Wednesday, May. 22, 2019 - 8:41 a.m.

Yesterday was pretty good.
New thing: mom drove Q over to her place to go swimming. She’s big enough now to just sit in a car seat, no booster, but hasn’t really done so much. Anyway, it went well and the boys didn’t even notice she left and returned again.

Met a little girl at the park who may be friend material. I actually approached her mother to exchange info, which is something I almost never do. The girl was really friendly and pinged my neurodivergence radar...yes indeed, she has global developmental delay and intellectual disability. She seemed really sweet and like she probably wasn’t going to be judging Q’s social skills. She’s a few years older, but emotionally they might be on par. The mother said intellectually she might be more at E’s level. Whatever. We don’t need her to do logic puzzles, and her social skills seemed better than Q’s. I don’t know what her interests are yet, but a little extra-familial human interaction would be a good thing for Q probably.

Two Q anecdotes: she was having trouble going to sleep and I was suggesting things to help. The ol’ counting sheep thing came up and she said she has tried that but her mouth gets tired after a while. I said, well don’t do it out loud, just do it in your
head. “Can you just think the numbers in your head?” “No”. “Do you think in words?” “No”. “Do you think in pictures?” “I try to”.

But she can read...? I don’t know how any of this works, wow.

And yesterday there was an incident in which U got hurt, and she was being a little preoccupied with her own agenda when I was trying to help him. (This has already happened once that evening when E had scraped his knee and I was cleaning off blood and comforting him and she was urgently demanding my attention so she could ask “what about my treat?”)

I explained that he was hurt and when someone is hurt you wait and make sure that they’re ok and feeling better before you go back to what you were doing/arguing with them/whatever. She took in this information. Then, “what if what they’re doing is funny?” “When they’re hurt?” “Yeah”.

So I explained that even if the faces and sounds they’re making are funny, she should try not to laugh. If you can’t help it, I said, you should go somewhere or at least turn around so they can’t see you. A person will feel really bad if you laugh when they’re crying. “Ok,” she said.

wHaT mAkEs YoU tHiNk ShE’s AuTiStIc?
(To be fair, they’ve pretty much stopped saying that)

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