Yesterday, for the first time, Ryan took the ice as a high-school hockey player as the team began on-ice practice for the upcoming season. There were so many points on this autism journey when I thought that would never be possible. Dreams of watching my son play competitive team sports were lost in the early […]
Read more "Dreams Deferred, Not Defeated"Ryan recently celebrated his birthday. Because he’s all about social media these days, he was very excited to receive birthday best wishes on Instagram. I got in on the act early, quickly searching my phone at breakfast for an old photo of the two of us that I could post with a birthday message for him. […]
Read more "Trust Me, They Hear Your"I’ve been silent for a while, basking in the slower rhythms of late summer. We had another wonderful family vacation. Let’s see … what else … oh, yeah, Ryan started high school. More on that to come. But something Ryan did the other day was enough to spur me to return to writing. He and […]
Read more "Empathy? Check."Two blog posts in my inbox caught my attention recently. One, from Austim-Mom.com, pulled something out of my recent post about Ryan tackling an aerial obstacle course. To prep Ryan for the course, I showed him YouTube videos of it to give him some visual perspective about the challenges he was going to face. Autism […]
Read more "Disconnected Connection"It was just a simple cargo net, made of chain, bridging perhaps five feet from the ground to a platform on the playground equipment of one of our local parks. I hated that cargo net. I hated it because Ryan could not, would not (and I know now, was not ready to) climb it. The […]
Read more "Conquering the Cargo Net"
Pucks and Puzzle Pieces 