This swim season is really taking it out of us.  Ane had her first meet this last Tuesday.  Wait, you say.  The meets are supposed to be on Thursdays!  Why would this change?

Well, because there is a shortage of competition-sized pools in the area available to the school districts, and one is currently closed for renovations.  Which means that in order to get all the meets in, there’s a Saturday meet this weekend.

You know, right in the middle of Ane’s work shift.

*sigh*

And because the meets are alternating between Tuesdays and Thursdays, with this one random Saturday tossed in, it means that we have no stability in the schedule at the moment.

My only consolation is that next year will be easier, because Ane will be able to drive herself to practice and meets.

It has taken YEARS of effort (my family, and Friend and Doc, will back me up on this), but Tad has actually developed into a decent eater.  And I’m not talking about quantity (because HOLY CRAP, can he put away food), I’m talking about his willingness to eat a variety of foods.  Now, he may not like everything he tries, but we have become big proponents of the “one bite/one serving” rule.  Everything must be tried at least once.

With Tad eating better, Rerun has become more compliant about following the same rules.  We’ve also seen changes in his appetite, coupled with his medications.  But I can definitely say that Rerun is a better eater than he was a couple of years ago (even if he whines about it).

And then there’s Thumper, the eater of habit.

As far as we can tell, Thumper does not have any hangups with texture or taste.  He just refuses to eat anything that he hasn’t eaten before, and then he develops irrational preferences to only certain types of foods.  (Also, the broken food problem has not gone away.)  This means getting Thumper to eat a balanced diet is tricky.

Once we find a thing he will willingly feed himself (therapy has enabled him to join the “one bite” club, but it’s a fight), we tend to make that thing a part of our weekly menu.

I’m not sure when we discovered that Thumper liked the spinach tortellini from Trader Joe’s, but once we discovered that he would feed himself a giant bowl of it in a single sitting, it became an immediate winner.  Fortunately, the other boys like it, too – not as much as Thumper does, but they rarely complain about eating it.  And it HAS to be the fresh spinach tortellini from Trader Joe’s.  We found that out the hard way.

This is yet another example of how everything we thought we knew about autism when Tad was little, Thumper has thrown out the window and set it on fire.  If only we’d known at the time how much MORE complicated Thumper was going to be…

We’re back into the swing of things!  Sort of.

Tad really thought hard about not doing art class this year, but with the other therapy changes in his weekly schedule, I really felt that he would miss it too much if he decided to not go.  So, he is back in art class.  His teacher, who he saw this summer when he did the watercolors class, was pleased to see him.

And they actually picked right up with another watercolor project.

This is why class is good for him – because it stretches his attention and his focus, and it makes him create things that he would have never opted to make on his own.

I went and got my flu shot a few days before the kids were scheduled for theirs, all so I wouldn’t hear “but MOOOOOOOOM” when I dragged them all into the doctor’s office on a Saturday.

Lucky kids, they know that I am immune to their whining.

So now, everyone in the house has had their flu shot except the Webmaster…. *stares in his direction*