The first week of the summer break was over and there were many interesting details that came out of the week.
We started the week with all of the kids wound up completely. Our son was climbing on everything that was in reach. He was on the computer desks and tables, walking along the top of the back of the couch etc. So all signs pointed towards a lively and energetic summer with almost no listening skills. At this point in his development that was not a huge surprise anyway.
What was of particular interest is that on the very first day he took over my wife’s computer and went searching for games. And he found them easily (take into account he was only 6). Then he proceeded to start playing them and pretty much took over the computer. We deciding it was time to haul my old computer out of the basement. So we set him up with a computer to share with his sister and at least my wife got her computer back.
We saw signs of certain things we were looking for. Our son had started to mellow out a bit (at least for the times when his sister was in day camp) so the hope was, that it would continue for the entire summer. He had also started to make progress again in his autism, hitting new milestones. We were hopeful that it would continue over the summer break
As Summer vacation continued we found more and more we were having to make greater efforts to find things for our son to do. I found that, as summer continued, he became increasingly bored and harder to please. We realized after a few days that the idea of sharing a computer with his sister was not working. The issue was that as soon as one of the kids grabs one computer, the other one would try to take ours. So we were still no farther ahead on that idea.
We did find he enjoyed time in the vehicle regardless of where he was going. There were very few problems when travelling, either for short visits to the store or long trips out of town. This meant that we ended up trying to take him out as much as possible. We were also finding excursions to various play parks were great at helping chill his mood. So we started taking him there as often as possible as it was helpful to him to be out playing. It was a generally fun outing for the whole family. Water play parks also seemed to make him happy most of the time.
We were finding that on occasion he was hitting out. There was more frequency to his hitting though as a rule, he seemed to avoid hitting his baby sister. The worst he did with her seemed to be leaning on her high chair. She could be extremely vocal when she told him she did not like it. His older sister got much of his frustration though in most of the cases it was normal brother/sister disagreements. Like who is going to get to do what, when and instigated by her as much as by him. We did discourage it, but we also acknowledged that if he was non-autistic we would still have been subject to the majority of the disagreements anyway.
I did find the summer progressed along nicely and (like any normal parent) was quite happy when September the 8th rolls around and we were back to a nice quiet and peaceful household for a good part of the day. Interestingly, as the kids got older, I found we liked having them off for the summer more. The older they got the more fun we had during the summers and it was sad to see it end.
We did find that as summer progressed he was getting increasingly vocal. I do agree that it was still not near what would be considered normal talking for his age range. However, all the work my wife put in that summer meant that he definitely was not where he was when school ended. We were very pleased with the progress that he made in speech and language that summer.
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