Managing Autism - A Personal View

After a mild panic attack, I gather myself together and focus on what needs to achieved for the evening - Dinner, bath, stories and of course clean up. As I am helping my wife with the last of the packing, I am picturing in my mind how the weekends events will unfold.

After many hugs and kisses, and a handover of a long list of instructions the kids and I wave as my wife drives off into the sunset for her weekend of freedom. As I get the kids back inside the house, I start to plan the strategy for the evening. First thing dinner…….. something easy to prepare like stir-fry, spaghetti and of course take out. Stir-fry it is, and I start to chop the vegies.. ” What you doing Dad?” asked Jack.

“I am making dinner for us mate, do you want to help me?” I reply with a little bit of desperation.

“You are chopping it up all wrong Dad, Mum doesn’t do it like this - Mum chops the carrots like this” as Jack paints a picture in the air.

I didn’t think that my first call to Elissa would be to discuss how to prepare the carrots! The recent episode of apple “boats” is still too fresh in my memory. I decide to scrap the stir-fry, and prepare the foolproof traditional dish of eggs on toast.

Dinner passes the 2 kids test, and we move on to the next challenge…. the bath.

“Dad, I don’t want a bath”

“You have to have one Jack”

“Only if you can catch me, come on Anna lets run!!”

I now have two naked kids running from room to room, working in tandem to avoid capture - After many tears, and screaming out for Mum, (the kids did some crying as well) they finally tire enough for capture, are bathed without any further problems, and are finally put to bed. 

This is going to be a long weekend…….

To be continued. 

  Thanks Casdok for my award, I feel very honoured - even if I can’t chop carrots, at least I’ve made someone smile!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 6:56 am and is filed under Personal Stories. 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.