Repeat and routine used to be an all day long every day way of life. Breaking it was a full blown nightmare and as a parent I had to adjust to a detailed life that almost never changed. I guess you could say it was survival and the only way to give my son any kind of peace. Peace in the details and peace in knowing everything that was going to happen from sun up to sun down. Not an easy way to live but surprisingly not impossible either. I think in some ways we both found peace living so repetitive. People would say to me change is good and they weren't wrong but they didn't understand what change did to my son and as a mother I couldn't put him through it unless it was necessary.
The interesting twist to this is, over the few months my son has craved change. He grows bored with repeat and routine. Even the thought of repeat, such as heading straight home after therapy irritates him. We pull up to a red light and he will point down a road that either he has not been down or leads away from our house and says "go that way." A total reversal from the way we used to live. Little details still cause some upsets like getting wet or a tiny speck of dirt in his shoe but new experiences are what he is all about and boredom sets in extremely fast. Why the reversal? The number one reason is the amazing ABA therapy he attends five days a week. Easter Seals Autism Center has impacted his life in an enormously drastic way and there is no way he would be this far without them. Number two reason is at some point we stopped staying home and I started a "let's see what happens" state of mind. Thankfully we have some real success with this new approach but we certainly have had some interesting things gone wrong as well that he recovered from without rushing home. Keep in mind the people you surround yourself with when taking this approach make a big difference as well. Tolerant and easy going is important or it won't be easy at all.
In the past few days something has happened and I would call it a regression, not a drastic one, but his attention span went away, he began slipping much more into his own world and he has been scripting with more slurred speech than usual. Meaning he has been repeating the script of the Little Rascals movie over and over again and his speech had taken such a dive no one could understand him. Even I had a hard time picking up on what he was saying. He starting watching this movie a couple of weeks ago after not really even watching TV in general and hadn't watched that particular movie in over a year. It's only in the last couple of days he has drifted totally into it and the repeat of the movie has started to take him down. I hadn't realized how bad it had gotten until we went somewhere he loves to go, the skate park. Typically he would attempt to skate and loves watching other kids skate but he spent most of his time reciting the He Man Woman Haters vow and playing in the dirt. He also did something I have not seen him do in over a year. He was given a sticker and over and over he let the sticker go and watched the wind blow it around. Sounds like fun but this was a past behavior not a present one and a huge red flag.
We came home and I immediately took all of his old movies and put them away starting with The Little Rascals. Every parent likes a little break and putting a child in front of the TV with a cute movie is the easiest way to get one but I would much rather entertain him myself or get out of the house than see him get taken down by repeat. I would much rather see him attempt to skateboard at a park than watch him wander around scripting a movie. I am not sure if he will progress out of this quickly but I do know allowing him to continue watching it is only going to keep him locked in. Life is not what it used to be and maybe he stopped watching movies for a reason I couldn't understand at the time. We don't buy movies anymore and only rent them so if he actually sits down to watch one it is gone quickly with no time to get locked in. This past week he has taught me minimizing how often he watches is very important and new is better. He takes in information so quickly if he is bombarded with the same information over and over that's what he is going to express. Exactly why therapy every day has done so much for him. They push what he needs to learn and they move on when it's needed, that's how progress is made. Makes perfect sense why he became stuck and so grateful he shows me what I am doing wrong quickly because if I couldn't see it by his behavior change I might have kept enjoying that short break and thought it was a complicated autism regression. It's an autism regression but it's not complicated at all. I haven't turned the TV on for him since last night and I can already see a positive effect.
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