We'll get there... when we get there

Cedar seems to be counting, which is super cute. He doesn't really talk, but he started chattering (it's like babbling but sounds purposive and has intonation to it, similar to spacepook though I'm not sure whether it was at the same age.) He has a few words at a time, like go and uh-oh, but as has been the case over the last year he has two or three at a time, then retires one to start saying something else. P.S. The counting sounds like "uh, doo, rhee, or." He counts up and back.

Slice of Life 1

I suppose I'll always have my early intervention notes. I guess what I was wishing for as I was looking for books at the library today is how it is living with Cedar, my toddler. I guess the part that is strange for me is having lived through this twice before and the inevitable tendency to make comparisons. We're told we shouldn't, but it's kind of an automatic process. I'm mining my past experience looking for hope, I suppose. Was my oldest this quiet? Was she this odd? When she babbled, was it the same? I didn't record very much from that time because I was so anxious about her. Am I the same? Am I hiding from the reality of it as I did for the first couple months after Cedar was diagnosed? Hekka was diagnosed at a much older age (first through third grade), because her speech was not especially delayed. I went the long way around, looking for another explanation of her deficits. And a big part of finally accepting her diagnosis was seeing the disorder in myself. So there was double the grieving process and on the heels of that, Cedar's diagnosis. And somewhere in there, Sputnik spending a lot of time in the assistant principal's office.

dys hors d'oeuvres

I had a discussion with some friends online recently where someone threw out the term aspie, and I said I didn't like the way that tries to make a cute pet name out of a disorder, and they said it was just short for Asperger's Syndrome, which the third person (who was indirectly being called aspie) said they felt was less stigmatizing than ASD. I suppose I could make a comic of it, only it wouldn't be a comic, it would be an illustration.

A: I am frustrated by an interpersonal interaction

B: The dilemma of the aspie in a neurotypical world

Me: I don't like the term aspie. It diminishes ASD.

A: I don't like ASD.

Me: Disorder means a condition that impairs function.

A: I think a syndrome is less bad than a disorder.

Me: A syndrome is actually set of problems. I don't think it's less bad.

There was probably some pictures of cats and dictators with humorous captions blended in, but that was the conversation.

Today I decided to pick up a book about ASD, Paul G. Taylor's A Beginner's Guide to Autism Spectrum Disorders and pretty quickly ran into this same concept, the desire to destigmatize disorder. It's probably a particular annoyance I have as a linguist, when people try to water down the language.

In the case of A, I probably have to grant that he doesn't have a disorder, since he was about to find a career where his qualities were an asset, attract a spouse, reproduce, and otherwise lead a functional life. He just gets into a lot of arguments with people on the internet.

We have the case of my older daughter, and I'm not sure what the argument is there. She seems pretty successful at this point and was never diagnosed, but we got her into an early reading program due to her language delay and she had one year of speech therapy during kindergarten. So she's successful, but I believe it was due to identification of a problem and early intervention.

In my own case, I feel disordered. I have married and reproduced, but I've been sadly underemployed most my life. Eta: Understanding that this was the product of a disorder allows me to feel less anger at myself. Naming the disease from self is a two edged sword. Sure it can make you feel stigmatized, but it may also frees you from the limitations of the disease if you are able to move past it. ASD may not have been the most important reason for my lack of career progress since I had MDD, but I think it definitely figured into it.

I certainly believe there are aspects of ASD that suit one better for life, such as the ability to focus and diminished impact of peer pressure. But I think there is a quantum of identity deeper than brain architecture. I suppose that makes me superstitious. 3.

The grammar of intention

For my biology class I needed to choose an article from a specific date range from the Public Library online Science (PLoS). Just by way of explaining why I am talking about an article from 2005. I could see if there's been more recent inquiries along this line, but this is the one I just wrote a summary of so I'll be talking about it. So the article is "Grasping the Intentions of Others Using One's Own Mirror Neuron System" by Iacaboni et al.

This article came up in a search for articles on autism, even though autism is only referred to briefly in the abstract. But if you know people with autism, the whole article is very interesting as it ties together the autism triad of language disorder, social dysfunction, and motor atypicality. (The language disorder connection is not as obvious, hence the title of this blog, but does come up in the references.)

Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that respond the same whether the subject is making an action or observing another making the same action. What this experiment looked into is whether mirror neurons are mirroring the just the action or the reason for the action (the intention). The took a couple dozen people and scanned their brains by MRI while showing them pictures of a tea cup being lifted either by the handle with two fingers or gripping the cup with the entire hand. These actions were imposed over a blank background, an orderly pre tea setting, and a disorderly after tea setting. The brain scans showed activity greater than the sum of action and context, possibly coding of intention.

What would be interesting about this coding of intention is if the intention of picking up a cup to drink were a relationship between the action of lifting the cup and the action of drinking (if I understood the discussion correctly). Rather than the brain being a like dictionary with the label of actions in one place and their meanings in another, intention was a chain of "logical association" between the actions. So the social dysfunction of autism could be the same variation (if you don't like the word failure) in reading people as in speaking words.

Of course I remember how exciting Theta grid theory first sounded when I took Morphology and the Lexicon, the idea that the meaning of words was their relationships with each other. Thought there always comes a point where this theory breaks down. Of course, that's with the limitation that a word is symbolic, while anything encoded in the mirror neuron system has an actual correlate to reality.

My experience with Aspergers/HFA is that the connections are there, but they don't follow the regular rules. The ASD child seems clueless about some situations but is inflexible about others. Think of echolalia applied to actions and intentions.

Darmok

My toddler, Cedar, is 30 months old now. He's been doing a couple of imitative things. One is the O-Re-O chorus from Wreck it Ralph, and "Uh-Oh." And I swear when he takes a little tumble he makes an utterance the general shape of "Are you OK." It's a little hard to check. But this is apparently part of how they operate, is not slicing language into constituent parts.

There's a Star Trek episode about an alien race that only communicates in stories. I was always bothered by this story since if they were incapable of using discrete words how would they tell the story? I don't know, maybe they had a complete language and something happened where the holists came to dominate the society. They had some technological superiority to the humans, they were interstellar travellers and could kidnap Captain Picard with a transporter that when around the Enterprises shields. So they apparently had well developed technical abilities. Maybe their day to day communication was sciencey and the mythological tropes were the best they could come up with for the diplomatic protocols prior humans had attempted.

Anyway, yesterday when his brother came home, Cedar smiled and turned around and walked backward to the gate in the doorway, apparently hoping to be picked up. That's what it's like. He doesn't see that if you want to be picked up, you hold your arms out to someone. Instead he assumes the posture that makes it easy for him to be picked up. We saw this kind of thing with spacepook (who was never diagnosed, but was a hand flapper) and Hekka will just kind of tackle me instead of asking in any conventional way for a hug. It's a kind of gestural hyperliteralism. How would he learn the gestures toddlers normally use?

He's the only toddler around here. He does go to a toddler class at church, but doesn't necessarily see them in interaction with their parents. He is finally going in without a fuss, which has been a big step for us.

Back to school

Today I start classes for Nursing prerequisites at SLCC. Nursing is something I've thought about doing since 2007, but then we relocated and I was working, and it always looked as though I had a couple of years of prerequisites ahead of me before I could even be a Nursing major. So I wound up taking a couple of semesters of GIS classes. If everything goes as I would wish, I would wind up being a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, which at the U is a doctoral program.

So the chronology is that I was thinking about my life choices in late June. Not becoming a nurse is something I don't regret for my original bachelors, but regretting something that happened 20 years ago is different from not taking an opportunity now, apparently. Two most recent posts here explain more: http://vtisha.blogspot.com/ Of course I talk about MPH there, but I that is closely allied with my goals that involve Nursing.

I guess I was thinking a lot about the MPH program in May, and then I was thinking about the SLP program in July, and I got registered at the U but then talking to my daughter about collegey things and contemplating my schedule (with an autistic toddler) gave me cold feet. But I still felt I should explore my online options, and I found a couple of online classes at the U (for SLP prereqs) and then I felt I should look again at the nursing program. It turned out to be simpler than what I recalled from looking at it 5 years ago. They have a second bachelors program, though the soonest I could apply to that is January 2015 (to start Summer 2015).

And then I thought that if I was trying to go online, I should look at SLCC. They have a lot of classes online, and the ones that aren't online have sections at night. The soonest I could apply to that program, which is an AAS, would be June 2014 (to start January 2015). The second bachelors program at the U involves a couple more prereqs and they only take applications once a year.

Another consideration in all this is the relative cost, which is much less for SLCC.

The Savage of Aveyron

Yesterday we were at the library and I saw a book about Victor, the so called Savage of Aveyron. I read it while the baby slept and the story reminded me a lot of my brother with high functioning autism. It got me reading about the Genie case and thinking back to my college days studying linguistics, and how at that time the focus was a lot on second language acquisition and the immigration wave. And because I had missed TESOL, I didn't pursue it. Applied linguistics didn't interest me as much as cognitive linguistics.

But these days with the autism epidemic, maybe there is more for me in the field. We are so reliant on language as an indicator of what goes on inside our children's heads. I've watched as my children have gone through school and have defied classification. My oldest was a late talker but became a stellar student. My second was an early talker but has run into some serious problems having to do with social function, somewhat with peers but even more with authority. Hekka has redefined my whole relationship with the brain and was diagnosed with PDD-NOS and ADHDI. And now my youngest has been diagnosed with high functioning autism and is in early intervention. He seems to be the least inclined to speak of any of my children. Though it's hard to know for sure. The home videos suggest that. But he does seem curious and social and the developmentalist said he shows good concentration.

I guess the plan is to provide him a warm and varied environment and see if things pick up around 30 months, when abstract thought actually kicks in according to the Brain Rules guy. Up until then, children speak imitatively. To my mind, it is like the language some apes have demonstrated acquiring. We have encouraged signing (we have the videos and use baby signs with him) but he doesn't use them either. The thing about signing, and what the psychiatrist who evaluated him recommended, is you can make a toddler sign.

Something that occurred to me last week is that my oldest sang before she could talk. She also had some rhymes she could repeat, but her natural language was a concern and when she played she would jibber jabber to herself.

But then it might be me. Hekka gave me one of those mother's day cards where they fill in the blanks about you. And the card said "My mom always says_____" "Nothing".

First World Problems?

Mild autism doesn't seem like a first world problem. It's a bit like obesity in that it's only a problem if you live in the first world.

Yesterday we had some time between the dentist and music, which is near the school where Hekka attended kindergarten. There's a fenced footpath between houses to the schoolyard so I parked by that and told her she could run ahead while I fed the baby. She came back in 5 min saying she didn't see the playground and I said "It's right on the other side of this house." I'd taken Cedar there during her music class a few weeks before.

15 minutes later it's about time to retrieve her for class so I carry Cedar down the path and where the playground used to be is a pile of gravel and a couple of backhoes. And no sign of Hekka. I start to wonder how far north she could have walked in 15 minutes. I started to walk around the school when she calls me from the other direction. She had also circled the school.

I was just glad to find her, of course, but tried to see if she could surmise that the playground was being replaced. It's one of those things about PDD, they can seem sort of like they know what's going on but will miss the relevance of certain things.