Managing Autism - A Personal View

What a morning we have had -and what a success to celebrate!

Jack loves lions, but will extend to other animals and dinosaurs when he’s playing with his Lego.  Our usual Lego play consists of Steve or I constructing animal figures out of Lego, Jack lining them up, and then no-one can touch them for a couple of days until Jack decides to pull them apart, and the process starts all over again.  Sometimes Jack builds the cave for the animals to live in - a very methodical and consistent procedure, that requires a lot of support and back up from us.

But this morning was a different story altogether.  I had left Jack with his tub of Lego in front of his favourite movie whilst I went about doing some cleaning and washing.  The phone had rung a couple of times and I had also been helping Anna with her dolls, so I hadn’t had a chance to check on Jack, other than a quick exchange of words every now and again, and to notice he was sitting very quietly and contently.  Little did I realise he had been busy constructing - and what amazing construction he had done!

Working all on his own, Jack had constructed a ‘T-Rex’, bottles of ‘milk’, a person and a dog, a policeman that (according to Jack) looks for lost animals’, a bunny and a cat.  He had worked diligently all morning, using the Lego picture guide as a reference, and his memory of what Steve and I had done with him in the past.  I was totally amazed, and delighted at the same time.

Jack is known for sitting back and watching - we experience this daily with him, and his Kindergarten teachers have often reported that Jack prefers to watch group activities from afar rather than participate, unless he understands the process and then he might participate on his terms.  Clearly our weeks and months of Lego play (where Steve and I have often been totally frustrated with Jack’s lack of want to physically participate and his preference for simply instructing us on what to do) have paid off.  Jack has reached that point where he can now process what to do with the Lego himself.

What a breakthrough!  And what a Lego milestone to reach!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Jack's Stories, Asperger Syndrome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.