Arkansas Walk Now For Autism Speaks

As many of you know my son is Autistic. The diagnosis became "real" June 19th 2013 when he was 2 years old. Before this he did have a preliminary diagnoses. So we have known very early on that he had autism. 
We have tried to do fundraising and raise money to donate to local organizations that contribute to autism. Unfortunately where I live there are not many local anythings. And we could not get much money raised at all, so we dropped it. 
Now we are focusing on Autism Speaks and I have been reading a lot of things where people are against this organization. Everything I am reading just makes no sense. I mean why do people want to nit pick everything and cause drama over the smallest things. I even received a message from someone warning me against Autism Speaks on my facebook page, Natural Beautisms and Flappings in Life, but yet I was unable to respond. 

So I will address some of the concerns people have against Autism Speaks
1) No one on the committee is autistic- Frankly this does not bother me one bit! Why would it bother anyone else? Are people who work in schools and the therapists that help our children autistic? Probably not. I am sure the people on the committee who are NOT autistic do have experience with autistic individuals, isn't that what matters?

2) Autism Speaks pulls money away from local communities- Well there are hardly any local anything where I live. We have a few things such as Community Connections, Arkansas Autism Resource and Outreach Center. When these local communities hold an event for fundraising we will do the same for them as we do Autism Speaks. Its not Autism Speaks fault that some people focus on raising funds for them than other organizations. 

3) Only 4% of money raised goes to blah blah blah--Honestly how can we tell? And if this was the case wouldnt this be fraud of some sort? I have not done a lot of research on this but I will eventually.  I know a lot of goes towards research and I am grateful for that! 

There are other accusations that I do not agree with. Autism Speaks’ advertising depends on offensive and outdated rhetoric of fear and pity, presenting the lives of autistic people as tragic burdens on our families and society. In its advertising, Autism Speaks has compared being autistic to being kidnapped, dying of a natural disaster, having a fatal disease, and countless other inappropriate analogies.

I mean come on! I have never had these thoughts cross my mind when I watch any video on autism speaks. They show the reality of autism, how it effects lives. And no this is not held true to all autistic children. None of the people are the same. What is wrong with showing the ugly side of autism? Nothing, hence the purpose of fundraising to raise awareness and donate money for research. So far I have NOTHING against autism speaks. It has been full of information that has helped me and my family learn and cope with my sons diagnoses and help us learn ways to teach him. 

So with this being said there is an event coming up October 18th that we have signed up for. Arkansas Walk Now for Autism Speaks. We have never done a walk before so this is the first and we have never tried to raise money for Autism Speaks so this is the first time for that. I am asking for donations to support us in our walk for Autism. Even Logan will be walking!! Please find it in your hearts to overlook all this controversy about Autism Speaks and donate. Our goal is to raise $500 by October 18th. If you get right down to it, every organization has controversy. 
Here is the link to our donation team, Logans Sidekicks! Please share this and donate!! I am thinking to everyone who donates I will send them a complimentary autism awareness para-cord bracelet. 

I WALK FOR LOGAN

Our New Tradition

I hope everyone is doing great! I have been out for several days. A week to be exact I believe. 
Here is my explanation. Firstly I try not to blog when my Mr. Sexy is home. He feels like I am ignoring him :-) Second, I ended up sick. Yes the illness came upon this house. My daughter had came to visit for her weekend time and she passed it on to us. Thank you Gabby! Eric (Mr. Sexy) ended up sick first. He took off work and slept for awhile and I will admit, I have a lack of empathy sometimes and I did not want to get sick so I tried to keep my distance from him. That did not work and I ended up with it, 2x's worse. Imagine that. Seems the further down the line an illness goes it gets worse. My step son ended up at the doctor yesterday with a minor ear infection. He is no antibiotics for a bit. 

This morning you could tell it was Friday. Waking the 2 kids out of 3 up to get ready for school was a bit more hard. Cory overslept and would not wake up when his older brother tried to get him up. 30 minutes later he gets up when I tell him. Shower was skipped. Logan had his covers up over his head and was not awake at all and he just wanted to stay in bed. Thank goodness its Friday so the little bits can wake up on their own tomorrow. The one thing I love about Saturday.

During the down time of trying to recover I missed out on several prompts from the Blog-Tember Challenge. That is okay I will do my best to try to make them up. If not at least get back on track again. 

Day 12- Tell us about a favorite tradition, it can be any tradition and tell us what makes it so special. 

It is very hard to have traditions when you have a blended family especially around the holidays. Everyone is trying to figure out when kids will be with us or be with the other side or when we can celebrate with our families and then try to have our own. Mr. Sexy (Eric) and I have been together 2 years this month. Our relationship is new still yet so there are not many traditions set in stone. Like I said it is so hard to do the traditional traditions. 

While trying to type up this post and racking my brain on a tradition we have or could have, I found one.

We make a yearly trip to the Little Rock Zoo every year. This started in 2013 when we heard thatArkansas Autism Resource and Outreach Center hosts one day out of the year where admission is free for families who have been affected by Autism. We have attended both years so far and hope to continue this. Unfortunately, getting everyone to go and together is impossible. 

2013 All the Kids together

This Year and As you can see, 2 kids are missing. One wanted to stay with a friend and the other is having issues talking to his father. Long Story

I have come to realize when you have a blended family, traditions have to be tweaked a bit. You can not always have everyone together at once to do the special thing your family does. Keep the tradition and if everyone can attend that is great if not that is fine too. We will continue to attend Zoo Day that Arkansas Autism Resource and Outreach Center hosts every year! 

What favorite traditions do you have? We want to hear and you can link up At Brave Love

ABA Success after 4 Months

What is ABA you ask? It is Applied Behavioral Analysis. I will go into more detail on a later post. If you can not wait that long then go ahead and check out THIS SITE.
Logan had been accept into the Autism Waiver Program back in October of last year and it took them until February to hire people to come out to our house. In this field of therapy there is your line therapist, lead therapist and a consultant as well as a program coordinator. To make a long story short, things were not being done correctly at all. I finally made enough complaints that the program coordinator came out to our home and seen what a mess things were and how everyone was not following the proper guidelines. They were training my son wrongly. He would get bored and frustrated. Especially since he had to repeat a task 40 times in one day and he had 6 different tasks to work on. He can only "sort" so many times without losing his temper. Now Logan only has to do the "sort" task 10 times in four hours as well as the others tasks. They are pretty simple right now. It consists of imitation, pulling up his pants and working on sign language. 
Logans consultant had not ordered much of anything as learning tools. Logans ABA supplies were very very lacking and ineffective. Within the last week Logan has gotten a new lead therapist and a new consultant. The line therapist showed up today with an armful of things. Logans face lit up with all the new goodies to play with. Only problem, he found it hard to concentrate at the tasks because he wanted to play with the new toys! His reinforcement for completing his tasks was to be able to check out these new pretties. His favorite toy today to work for was the Handy Manny tool box.

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Next on the list of supplies that were brought today was Melissa & Dougs Rainbow Caterpillar. This particular toy will help develop gross motor skills. Logan has this bagged and passed. Even though it is easy for him he loves to play with it either way. It spins and anyone who has an autistic child knows that they love to spin things. That is a classic sign of autism. 

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My son is not the violent or destructive autistic child. In fact he loves to cuddle. Of course that would be on his terms but he has never "hit" a thing unless told do so. Even then it is iffy if he would even do it then. His line therapist brought in the whacky ball toy. Once he figured out how to hit the ball he enjoyed it. This toy was used in his functional play time. Functional play time is where we all play and show Logan how to play with a toy properly. He even played with it after the therapist left. 

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I felt very confident in todays therapy session. Instead of Logan getting bored or frustrated, he had fun. The way it should be. He even learned two new signs which are cookie and milk. He even learned how to pull up his pants. He still can not get the shorts over his bottom but he mostly gets it. Tomorrow will be even more fun. More supplies coming, meeting the new lead therapist and seeing what other tasks we can work on as well as learning what the parents goals will be. 

Logan did have a hard time focusing on the tasks but I play that off to the fact he has not had a therapy session since his surgery which was May 20th. He has to get in the swing of things again and get used to the new way of doing things. He was also distracted by all the new toys. 

Parents if your children are in therapies or anything else and you just have this gut feeling its not going the way it should, go with it! Research it and get things on the right track. I am excited about seeing Logans progress now. I think it is time for him to soar!!

Baby Book Milestones

You all know that special baby book you get for your newborn or the one not born yet? You excitedly can not wait to get your hands on it and start filling it out. I have done this with each one of my 3 children. My oldest had a winnie the pooh baby book. My middle child I did a scrapbook. Did everything on my own and had a very enjoyable time doing to. I loved recording all their firsts. 

I got my sons before he was born. I found it at a truck load sale. Not a very special one but special enough for me. I was excited about getting started. To begin with you have a section all about mom and dad. You should see my side compared to his dads side. Then you have a section to write about our parents .                Mine

His

Oh well I can get over that just fine. It's filling in the milestones that start to get me a little down. I am sure I am not the only autistic parent that may feel this way. We still have blanks in there and Logan is 3. He has yet to hold his own spoon, go to potty, stop wearing diapers, sang a song, first animal sound, first word and favorite playmates. What can I do though? I will not sit here and feel sorry for myself or him. My son and I are working very hard on trying to get all these milestones met. It may be later than most but he is more special than most. Maybe I am just bias. He may not be able to speak a single word but there are many other things he can do that children who can speak can not do.  Those are the things we shall focus on. 

As I was typing up this blog I realized something. The front cover of this baby book is of noah's ark My grandmother passed away back in March. It was not an easy passing for me to handle. My Grandmother loved Logan. She would be so proud of how intelligent he is. I was going through her belongings after she passed and found a noah's ark she had constructed by hand. I feel a connection. I told you at the beginning, that this baby book was nothing really special and I could have bought a much more nice one at the store or something but I seen it at a truckload sale and just had to get it. I feel there is something there but maybe I am crazy. But I can believe and it makes my heart feel better. 

Us autism parents, those milestones feel like a huge thing to us. It does hurt our hearts when we see that our children are behind but we also see our children excel in other ways. We are happy for every single progression they make. Love to you all and stay strong!