Hooray, I survived! This last week wasn't scheduled to be busy or a struggle, but it was really hard for some reason. Possibly high stress levels and "too many tabs open" in my brain? I haven't been failing at my supplements, so it's presumably not that...
I dunno. I hate guessing games, like I hate most needless complications in life. But there's a reason several of the books on autism like to refer to parents as "detectives." It's because that's what they often become, trying to figure out why their kid suddenly stopped improving, trying to figure out why their kid is struggling, trying to figure out what therapies work. I kind of envy those kids a bit, since being both struggler and detective is, if you ask me, even worse an experience than just having to be a detective.
The tradeoff, of course, is that I am actually in my own head, and don't have only behavior and other external data points to work with. Those are still important, but being able to know if the person knows why they're upset is probably pretty valuable. I don't know personally, I'd have to ask a parent.
Anyway, I am finally managing to get some of the stress off my shoulders, because I'm finally managing to kill a couple projects and get up to speed on a couple more. One of the major stressors was a website for the self advocacy group I help direct. I'm afraid it's not very impressive at present, and doesn't even have its own domains yet, but you can find it here. The hope is to update it a couple times a week, and my personal hope is that I won't be the one doing that, because there are two other people on the PR committee that haven't done all that much for getting either this or the Facebook going, and they have volunteered to find and add things to these sites.
Beyond my personal stressors, there were a few pleasant social encounters this week. Chris and I got to see my grandma for a nice dinner. I'm afraid I was a bit of a grumpy-guts, as I was still worn quite thin from the week and the weekend before it, but fortunately she didn't seem to mind too much. We also had a movie + meal deal with a married pair of our friends, which has pleasantly become a new pattern in our lives. They are both relatively busy people, so it's not easy to find times to hang out, but fortunately they love movies, so we can plan around whatever looks most interesting.
The latest movie we saw was Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and it has gotten me an earworm. One of the major songs in the movie is called "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac. I was already familiar with it, and kind of liked it, but the movie used it in key points, so now it's quite stuck in my head. I don't hate that fact yet, so I'll probably hear it for a couple more days before getting completely, utterly sick of it and overriding it with something else.
So those things were fun. But I did spend most of the week miserable, and the crowning moment of awful was actually yesterday morning, when my support tablet broke (again). This is the third break in two years. This brand and model of tablet is supposed to be relatively durable, but apparently either I'm super-klutzy or I got a defective one. Either way, not fun times. The last time this happened, I wrote an entry about why it was so awful to lose my tablet.
The circumstances here are a bit different, fortunately. At this point, the phone plan that Chris and I have will allow multiple tablets for a small pittance per month, so we bought a cheapo tablet and added it to our plan. I'll make do with that for awhile, until we can afford something a bit more functional. In the meantime, a "child safe" case and an extra thick screen cover will be arriving by mail in a couple days, lest my clumsiness destroy this tablet, too.
I dunno. I hate guessing games, like I hate most needless complications in life. But there's a reason several of the books on autism like to refer to parents as "detectives." It's because that's what they often become, trying to figure out why their kid suddenly stopped improving, trying to figure out why their kid is struggling, trying to figure out what therapies work. I kind of envy those kids a bit, since being both struggler and detective is, if you ask me, even worse an experience than just having to be a detective.
The tradeoff, of course, is that I am actually in my own head, and don't have only behavior and other external data points to work with. Those are still important, but being able to know if the person knows why they're upset is probably pretty valuable. I don't know personally, I'd have to ask a parent.
Anyway, I am finally managing to get some of the stress off my shoulders, because I'm finally managing to kill a couple projects and get up to speed on a couple more. One of the major stressors was a website for the self advocacy group I help direct. I'm afraid it's not very impressive at present, and doesn't even have its own domains yet, but you can find it here. The hope is to update it a couple times a week, and my personal hope is that I won't be the one doing that, because there are two other people on the PR committee that haven't done all that much for getting either this or the Facebook going, and they have volunteered to find and add things to these sites.
Beyond my personal stressors, there were a few pleasant social encounters this week. Chris and I got to see my grandma for a nice dinner. I'm afraid I was a bit of a grumpy-guts, as I was still worn quite thin from the week and the weekend before it, but fortunately she didn't seem to mind too much. We also had a movie + meal deal with a married pair of our friends, which has pleasantly become a new pattern in our lives. They are both relatively busy people, so it's not easy to find times to hang out, but fortunately they love movies, so we can plan around whatever looks most interesting.
The latest movie we saw was Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and it has gotten me an earworm. One of the major songs in the movie is called "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac. I was already familiar with it, and kind of liked it, but the movie used it in key points, so now it's quite stuck in my head. I don't hate that fact yet, so I'll probably hear it for a couple more days before getting completely, utterly sick of it and overriding it with something else.
So those things were fun. But I did spend most of the week miserable, and the crowning moment of awful was actually yesterday morning, when my support tablet broke (again). This is the third break in two years. This brand and model of tablet is supposed to be relatively durable, but apparently either I'm super-klutzy or I got a defective one. Either way, not fun times. The last time this happened, I wrote an entry about why it was so awful to lose my tablet.
The circumstances here are a bit different, fortunately. At this point, the phone plan that Chris and I have will allow multiple tablets for a small pittance per month, so we bought a cheapo tablet and added it to our plan. I'll make do with that for awhile, until we can afford something a bit more functional. In the meantime, a "child safe" case and an extra thick screen cover will be arriving by mail in a couple days, lest my clumsiness destroy this tablet, too.
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