Autism Vox

Once Upon a Snowy Afternoon

by Kristina Chew, PhD on December 6th, 2007

There were snowflakes falling fast outside my office window at 1.30pm so I packed up some student’s papers and books and hurried out the door: There’s at least one bridge and a couple of highways between where I work and where we live and a little snow can change people’s driving habits, and Charlie’s 3.15pm bus must be met. As I got closer to home and I saw that the snow was not going to let up, I started to wonder what we were going to do this afternoon.

Charlie likes to come home and he likes to be on the go. When he was younger and the weather was cold and it was a day without anything planned—speech therapy, or ABA, or a gymnastic class (or when a therapist called in sick), he and I spent too much time roaming the aisles of “big box” megastores—Toys ‘R’ Us and our perennial favorite, Target—-and looking through racks of Barney DVDs and CDs, with Charlie always requesting to buy the ones we already had. Sometimes we would try the mall but Charlie, in those days (before he turned 8), was interested (that’s an understatement) mostly in the escalators and elevators, and mall-going meant negotiating rides (numerous) on those. And at Target, one can always find some paper product that needs restocking or a mega-pack of barsoap on sale…….

To get to Target today, though, required driving straight into a major traffic artery at rush hour, as (I calculated) by the time Charlie got home, had his snack, and played around as he likes to, it would be nearing 4.30pm, and, while Charlie always likes to be in the car, he does prefer it when the car is moving. Getting stuck in any kind of traffic snarl, in the dark, surrounded by grumpy commuters, did not seem worth it.

This might seem to be excessive worrying, but Charlie’s fretfulness definitely increases when his time is less structured, and especially in the late afternoon before dinner. Fretfulness leads to anxiety and anxiety leads (sometimes) to repetitive and obsessive talking and racing thoughts and then some not so easy moments.

The afternoon and evening turned out better than I had expected though we never went far from home (and never got into the car). After he had his snack (I am definitely raising a growing boy), we practiced piano. When Charlie started taking lessons in the summer of 2006, we barely seemed to be able to practice for ten minutes—now it takes a solid half-hour to go through all of the exercises, songs and scales in Charlie’s music book, and also to play through the songs that he has mastered; his teacher has added some holiday songs, including “Frosty the Snowman” and “Auld Lang Syne.” I could see that that snow was not falling so fast and, after we had both donned three layers and Charlie had discovered that he had outgrown last year’s boots, we went out for a “fast walk.” A solitary jogger passed us as we made our way up the sidewalk, which was thickly dusted with white. Charlie liked walking in the snowy leaves and grass and the lights of the cars passing us brightened our way. We ended up walking farther than I would have thought and, while Charlie ran ahead of me, I recalled how I used to regard him as, indeed, somewhat delicate, prone to lose his balance and slide down and skin his palms or conk his head.

I had told Charlie that we would make one of his favorite dinners—Vietnamese summer rolls; Charlie calls them spring rolls, as we erroneously referred to them as such a long time ago. (Spring rolls are what my Chinese American family and I would call egg rolls and are deep-fried; summer rolls call for soaking rice paper wrappers in water, draining them, and stuffing them.) Charlie has always liked to watch me making spring rolls: Tonight, he helped to make them himself. He stood at my elbow as I sliced carrots and green onions; he took out the rice noodles and watched as I poured some into a pot of boiling water; he got the frozen shrimp out of the freezer and (as I requested) put some into the pot, along with a few carrots. When the noodles were cooked, I spread out a towel on the counter and carefully laid a rice paper wrapper on top. “Get some noodles—a shrimp—-carrots and green onions—-roll the side—-and the other side too, then fold that part in……,” he repeated after me, and did each step without my having to show him. After Charlie made a roll (or rather a blob-roll, as the wrappers tear if you pull too hard and he put in lots of filling, so the results were rather amorphous), he plopped it on a plate and ran (with a big smile) to sit at the table and eat.

After making and eating several more spring rolls (and stowing away three for his lunchbox), Charlie carried out the garbage and folded some towels. By the time Jim came home, Charlie (calling out “Dad home!”) was in his pajamas and playing with his iPod on our bed (which doubles as an indoor trampoline). It was only after I had tucked Charlie in that I realized that we had not done his homework—-writing his name on a worksheet.

I guess you could say, we got kind of preoccupied doing other things on a snowy afternoon.

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POSTED IN: Charlisms, Family, Food and Diet, Music, Parenting, Weather