the lining up of toys, a repetitive and restrictive behaviour, and therefore, wrong.  We were supposed to discourage that, the books said, and break him of that habit and “make” him play with toys “appropriately”.  I was so frustrated – I thought he was playing appropriately! Now this picture would make me wince whenever I saw it.

The problem with reading everything you can on a subject is that, without a guide, it can be hard to separate the sound from the debunked. Theories abound on the causes of autism (early ones blamed the mother, of course) and there are nearly as many treatments for autism as there are theories. We were fortunate enough to attend a conference in June 2012 featuring Jonathan Alderson, who encouraged us all to challenge the myths of autism. If a child shows a strong interest in something to the exclusion of anything else, why take it away, he asked. Why not use it as a bridge to learning? Why not take that hyper-focus and introduce new skills and new ideas at the same time?

And that’s what we did. We looked for numbers and letters while out shopping with Incrediboy, and we played alphabet games. He’d learned some sign language during speech therapy, so we sang and signed the alphabet together.  He wouldn’t hold a pen, put he liked to put his hand over mine while I drew letters, so we’d do that over and over again, until that hand on mine was directing the motion.  We moved from letters to words, using flash cards, and today, he is sounding out new words, and reading at his age level.

Now I can look at that photograph and remember the pride I felt while taking it. He IS a clever boy, and while we’ve had some challenges to overcome with school, he is more than ready to be there. With apologies to Sigmund Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a pretty row of letters is simply a pretty row of letters.