Tremendously Successful Travel With Leelo

I'm not sure why I said I would write this post earlier today. I needed to get Iz to camp, get Leelo back home and ready for the schoolbus, take Mali to swimming lessons (which she uses to hone her comedy routine, not learn water skills), and then pick up her friend Lucy to distract her with imaginary Sparkle Puppy Super Veterinarian scenarios. Thinking I could do anything beyond kid-prep and chauffeurring and popping out some tweets was poor planning.

Still, no harm done. We are having a relatively mellow summer week and blogging is an elastic medium. But last week's San Diego trip with Leo? That was planned, examined, tweaked, and replotted until we had accounted for every detail we could anticipate. Planning was what made that trip with my boy and his autism possible.

And it worked. Leo was a star on his visit to San Diego. He cheerfully tolerated the flight down and the marathon road trip back (he was a much better sport than his Bickerson sisters), and was mostly happy and content to stay at my mom's house.

Here's how we prepared for our boy and his autism to have a successful trip away from home:

1) Do a Local Trial Run.
Leo and I recently spent one, experimental night at a hotel. I chose a location (Sebastopol, two hours away) that was close enough to turn tail and run home if we had to. We stayed at a hotel because I didn't want to risk interrupting family or friends' sleep. Leo did not have a problem sleeping away from home (though he did have issues with the pool not being open at 7 AM), and we had evidence that successful travel with our boy was indeed possible.

2) One-Way Flight the First Time
Leo and Seymour flew Southwest, which has an official policy of pre-boarding kids like our son. Leo enjoyed the flight down, but if he hadn't then we didn't want to worry about flying him back. Our destination was a day's drive away; I took the car down ahead of time and met Leo and his dad at the airport, and we all drove back together.

3) 48 Hours Are Plenty
We didn't want to push our luck, or stress Leo out with a long trip. A short, two-night visit seemed like the best way to succeed -- and indeed, it was. Leo got to have plenty of fun before coming right back home to his regular routine. We might try a longer trip in the future.

4) Choose a Destination With More Options Than You Think You Need
My mom's place is an ideal vacation spot for Leo, and I wouldn't take him anywhere that didn't have a similar variety of options. We could walk to one beach, and drive to several more. There is a hiking path out the back door. A nearby park has swings and a slide. There is a wonderful waterfront for taking walks when Leo goes into dawn-greeting rooster mode. There is a porch swing for Leo to chill out on if he gets overwhelmed and needs a quiet space. We rarely had to worry about how to keep him happily busy.



5) Stay With People Who Will Help You
Traveling with kids who need 1:1 supervision can be exhausting, even if those kids are good-natured. So we stayed with relatives who were happy to hang out with our boy in short stretches. If we attempt future non-family trips, I will research local special needs babysitting options in advance, so we can have a small bit of respite. As much fun as we all had, if my mom and brother hadn't pitched in occasionally, we'd have been exhausted.

6) Rearrange Accomodations As Needed
Leo loves my mom's house, but he simply cannot sleep in her guest room. It is too bright, and its location on the top floor makes it too hot for him during summer nights. Leo was up by 3:30 AM on his first night, which had us worried that he no longer tolerated sleeping away from home. But once I pleaded with everyone in the house to play musical beds and he got to sleep in a dark cool room on the ground floor, he slept through the night. *Whew*

7) Bring Lots of Engaging Activities
Leo currently enjoys dot-to-dots, mazes, matching activities, etc, and he likes to do the same activity multiple times. Instead of buying several of the same activity book, I made copies of their pages to tuck in every backpack and bag we brought with us, and laminated other copies to use with dry-erase markers. And I have mentioned these multiple times (and am not employed or compensated by their producer), but the My Busy Kits are a great idea -- lots of sensory, tactile, and open-ended activities, good space-savers, and all three of my kids love them (Leo was the focus of our trip, but he does have sisters). No matter where we were, we always had something with which to engage our boy.

8) Plan Time-Consuming, Self-Directing Excursions
The shore walk mentioned above takes at least an hour. Going to the beach takes at least two. Leo needed supervision but was otherwise self-directed during both. During these activities, my and Seymour's energies were able to shift to lower gears. Plus we enjoyed the swimming and walking as much as Leo did -- I was positively giddy to see my entire family having a good time in a crowded public beach.





This was the first full-family trip we'd taken since Spring 2008, when Leo exploded in the SeaTac departure lounge. We pretty much gave up on traveling with him after that, which is why I am so excited about last week's success. I almost can't believe Leo was such a happy and willing traveler, but am so, so grateful.

We may not be the globetrotting family of my pre-parenting dreams, but I'm tentatively hoping to resume traveling on our previous scale (before Leo's rough behavioral patch, he'd been to Hawaii, Seattle, Southern California, and Nevada, several times). We'll keep our destinations reasonable, and tailored to his needs. Who knows, Leo may one day get to fulfill his grandparents' dreams, and come boating with them. He loves to contemplate waves and water, and I love to think how soothing he would find the scenery below.



I won't despair if extensive travel doesn't happen, but how wonderful to once again imagine that it might!

How to Travel With Leelo

Will write a real travel post in the AM. Our travel was hugely successful, but I'm finding we all need a couple of recovery days.

I will say: BEACH BEACH BEACH = GOOD. Leo agrees.

The Autism Corps

If I had an opportunity to discuss autism with First Lady Michelle Obama, here's what I'd want to talk about:

We need an Autism Corps, modeled after the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps.

There are hundreds of thousands of children and adults with autism diagnoses who need day-to-day support now, and their ranks are swelling. There aren't enough trained professionals to serve them all, and even if there were, many families can't afford them. I can't imagine how those families go it alone, managing their lives without external support -- especially those whose children have moderate to severe diagnoses. Mine is one of the luckiest autism families around; we have access to and funding for the highest quality services, yet we still have plenty of scorched-earth days.

Michelle and Barack Obama have launched a campaign to encourage service, while millions of energetic and idealistic young adults want to work but can't find jobs, and our president has said that he "...believes we must work to guarantee that Americans with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] can live independent and fully productive lives and to assure that their families understand and are able to support a loved one with ASD."

Let's put that all together. Let's create a federally-funded organization dedicated to training volunteers to work with kids and adults with autism. Autism Corps workers could help individuals with autism gain skills and independence, and have recreation opportunities. They could give their families -- all autism families, not just those who can pay for or know how to get services -- some sorely-needed respite. They could make it possible for parents who would otherwise be full-time caretakers to work outside the home. They could supply balance to families who never thought they'd find it. They could make a real difference for families approaching the breaking point.

This is not to downplay the importance of autism discussion, approaches, and research. But those are already on White House and Federal radars. "The Autism Society has invited First Lady Michelle Obama to participate in [their annual conference's] July 24 keynote panel on public policy and autism." This is good news for autism awaress in general, and I hope the panel will be recorded. President Obama has welcomed science back to the White House, which hopefully translates into good news for evidenced-based autism treatments. And the US Dept of Health & Human Resources has publicly released its Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee Strategic Plan for Autism Spectrum Disorder Research, which bodes well for future autism research, and answers.

While autism and people with autism shouldn't be demonized, we need to be frank: having a child with autism is more stress than some families can handle. Those families have needs that take precedence over panels and promises and research; they need help getting through the day. They need an Autism Corps. I would hope our First Lady (and her husband) could both recognize and support this idea.

Just Beachy

Leelo in Wonderland

Leo is going on a plane today.

That is huge news, and speaks to how wonderfully he is doing in general. Air travel is something we'd written off after a departure lounge meltdown fourteen months ago, and while his aggressive behavior escalated from the summer through the winter of 2008. On January 1, 2009, we put him on a very low dose of Risperdol, and it was a switch-flip. Almost as though all his senses all been previously misaligned, and he could now focus on things other than trying to process each moment.

Since the beginning of 2009, Leo has been increasingly been so content, so confident, so affectionate. He is engaged with his environment, and his family. We are locked in a vicious positive-reinforcement cycle: he behaves well, we shower him with praise and affection, he likes that and wants more, he repeats and expands on the positive behaviors.

Some mornings we now have to wake up our former dawn-responder alarm clock. He usually gives me a sleepy, "Mommy, get in the bed," and if I do lie down, he enfolds me in a bear hug. It's delicious.

His good mood had meant minimized aggression both to himself and to others. During provoking situations, he will start to lunge as he used to, but now pulls himself back or hesitates before he makes contact. That is fantastic self-control. I'm impressed and proud.

He has lots of spontaneous and new language, and this past week especially it has been bubbling up furiously:

• "Dora is on TV, Monsters [Inc.] is a video!"
• "Stand up, Mommy"
• "I'm hungry!"
• "MOVE!" [proper imperative form].
• "I need to run to the potty" (spontaneous potty run!)
• "Turn on TV," then "Turn it OFF" (when done).
• "Move your arm" [to me, proper spontaneous pronoun]
• "Want to lie down in the bed wif Mommy."
• "Lie down, tickle my belly"
• "Jump with me" (on trampoline)
• "Wear your crocs" (when he wanted Seymour's shoes).
• "Cut my apple."
• "Don't spin around" (a current stim is spinning during transitions between activities.)

(Half of this language was collected by Seymour. One more reason to love online spreadsheets for tracking data -- If I'm away, I can log on remotely and keep up with how Leo is doing, whether my husband is available to talk about it or not.)

He has also been doing really well with color and shape matching activities, pre-sight reading word-matching, dot-to-dot, and maze activities. Therapist V, his home ABA therapist/respite provider (who also works at a local autism school), has been instrumental in helping Leo identify new activities' goals in cases where I could not figure out how communicate them. Once he understands them, Leo has been mastering these visually-based tasks very quickly. Like many other kids with autism, he is smart as hell, but cannot always express that intelligence through traditional learning routes.

This is a boy who is ready to fly.

The girls and I are already at our destination at my mom's beach town home, and will be picking up Leo and Seymour in couple of hours. Leo has been talking about airplanes and airports for a couple of months, so I hope he enjoys having his wish fulfilled.

I can't wait to see how our attempt at a full-family vacation goes, because we miss taking our kids to stay with relatives and seeing the cousins -- all the cousins -- frolic and bicker and play. We're keeping this experimental Leo leg of the trip brief and controlled -- one-way, short flight, less than 48 hours at my mom's place, then driving home. If Leo can't tolerate being away from home, we can leave.

But I'm feeling optimistic. We're staying next to a park, can walk to a beach, I've brought Leo's favorite videos, toys, and stacks of xeroxed activities, and stocked up on his preferred foods. There is a trail behind my mom's house; if Leo gets antsy, we can go for a hike. He will still need vigilant supervision, but my mom and my little brother and Seymour will be here, and my girls are mostly self-reliant and hanging out with their teenage cousin Nicole -- Leo's need for a 1:1 adult companion shouldn't exhaust any of us, even if he is less than content here.

Have a happy flight, sweet boy.



(Mali & I planted these dahlia & gladiolus bulbs in March, and have been entreating them to bloom for weeks. This picture was taken the day before we left on our vacation; the flowers are of course about to explode. At least we got to see some of them bloom.)

Journalist Brian Deer vs. MMR Researcher Andrew Wakefield

Those who keep up with reporter Brian Deer's ongoing research into Dr. Andrew Wakefield's questionable research practices re: autism and the MMR vaccine, or who read the Schaefer Report, may have read that:

"Press Complaints Commission Orders Sunday Times to Remove MMR journalist's Stories on Dr. Wakefield from Paper's Web Site"

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) of London, an independent body that oversees journalism fairness in the UK, has issued an interim order calling for the Sunday Times to remove stories written by Brian Deer about Dr. Andrew Wakefield from its web site. Dr. Wakefield had filed an extensive complaint with the PCC regarding errors of fact in Deer's reportage on the MMR vaccine and its possible relationship to autism. The General Medical Council (GMC) in the UK is presently hearing evidence involving Dr. Wakefield and two of his colleagues following a complaint to the GMC by Deer himself. The PCC decision today appears to indicate there are questions about the accuracy of the Deer stories. (Full article)

The problem is that the article excerpted above is from the media arm of Thoughtful House, which is Dr. Wakefield's US research/treatment facility, and that it distorts the facts (as reported on LBRB):

The Sunday Times has not been ordered to take down the articles. The PCC [Press Complainants Commission] decided to postpone its investigation until after the GMC [General Medical Counci] reaches a decision on the allegations of misconduct. This makes sense. If Wakefield is found guilty the complaint will fail. Meanwhile the PCC has asked the Sunday Times to remove the article from its website until matters can be resolved and the Sunday Times has agreed. [...]

So no order was issued, no judgement was made and there is no suggestion of impropriety by Deer or the Sunday Times. All the suggestions come from one source, Wakefield himself. (Full article.)

More from Brian Deer on Dr. Wakefield and the MMR/autism brouhaha.

New BlogHer Post: Identifying and Avoiding Autism Cults

New autism parents need to invest in critical thinking, and avoid hype-based organizations that foster autism fear & loathing. If you fall for an autism cult, you might never trust your own judgment again.

http://www.blogher.com/identifying-and-avoiding-autism-cults

An excerpt:

The best investment you can make in your autistic child's future is a commitment to intense scrutinization of treatment options. Does an approach make sense, or do you just really, really want to believe it will help? Are there real risks and only possible benefits? Do data and studies support it? If so, are they from independent sources or biased ones? New autism parents need to work past their fear and confusion, and embrace their critical reasoning skills. (If you need a skeptical thinking refresher, Michael Shermer's "Baloney Detection Kit" lists ten criteria for evaluating questionable claims.)

Got Your Goats

Like swallows returning to Capistrano, scores of goats descend upon our neighborhood each June to eat the long, fire-prone, un-mowable hillside grasses. Where do they come from and how do they get there? I have been telling my kids that they come in scourges, like locusts. But I should probably stop the recreational fibbing and start teaching my offspring some practical goatherding, since holding that job is still one of my goals in life and I plan to make them my apprentices.

This year, instead of shrieking "THE GOATS! THE GOATS ARE HERE!" and almost swerving into oncoming traffic, I pulled off the road and took some snaps:



The goats are here! Click to embiggen the herd.

Mother Warriors: The Extended Review

This is a long post, but one I hope you'll pass on to help debunk the image of Jenny McCarthy as a reliable source of general autism information and support, while spreading the word about hope and resources for ALL autism families.

"But vaccinations cause autism. Sure, science says otherwise, but Jenny McCarthy has some real convincing anecdotes.” -The Onion

Jenny McCarthy's son was not only diagnosed with autism, but had severe, life-threatening seizures. Through medical intervention, applied behavioral analysis (ABA), and other therapies, he is now doing much so much better that his mother describes him as "recovered" from autism and calls him a "poster child for hope." When she went on Oprah and described the symptoms of autism, parents across the country were able to give their quirky children's behaviors a name, and start getting those kids help.

I am grateful to her for helping those families, and I am glad for her and her son -- as are most autism families I know, because we crave success stories and the hope they bring as much as we crave our children's happiness. Parenting these kids we love so much is rewarding, but it can also be devilishly challenging, and we need role models to replenish our hope reservoirs, frequently.

Ms. McCarthy could have been autism's true hope-bearer. She could have used her visibility to create and promote books full of resources and ideas for helping all families with autism, telling us to never give up hope, to focus on loving our kids whether they respond to therapies or not, while including a chapter or two about alternative treatments that seem to work for her son and some of his peers.

Instead, she produces books like Mother Warriors, about how she and other parents rescued their kids from autism using expensive and time-consuming biomedical diet and supplement methods that won't help most kids on the spectrum, portrays pre-"recovered" children in a very negative light, and gives parents of newly diagnosed autistic children false hopes of recovery. Not real hope. False hope. That, and misinformation, are what Mother Warriors is full of, among other things.

Reading Mother Warriors is like listening to a college sophomore try to recruit campus freshman to Earth-First!-style environmental activism. Yes, she is sincere. Yes, the stories that keep her going are heartbreaking. Yes, we need to challenge some industry professionals to change their thinking. Yes, she is walking the walk, and taking action.

Yes, she is totally naive, in thrall to extremists, making a good cause look bad, and could possibly get people hurt.

Ms. McCarthy believes that her version of autism is reality, but instead of supplying any kind of non-testimonial documentation, she uses emotional manipulation, pop psychology, ratings numbers, and bullying -- not evidence -- to support her assertions. She shouts, "[My child] is my science!" when confronted with contradictory evidence, considers being on Oprah the ultimate validation of her "truth," declares that The Secret helps her to be a better autism parent, and thinks that yelling the loudest is an appropriate debate technique.

She also insists, as do many of the parents in this book, that she saw her child disappear and regress after his vaccinations. None of the parents in this book will consider that their child's regression and the timing of the vaccinations might be a coincidence:

"Yet, speculation that shots cause autism continues to stick in parents' minds. Why? One big reason is because we have all heard reports of kids suddenly "got" autism just a week or two after shots.

"In fact, one of the scariest characteristics of autism is that it can suddenly afflict a child who seems developmentally normal. But, is it possible that this sudden problem right after shots is just a coincidence? Absolutely, yes! Every day, serious and amazing things occur, purely by chance. Think of it this way, in a large country like the US, a one-in-a-million coincidence happens 300 times a day.

"Approximately 24,000 children are diagnosed with autism every year and in about 1/3 of those cases (8000/year...150/w) normally developing kids show abrupt deterioration (so called "regressive" autism). Regression usually appears between a child's 1st and 3rd birthdays, a period during which they get shots 4 separate times. Do the calculations and you quickly realize that, every year, over 600 children will spiral into autism during the four 1-week periods that follow these 4 shot visits... just by pure, utter, random chance."

-Harvey Karp: Cracking the Autism Riddle: "Vaccine Theory" Fades as a New Idea Emerges

All Ms. McCarthy had to do to give this book some legitimacy was to state, upfront, that some kids diagnosed with autism have other medical conditions that need addressing, and that when some of these kids become healthy, they seem to lose their autism diagnoses. She should have had a front-and-center checklist of symptoms to watch out for, if children are to be candidates for biomedical approaches: uncontrollable diarrhea, severe insomnia, adverse vaccine reactions, etc.

She should have said, on the first page of the first chapter, that even though she has encountered many success stories, the biomedical approach doesn't work for most families with autism: information she acknowledges but buries, in one paragraph on page eleven, and another on page 140. All the other pages of the book are dedicated to telling us how all kids with autism -- not those who have serious illnesses coupled with an autism diagnoses, but all kids with autism -- should at least try the biomedical approach.

The children in this book are not like most of the autistic kids I know, kids who did not regress into autism, many of whom are almost supernaturally physically healthy (my own son used to be a barfer, but that was due to intolerance of the antibiotics for his frequent ear infections. Once he got ear tubes put in and the antibiotics stopped, so did the barfing). Our kids contrast with the children featured in Mother Warriors, who all have gastrointestinal disorders, seizure disorders, family histories of immune disorders, or bad reactions to vaccinations.

I do believe that successfully treating these illnesses might lessen children's autism-like symptoms. Adults with conditions like ulcerative colitis, a large intestine disease similar to the leaky gut syndrome cited by several Mother Warriors parents, say that their pain can be excruciating, and leads to extreme irritability and mood swings. Intense pain could cause autistic-like symptoms and developmental delays in a baby or very young child. It is also a condition that is helped by trial-and-error dietary modification, in some cases a gluten-free, casein-free diet.

The one Mother Warriors child who didn't seem ill is a girl whose developmental trajectory mimicked that of Catherine Maurice's daughter in the classic story of autism recovery, Let Me Hear Your Voice. You know, the girl who regressed into autism and was recovered by ABA therapy while using goldfish crackers as reinforcers? It is difficult to take biomedical and wheat-free dairy-free diet claims seriously in that warrior mom's case. (Of course, almost every last kid in Warrior Mothers also had ABA therapy, but ABA is infrequently mentioned as a contributing recovery factor.)

The author skews her book in other non-inclusive ways. She lists no resources other than a directory of DAN! doctors, a few things that she wants you to buy: her DVDs, hyperbaric oxygen tanks, infrared saunas, etc., and a page about her and Jim Carrey's cult-like autism organization, Generation Rescue. Why doesn't she list any ABA resources, non-DAN! developmental pediatricians, autism research & support agencies, parent organizations? There are so many places online to send autism parents for help and support, but no one looking to this book as a source of general autism information would know that.

Specific instances of additional skew:

• She lets Dr. Jay N. Gordon, who wrote the introduction, embarrass himself by citing the continuously-debunked vaccines-causes-autism myth and alluding to the not-autism Hannah Poling vaccine injury compensation case.
• She lets a father justify the use of the anti-viral Valtrex on his autistic child by describing studies of post-viral autism-like regression in adults, without a single footnote or citation to back up his claims.
• She lets another parent describe how vaccinations stole her child's words, then later contradict herself entirely by talking about that same child's severe apraxia of speech, a motor planning disorder that is either present at birth or the result of stroke, tumor, or other brain injury.
• Several of the parents blame mercury in vaccines for their children's autism, without bothering to make a distinction between the non-bioaccumulating ethylmercury that used to be in vaccines, and the Minamata-disease-causing methylmercury everyone thinks the parents are talking about.
• She states that "No one ever talks about the [autism] siblings." Right. She's the first person who ever thought of them! Except no, no, no, and no.
• Eighty percent of autism parents' marriages end in divorce. Also a no.
  
• No one is studying biomedical approaches to autism, or vaccine-autism links! Absolutely untrue.
  

This massing of misinformation is so intense that Mother Warriors stops being a book and becomes a crusade. Fact-checkers must have either fallen on their swords, or were not invited along. And I sometimes suspect that our author did not graduate at the top of her class at The University of Google.

Other areas of the book go beyond faulty research or bad judgment, and into irresponsibility. By including the story of a family whose child died from a possible adverse vaccine reaction, Ms. McCarthy is stooping to emotional exploitation. No one can deny that bad vaccine reactions do happen; they are the reason the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) exists. But whereas this family's poignant story should be used to educate parents and doctors about exercising caution after adverse vaccine reactions -- the child had a severe seizure after a vaccination, but was vaccinated again, and had another bad reaction -- instead the author places the story in a biomedical context and has likely scared untold numbers of parents out of immunizing their kids. Do you know what happens kids stop getting vaccinating? They start to get sick, and some of them die. Just like the child in the story.

But facts and statistics aren't going to terrify new recruits into joining Ms. McCarthy's cause. So of course she's not going to say that it's much more risky to put your baby in a car seat and drive them down the street than it is to vaccinate them. In the past 20 years, U.S. families have filed 11,970 vaccine injury and 1,006 vaccine-related death claims (note that these are for adults as well as children, and are for claims filed, not claims verified and compensated). In one year, 2005, car crashes injured 184,000 children under 14 and killed 1,335. If your child has an adverse reaction to a vaccine, then you should devote your energy to investigating why, getting answers, blocking decisions you're not comfortable with, and encouraging other parents to vaccinate their kids, so herd immunity will keep your vaccine-averse child healthy.

Another distressing book theme is the assumption that parents who are truly dedicated advocates for their children will be able to somehow pay for all of the approaches this book recommends. Biomed is pricey and time-intensive, even if you just go for the GFCF diet and a few supplements. If are convinced you need go for the Mother Warriors gold standards, the DAN! doctor and resulting multiple supplements, medications, possible even chelation, and add on the hyperbaric oxygen treatments that every other person in the book cites as miraculous, no wonder you have parents in this book stating that they'd sell their houses, go into debt, don't care, need to recover their kid at any cost. But what about people who don't have a house to sell, or who are already in debt? Where is the resource section for the desperate parents who want to listen to Ms. McCarthy, but can't afford what she's selling?

Mother Warriors would not deserve this kind of drubbing if its author wasn't smacking down naysayers at every opportunity, unwittingly or knowingly spreading falsehoods, or had been guided by a clearer head. But, on top of all its other failings, this book is so badly organized that the best information (e.g., her p. 141 recognition that some kids don't recover and their parents are okay with that, and some recover with ABA therapy alone, but some kids are sick and those are the ones she's trying to reach) is buried. A good editor and one week's work could have transformed this book into one ten times more useful. And surely someone at Dutton could have spent a day at Ms. McCarthy's own online alma mater, and realized how much of the book's information doesn't hold up?

Even though the damage Ms. McCarthy is wreaking on my son's peers, their potential, and their families irritates me, I cringe when people take potshots at her because of her background as a TV personality and Playboy playmate. Her former career has no bearing on her experience as a mother and an autism activist. But she can be criticized for her lack of critical thinking skills and unwillingness to help the kids whose families don't or can't buy into her largely spurious autism recovery campaign.

----

P.S. One veteran mother talks frankly about her adult autistic son having adult sexual needs, a topic which needs more open discussion. However, that mother takes care of her son's needs by providing sex workers (a practice I am neither addressing nor condemning). That mother needs to give her son the benefit of the doubt, and learn more about autism and adult relationships.

La decisión

A letter arrived last night, letting us know that Mali got into Esperanza, the local Spanish Immersion public elementary school that her older sister attended.

The school to which I'd already resigned myself to her not going, because I didn't realize alumni still had to take the mandatory school tour, plus the administrative staff completely turned over since Iz arrived and no one remembered us, and the principal said (even after we took a tour) that admission would likely not happen.

I was content with the local kinder but am now conflicted. Seymour's not, he wants her in Spanish immersion and thinks that a kid who is already excelling at dramatic readings will be bored in a regular kinder; I suspect it would be nice for her to mess around and do crafts and non-reading kinder learning for a year. But it is hard to turn away from free language immersion *combined* with regular kinder learning and crafts.

Have to make a decision by tomorrow. What would you do?

Yes Esperanza

• Spanish Immersion for Free, Free, FREE!
• Full-day kindergarten
• Three kids in three different schools no matter what

No Esperanza

• Fifteen minutes across town
• Three different school year schedules (local kinder & Iz's school are on same calendar)
• Strict dress code (but I have hand-me-downs from Iz)
  

Yes Neighborhood School

• At the bottom of the hill where I pass it 6x each day
• Neighborhood kids, neighborhood friends?
• Ep and other friends have kids there