Autism in Banff National Park

We had Bush’s Hickory Smoked Baked Beans last night, and said to Steve, “I feel like we’re eating a campfire.” Because everything in our house now smells like campfire–our tent, sleeping bags, and clothes are all holding the smells of our camping trip hostage.

I love it.

Steve and I went to Banff two years ago, just the two of us. It was Steve’s first “real” trip to Alberta–the province I grew up in. He fell in love instantly. The Canadian Rockies will do that to you.

A few months ago, Steve announced he wanted to do the trip again–this time with the kids. It’s a fourteen hour trip up to Lethbridge, Alberta (where my aunt and uncle live) and another 3 hours or so to Banff. It’s a long way to be away from home if something goes wrong. And we’re camping–neither of us are outdoorsy. It’s a 50/50 shot if we can get a fire going. But honestly my main concern was the bears. I’m talking grizzly bears.

Grizzly bears and two kids–one an autistic kid? Sign me up.

I’ll admit, my need to go back to Alberta this time trumped all other concerns. Even the bear ones. It sounds selfish, but sometimes I get that way. Selfish. We work with autism every day around here and sometimes I just want to do something I want to do. Even if it’s logistically almost impossible, even if it isn’t “autisticly ideal.” So I said yes to the Canadian Rockies trip. For me.

I researched Pintrest for camping hacks. I made a fire starter kit. I bought a mini camping stove. Somehow Steve and I were able to shove 4 sleeping bags, 4 pillows, 4 suitcases, one tent, and all our supplies into the Camry. The kids were squished, but that’s what long car trips are all about, right?

We got into Lethbridge late Saturday night, and spent a couple of days recouping before our big week-long camping trip in the backwoods of Banff. Okay, so it really wasn’t the backwoods, it was a civilized campground surrounded by an electric fence to keep out the bears and we stayed in a hotel every other night, but for our family it was essentially backwoods.

Lethbridge, Alberta

J and my cousin Jessica making cookies. Jessica was amazing with J–even when J was trying to get away with things he shouldn’t she kept him in line and he loved being with her for it.

Then we headed up to Banff. I wondered how this would work for J. I always wonder how things work with J. Sometimes I wish I could crawl into his brain–a real version of Inside Out–is he’s capable of what I expect from him. Am I short changing him? Am I asking for too much? Can he do this?

With some divine intervention (a family willing to let W on their boat at Lake Louise so Steve and I could canoe with J, the downpour of rain waiting until our last night to show up, no bear encounters) and some perseverance by J, it worked. Camping is exhausting. It’s setting up camp, it’s hiking, it’s driving, it’s doing it again at another location. I’m so grateful that J’s getting more flexible with his routine. Things aren’t always perfect and there were a few big meltdowns. Two days in I had to think on the fly the new privileges that would work for our transient lifestyle (I can’t take away the Wii or trampoline while we’re travelling) but s’mores privileges and socks to bed can work just as well 😉

Here are some pictures of our trip:

Lake Louise

J trying out paddling on the canoe. And yes, I was terrified he’d drop it in the lake.

W paddling with the VERY generous family that let her on their boat. The company only allowed two adults and two small children. Both J and W were too heavy to be considered small children.

Marble Canyon (Kootenay National Park)

My little hikers.

Johnston Canyon:

One of J’s favorite places. You hike up to the first set of falls, wait in line to crawl into a small cave to get a spectacular view of the falls.

Top of Whistlers Mountain (Jasper National Park)

I was so proud of him here. J was pretty scared to ride up the tram to the top of the mountain. He kept saying “but it’s on a wire.” When we were let off, you still have to hike quite a ways to the top. The air is REALLY thin and the hike is REALLY steep. He had to take a lot of breaks, but HE MADE IT. He kept saying, “This is just like running” 🙂

Our last day in Banff

It’s been interesting coming back home. I feel like we’ve been gone for months. It’s only been two weeks. The best part is that I feel recharged (which is strange, because of all the work and stress of travelling). It must be the mountain air. And J is really happy. He’s happy to be home in his routine and it’s like he’s matured a little more over the last two weeks. He tells me over and over every day that he loved our trip. He tells me every day that he loves Banff. Sometimes I wonder that if we just remove all the things around us–all the busy stimuli and our responsibilities–and strip down to the basics: food, shelter, human interaction, nature–if we develop ourselves a little more too. If we find a little more of ourselves again.

Oh, and this is everything I love about Alberta:

What’s on our iPad: Reading Comprehension Edition

I used to think that we are all inherently good or bad at things. But after hearing Temple Grandin speak in Fargo a few years ago explain her strengths and weaknesses in math (how she was terrible at algebra and fantastic at geometry), it made me see “subjects” and “challenges” in a whole new way, and it helped me understand J a little bit better.

J is an amazing speller–he always has been. Before he could really talk, he could spell words, not just easy words like “cat” and “dog.” He could spell “dinosaur” and “Hy-Vee-Food & Drug” and “Old Navy” and “octagon.” When he was three. He loves grammar and usage–so much that he will take a pen and scribble out the misspelled words and bad grammar on Mac and Cheese boxes or other “poor English/cutesy English” marketed items. He loves the thesaurus and homophones and antonyms and palindromes. He will kick your trash at Scrabble.

But he is absolutely terrible at reading comprehension. Since he doesn’t cooperate with state testing, and since we’ve never gotten an “accurate” reading on his strengths and weaknesses (mostly because he doesn’t want to do the test and he’ll guess random letters like A, D, D, C just to get the test done), I’ve been trying to pinpoint a little better where his strengths and weakness are. I found a few websites for practice Common Core test prep and we’ve done a practice test almost every day this past month. I started at grade 2 just to gauge where J is using this test website: prepdog.org.

The questions are shorter, and it allows him to develop better test taking skills. The tests aren’t good but not perfect. There are some spelling mistakes (which J is quick to point out). Sometimes there are really badly worded questions, but by going through this, I realized that standardized testing might not be as evil as I once thought. It’s allowed me to notice trends in J’s strengths. Believe it or not, he focuses on feelings in the story (at grade 2 this is pretty easy to find in the text). I’m guessing because he’s had so much therapy on that. He does really well at short paragraphs with once central idea–something I wasn’t sure he was able to do. He DOES NOT know the difference between fact and opinion. He CANNOT make very good inferences. He has a hard time with sequences and steps (what did Jimmy do before he picked up the pen).

By serendipitous luck, I stumbled on these great reading comprehension apps for J, and they’ve been really good for him. They target specific areas of reading comprehension: fact v opinion, inferences, main ideas, etc. As I’m learning more and more with J, we have to teach him the pieces of the puzzle first before he can put it all together. I really love these apps for J.  I’ve learned through trial and error what apps work best, the most important being no “games.” No “cutesy characters” or bells and whistles. He loses all focus on the assignment and will start perseverating on the games. Second, no repetitive, predictable programing. He figures that out really quickly and starts to fixate on the patterns and then will perseverate on the program itself and not the content. Scholastic’s Read 180 is terrible for him because of the repetitive, predictable nature of it. He likes to get things wrong on purpose because the computer will talk back to him every time.

There is very little repetition in these apps. They will ask you to read the same passages or sentences again, but every time they ask you a different question about the passage. Which is great! Because J actually has to read the question and think about it instead of memorizing the answer after the first time. I love it from an English perspective because it shows you that you can read the same passage multiple times and get different things out of it every time. It was so funny to see the look on J’s face when he figured out that the same sentence could mean different things 🙂 Here are some of the screen shots of the various apps. We’re still at the beginner levels because that’s where he’s at comprehension-wise. But I know over the next couple of months he’ll figure it out pretty quickly. They might not be for every kid with autism, but they’ve been sure working well for J.

The apps are by Janine Toole (here). We started by the free downloads.

Here are some screen shots of each individual app:

WH2

Fact Opinion

Inference Ace

Inference Clues

Main Idea Sentences

We don’t solely rely on the apps for reading practice, of course. We still read a novel together every day. I still print off the prepdog tests so he can practice a test on paper. Just one more tool in our arsenal of learning.

What reading apps or reading strategies do you like?

When Family Can Help You Settle Your Glitter

I feel like the summer is flying by and we’ll be starting school again in no time. I was talking to a co-worker last week and we both decided that the fourth of July is the halfway mark of summer. After that it’s just a fast downhill descent to the beginning of fall semester. That means J will be soon starting grade seven and I’m not ready for that. We’ve got so many things to learn and work on before that happens. We’ve been working on handwriting, but I want that to be at a better place before school starts. We’ve been working on reading comprehension but not as much as I’d like. I had grand plans for writing projects but we’ve only completed one. There’s still so much I want to go over with him.

With all my ambitions for academic rigor, I need to remember that living is part of learning. I keep telling myself this–that there are lessons to learn, opportunities outside of our daily drills of running, piano, handwriting, reading comprehension, and math. It’s really hard; I feel like we’ve been playing catch-up since the toddler years and to give myself permission to let that go for a few weeks is hard. There’s a lot of paranoia being a mom of an autistic child. Every wasted day is a wasted opportunity to rewire the brain. Every change in routine can undo weeks of work, so I repeat this mantra:

Living is learning too.

This week we headed to Kansas City, Missouri and Wichita, Kansas to visit our parents. We were lucky enough to have some siblings meet up with us. I brought along J’s piano books and some “homework” along the way. Sometimes we were able to fit most of his routine in, sometimes just a few things. We’re lucky that J has (mostly) gotten over his insistence on strict scheduling. He prefers to practice piano every day, but when we missed one day it wasn’t the end of the world. Some activities were great–the 10 hours at Worlds of Fun with late lunch and late dinner ended up working out just fine. The trip to the Royals stadium the next night went well initially–until J started thinking about our dog Fred and how much he missed him. By the 8th inning when J announced he was so tired and that ten o’clock was way past his bedtime. The workers of Kauffman stadium got to experience a full twelve year old autistic meltdown. It’s hard to know how to push when you’re out of town, out of your element.

Enjoying the Royals Game (before the meltdown)

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires made it as far south as Kansas City making for a hazy night.

A few days later we headed down to Wichita and visited more family. My sister’s kids were there as well and so W had a good time playing with them. They went to the trampoline park and the Nut House. Overall the whole trip has been a good experience.

Fun with cousins at the trampoline park.

The autism factor is interesting when you’re dealing with family. We live so far away from family that we’re lucky if we see them every six months,and within six months, J changes astronomically. Luckily, family is always willing to learn, support, and enforce the things you’re working on. I explained to everyone: “If he talks about exit signs or spelling words, just tell him that it’s inappropriate and redirect the conversation. He knows it’s inappropriate and he won’t be hurt if you call him on it. If you’re annoyed that he keeps talking on and on about the same thing, it’s okay to tell him to stop. The great thing with J is he’ll keep trying to interact with you until he figures out the right way.” That’s great thing about family is that they’ll back you up, even if they’re uncomfortable or unsure if they’re “doing it right” they’ll still try.

*Bonus points and a shout out to my sister Laura–one day J was having an anxiety attack (because he was overtired from the late fourth of July fireworks). She knew exactly what to do, she pulled him in close to her and started rubbing his back, ignoring all of his anxiety-filled gibberish, while I was able to grab the ipad for a calming app. Sometimes you feel so isolated in this autism journey, and when someone who isn’t by your side every day and doesn’t deal with autism every day is able to give you a hand, it makes all the world of difference.

*The “Settle Your Glitter” app available through iTunes is awesome. And it’s free. Which makes it even more awesome. You can check it out here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/settle-your-glitter/id962467492?mt=8