Thursday, September 11, 2014

The kindness of strangers

Say what you want about Facebook and other social media, but for as much drama as they can cause, they can also bring a lot of good. I have had some first hand experience with this in the past 24 hours. All because of this little cup


Like many children with autism, J has his little "quirks" and there are certain things that have to be a certain way. He is definitely a creature of habit. One example of this is the cup in the picture above. Since we transitioned J off of his bottle just after he turned a year old, this is the ONLY cup he has ever drank milk from.  He is perfectly capable of drinking from an open cup and will do so with juice when he is at school. But NOT his milk. I have a cupboard full of sippy cups that we went through when initially trying to find a cup he would drink from and that we have tried to get him to drink milk from since. He has different cups that he will drink juice or water from. But if I put milk in them, the second he takes a sip and realizes what it is he will reject it. We tried a few months ago, with the help of his in-home therapist and teachers at school, to break him from only drinking milk from his cup. We tried the same cup with a different lid, different cups with this lid, etc. We also tried only offering him milk from an open cup and not giving him this one. All that these efforts just resulted in him not drinking milk for weeks. We finally raised the white flag and gave in. He has been very limited in his diet lately (a subject deserving of it's own post) so I don't want him to give up drinking his milk. So we went back to giving him his milk in his beloved cup.

Then... it went missing.  Cue panic

 Unfortunately this cup has been discontinued so I can't just run to the store to buy a new one. I have scoured the internet, searching Amazon, eBay, etc. without any luck. Yesterday I decided to post a picture of the cup on 2 Facebook pages that I have been a part of since before J was born. These are small pages with groups of woman with whom I have become close with and who have been a great source of support over the past 4 years. I posted the pic in hopes that one of them might have this cup knocking around. None of them did, but a few of them shared the pic along with a short story about why they were looking for it. From there it has taken on a life of it's own. The posts have been shared all over Facebook and seen by thousands of people! And people have responded! Last count there are 15-20 of these cups being sent to us from all over the country!  I am overwhelmed by the response and support - it warms my heart. Never underestimate the power of social media or the kindness of strangers!

Monday, September 8, 2014

Hello again...





WOW, to say it's been a long time would be an understatement lol. I started this blog with all good intentions. I planned to chronicle our journey as we learned to navigate the world of autism with my beautiful son J. I started out strong and then eventually petered out. As I mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts, I think I hit a wall and became burned out on the topic of autism so to speak. Not that I stopped living it or researching, or that I backed off from doing all that I can to help my son. However, I needed to back away from reading every single blog I could find on the topic, spending any free minute I had reading about various therapies, and obsessing over every single thing J did or didn't do and why certain things were or weren't working. I unintentionally stepped away from this blog for a while. Then, as often happens, life got busy and in the way and this poor old blog was neglected. Things have settled down a bit, so I am going to attempt writing again.   A LOT has gone on over the past 1.5 years, so we have lots of catching up to do :)

I need to update everyone on Jake's progress over the past year and a half  (can you believe he is going to be 4! next month?!?!) and on everything that has been going on with our family. Right now it's late so I'm not going to write too much. But here's a little preview of part of why we've been so busy...