When Hunter gets stuck...

I was talking to some parents on the bus stop yesterday for my older son and some didn't even realize Hunter was autistic. :) One parent was asking me about him and I was describing how motor planning is a common struggle for him. A perfect example of it happened yesterday. Hunter will often struggle with a change to a routine he knows. Not that he doesn't want to change it up, just that to motor plan the change and do it differently can lead to a bit of confusion which then leads to his inability to do that new task and then he gets stuck. He will sometimes just stand there when it happens not knowing what to do or will work to do it the only way he knows. Over the recent months he has been drinking his sippy cup on the couch laying down on his stuffed dog. (Laying on his dog to drink is something he has done his entire life). He struggles to sit up to drink it and has yet to walk around with a sippy cup because that is a different way of drinking and again a motor planning concern. He can do it if you remind him how to do it at that very moment. (He drinks a straw cup upright or open cup upright at the table but a sippy is done laying down.) We are still working on teaching him the flexability in drinking it in various positions, but like anything it takes time and patience. He was hungry yesterday and helped me in picking out a good snack to eat :) He was very excited with anticipation to know he would be eating this snack. He walked over to the coffee table in which he often eats his snack at and I changed it up and offered the option of sitting on the couch to eat it and he happily jumped at the opportunity to sit on the couch to have his snack :) Suddenly though Hunter got stuck and struggled with the new change :( When I placed him on the couch he fell over a bit then it lead to him changing gears to think he needed his sippy cup cause he landed in the sippy cup drinking position. It may to an outsider just look like he changed his mind but in fact it wasn't that at all. He just couldn't revert back to snack time and sitting back up. He got stuck in what he knows and was unable to apply a change to the situation. I tried several times to get him to eat his snack, tell him about it and how yummy it was etc etc. Nothing worked. The moment was lost. Hunter then had a sippy cup instead, the snack was left to collect dust, no longer wanted by him. Sometimes with Autism you will find that when the moment is there you need to jump right in because in a split second that moment can change. Should you anticipate something about to occur and change it it's important to be one step ahead of it to prepare. Getting back to the original plan can be hard or for some impossible. If I had been quick enough to prevent him from falling over I may have helped him and prevented him from loosing his train of thought in having his snack. But sadly I wasn't :( Motor planning concerns are not behavioral or a choice to just not do something and sadly they can at times be very draining on both Hunter and our family. There is nothing more heart breaking then watching your child suddenly be unable to do something they KNOW how to do. To watch them stand still silently, wheels churning, trying to sort it out and be unable to grasp onto it. It isn't regression, it is still there just lost for a brief moment in time :(