Search Me!
New on my website this month – finally! A search feature that will help you locate just what you are looking for. I’m having fun with it myself, rediscovering older articles, soapboxes and other tidbits. There are dozens of essays, columns, stories, book excerpts and commentaries, and isn’t late winter a great time to squeeze in some extra reading? If you’ve been reading only my autism articles, or only my genealogy and history pieces, why not branch out and read something new. You’ll find subjects like baseball, politics and social issues, general health and parenting. Click here.

You Said It: Your favorite articles in 2008
Thank you, readers, for hitting my website over three-quarters of a million times in 2008! Even with that many visitors, a number of articles emerged as clear favorites. Here are the top ten, with links to all:

Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew
Ten Things Your Student with Autism Wishes You Knew
Diez Cosas Que Todo Niño con Autismo Quisiera Que Supieras
What We Leave Unsaid
Three Little Words
Behavior Is Communication: Yours, Mine and Ours [PDF]
Emma’s Unmarked Rest [PDF]
Unbundle Me
Little Boy Found
With Both Feet on the Ground [PDF]

A Readers’ Favorite: Three Little Words
While I was waiting at the jeweler’s for my watch repair last week, the salesman tried hard (but nicely - just doing his job) to convince me to choose a Valentine’s Day gift for my husband. He was visibly taken aback when I told him we never exchange Valentines. I’m used to that response. A snarky part of me even enjoys it. So I wrote about it last year, how what happens on a day in February doesn’t isn’t the end-all expression of love and how many, many combinations of three little words there are that say, “I love you.” This column, originally appearing in Autism Asperger’s Digest in March of 2008, has become a reader favorite.

THREE LITTLE WORDS

Valentine’s Day will come and go this year, and will make twenty-something times I will not have received a Valentine from my husband. He has a long-standing allergy to what he calls “commercially mandated” holidays, declaring that he doesn’t “need Hallmark to tell me how and when to love my wife.” And I don’t care because 365 days a year, he shows his love in dozens of ways.

It isn’t that I don’t care about hearing those “three little words.” Who doesn’t? My son Bryce has autism, and when he was young and only minimally verbal, I had my blue moments wondering if I might never hear “I love you” from him. But when the day finally did come – oh my! Those three little words were not whispered in my ear or crayoned on a card, but announced at a school assembly. The students were supposed to describe themselves as a dictionary entry with three definitions. The typical definitions were along the lines of soccer player, math whiz, love to draw, etc. Bryce’s definition of himself was “someone who loves my parents.” It was, of course, a moment that completely redefined the word “unforgettable.”

When a child struggles with verbal language, social communication or emotional issues as many children do, it gives new meaning to old clichés like “actions speak louder than words” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.” We may shower our kids daily – hourly! – with the words “I love you,” but after all, the glory of love is its infinite abstraction. We can’t assume that children will ascribe the same meaning to the word as we do, no matter how often they hear it.

The good thing about growing older is that your kids grow older too. One day they emerge from childhood and pre-adolescence (“pukey pubes” as one friend good-naturedly calls them) and, rather than telling you all that you do wrong, they begin to tell you everything that you did right. My son Connor is 21 now and Bryce is nearing 17, and they tell me that although they certainly heard those three little words “I love you” from me ad nauseum, it was a number of other three-word phrases and the actions that accompanied them that really imprinted the I-love-you message on their hearts.

“I’ll be there.” At the hoary age of 11, Connor got up at his grandfather’s funeral and told 200 people that his “Grandpa was all about devotion. He was at every baseball game, every birthday party.” He’ll be able to say the same thing about us when the time comes. To us it was the most natural thing in the world, not an imposition at all, that we would be at every ball game, every swim meet, every Halloween parade, every school performance, art show and parent conference. Also for every nasty doctor appointment, call from the principal, broken window and broken heart. I’m sure we put in thousands upon thousands of hours being there, but those years flew by and what we are left with now is kids who may not remember their bygone teammates or birthday presents or illnesses, but do remember that their parents were always, always there for them.

“I was wrong.” So many people find it terribly difficult to say these three little words, and yet nothing is more loving than giving your children the gift of being content with their own humanity. By freely admitting when you are wrong, you are modeling strength, grace and humility. These are learned skills that we cannot assume will come naturally to our children. For some children, all errors come in only one size: colossal! By freely admitting when I was wrong (which was frequently), my children learned that, not only will the world not come to an end with such an admission, but that trying again and/or making amends can feel great...

Read more ways to say “I love you” in the full article here.

On My Soapbox: A 300-Calorie Mixed Message

Chocolate Peanut Butter Dream Bars!

Got your attention, didn’t it?

So would the photograph on the cover of the January 2009 issue of Family Circle. One blogger called it a “full- cover porno dessert.” A half-foot tall image of two brownies topped with cream cheese filling topped with chocolate frosting topped with whipped cream, topped with nuts and chopped peanut butter cups, waterfalls of caramel sauce oozing down the sides. According to the recipe, a 1.5-inch square of this Jezebel of a dessert packs over 300 calories and 20 grams of fat.

And that’s OK. Except for the coverline under the come-hither confection:

WALK OFF THE WEIGHT.

Right.

A rather poignant news piece here a couple of years ago polled graduating seniors and asked them what they wished they had learned in high school but hadn’t. The most common response was “life skills” (cooking, handling money, fixing cars, etc.) but close behind was “interpersonal communication skills,” especially the kind needed to determine when they were being conned by marketers, politicians and workplace associates. It’s really important to spot mixed messages in the media and within relationships and point them out to our kids, relentlessly. Learning to distinguish manipulations, contradictions or non-sequiturs is bedeviling for everyone, and exponentially more so for children with autism.

In our house, we talked about the obscene dessert with the caption that implies that you can bliss out on these brownies-on-steroids and stroll the effects away. Fourth-grade math tells us otherwise: at 100 calories burned per mile, you’ll have to cover three miles for the moment-on-the-lips just one of these brownies packs. Is it worth it? Maybe, maybe not. But it should be a conscious decision made in light of facts, not seductive photos with misleading inferred messages.

Headed to Hedgebrook
Private cabin, organic dinners around the farmhouse table, the sea and sky of Puget Sound – I’m humbled and thrilled to have been awarded a writer’s residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, one of only 40 selected from over 500 applicants. www.hedgebrook.org

For this very good reason, there will be no newsletter in March, but there’ll be much brewing on my return, including an Ancestry piece on a 19th century North Dakota murder and news about my next book project.

See you then.