The audio clip can be found here.

Funny wiring. The author describes the book as follows:

My personal experience in living and working with a child with autism (my daughter) from diagnosis through adolescence up to adulthood. The book presents and delves into all aspects of the syndrome, focusing on the strategies and methodologies I found helpful in coping with and addressing the language, learning and behavioral challenges that children with autism present to parents and teachers. I also discuss at length what is going on neurologically in the autistic brain…

It is worth noting that google can be a great resource for books. They index a large number of books and provide large portions of the text for reading online. Some searches I found useful besides just searching for autism are:

Works by Simon Baron-Cohen

My personal experience in living and working with a child with autism (my daughter) from diagnosis through adolescence up to adulthood. The book presents and delves into all aspects of the syndrome, focusing on the strategies and methodologies I found helpful in coping with and addressing the language, learning and behavioral challenges that children with autism present to parents and teachers. I also discuss at length what is going on neurologically in the autistic brain…

This has lead me to want to use this post, or this blog atleast, to keep track of some of these available online resources. As I mention on our homepage many relevant and useful resources are available online but they can be found in very scattered places. This is one thing that I have aimed to do with our website is to consolidate information into one location, or atleast try to concentrate links to information in one place. This is, I’ll admit, a very self serving pursuit, but I hope to be able to have others benefit from my online exploration by making my findings available to the larger population. It is not my intent to actively filter the content of what I find, though this will likely be a natural phenomenon anyway as I will link to and post about things that I am researching or stumble upon by accident (much like the source of this post).

I recently had the pleasure of exchanging some thoughts on the autism-vaccine issue with the author of a blog I like to read and he mentioned that he did not necessarily agree with some of the content in our document storage. This made me think more critically about what we want to achieve with that portion of our web presence. As we state in the caveat on our mainpage, our goal is to help consolidate information and have it in one location. I do not presume to know if everything that is there is fact, I do think that it is information (I hope that there is no dysinformation – though some may view it as such and that is there right) and information is very valuable. Reading and exploring broadly within any topic is the key to understanding and forming a well rounded opinion. That is my personal goal and therefore we provide these documents so that others can do likewise and perhaps fuel some healthy discourse where opinions vary, as they undoubtedly will.
So, now I can go on about my exploration of the internet and adding things that I find interesting and hopefully useful as we continue to learn about autism and its many facets. I think an important key to finding success in anything is to be well informed and keeping an open-, and critical, mind. I hope that is what we are doing.

NB: In keeping with my goal I have included a copy of Funny wiring in our repository should the link go stale or no longer be available.

Perhaps I can blame some of it on the time of year, with too much to do, the ever-shrinking daylight, and the seasonal “west-coast sunshine” it may be no wonder I feel that nothing is getting accomplished and I fear that K may be suffering for it. Or maybe, just maybe I have come to some level of acceptance about K’s “diagnosis” and all that we are doing to help him reach his maximum potential. And, to be fair, we have been quite relentless in trying to learn as much as we can about ASD and current treatments that are available so perhaps we are just in need of a well deserved break.

Since we received his diagnosis in June 2006 we have tried very hard to educate ourselves so we could rest assured we were doing all we could do help K and making informed decisions on his behalf. In fact, truth be told, we have done this at the exclusion of almost everything else. There was no conscious intent to have all other aspects of our lives be put on hold, it was just the result of feeling so strongly about what was required of us and our desire to get it done. Perhaps that is the natural first stage of dealing with having an ASD child, frantic education and mobilization of available resources.

Would then the second stage be a degree of normalization and less feelings of immediacy? We work very hard to ensure K is getting all that he needs to be his best, for after all that is all we have ever wanted for him- diagnosis or no diagnosis, just now much of the very intensive first stage has been completed. Is this the natural expression of this very important transition? These feelings of wasted time and a small amount of guilt when there is still so much to read on the subject, there is research to be done and new treatments to investigate may just be phase 1 hangover. I have read on numerous occasions that having an ASD child is a marathon not a sprint and perhaps we have just come to that realization and are just now feeling competent and confident enough to slow our pace. I think Tracy and I will always feel some degree of urgency. We know that time is against us as many treatments are most successful if initiated at an early age and K is now close to the ripe old age of 4 but we are confident in what we are doing and the results we have seen to date.

However, once the silly season is over I plan on re-dedicating myself to the cause. Though I continue to add new information to the documentation part of the site I often do not have time to read it all. This is one area that I am hoping to improve, as well as doing more reading on ASD sites about what other families are doing and finding success with. Part of that goal will be keeping this portion of the site up to date with what we find and our thoughts on the various topics that fall under the ASD umbrella. I also want to get more information on the site specific to K and what we are doing and our thoughts on their outcomes. In short I want to return to the original goal of the site; to organize and share information about ASD and track our experiences with K.

There, I’ve done it. A New Years resolution with time to spare!