Forrest Gump Goes to Heaven...

Not sure who wrote this but I sure do love it :)

The day finally arrived. Forrest Gump dies and goes to Heaven.
He is at the Pearly Gates, met by St. Peter himself However, the gates are closed and Forrest approaches the gatekeeper.

St. Peter said, 'Well, Forrest, it is certainly good to see you. We have heard a lot about you. I must tell you, though, that the place is filling up fast, and we have been administering an entrance examination for everyone. The test is short, but you have to pass it before you can get into Heaven.'

Forrest responds, 'It sure is good to be here, St. Peter, sir. But nobody ever told me about any entrance exam. I sure hope that the test ain't too hard. Life was a big enough test as it was.'

St. Peter continued, 'Yes, I know, Forrest, but the test is only three questions.

First:
What two days of the week begin with the letter T?

Second:
How many seconds are there in a year?

Third:
What is God's first name?'

Forrest leaves to think the questions over. He returns the next day and sees St. Peter, who waves him up, and says, 'Now that you have had a chance to think the questions over, tell me your answers.'

Forrest replied, 'Well, the first one -- which two days in the week begins with the letter 'T'?

Shucks, that one is easy. That would be Today and Tomorrow.'

The Saint's eyes opened wide and he exclaimed, 'Forrest, that is not what I was thinking, but you do have a point, and I guess I did not specify, so I will give you credit for that answer. How about the next one?' asked St. Peter.

'How many seconds in a year?

Now that one is harder,' replied Forrest, 'but I thunk and thunk about
that, and I guess the only answer can be twelve.'

Astounded, St. Peter said, 'Twelve? Twelve? Forrest, how in Heaven's name could you come up with twelve seconds in a year?'

Forrest replied, 'Shucks, there's got to be twelve: January 2nd, February 2nd, March 2nd.. '

'Hold it,' interrupts St. Peter. 'I see where you are going with this, and I see your point, though that was not quite what I had in mind....but I will have to give you credit for that one, too. Let us go on with the third and final question..

Can you tell me God's first name'?

'Sure,' Forrest replied, 'it's Andy.'

'Andy?' exclaimed an exasperated and frustrated St Peter. 'Ok, I can understand how you came up with your answers to my first two questions, but just how in the world did you come up with the name Andy as the first name of God?'

'Shucks, that was the easiest one of all,' Forrest replied. 'I learnt it from the song,

ANDY WALKS WITH ME,
ANDY TALKS WITH ME,
ANDY TELLS ME I AM HIS OWN.'

St. Peter opened the Pearly Gates,
and said: 'Run, Forrest, run.'

Lord, Give me a sense of humor. Give me the ability to understand a clean joke, to get some humor out of life. And to pass it on to other folks!

Some of you may wonder why I posted this on my autism blog... it is a perfect example of how autism can be for many. Hunter is much like Forrest in this case, he can do things but it isnt always the way others do it. It is done but in different way :)

Todays sensory project :) SNOW!!...

I hate the cold winter weather!! Living in upstate NY though I have to just deal with it, lol. Hunter noticed the beauty of the snow that fell last night :) You wouldn't find me bundling up yet to head out to play in it, lol. Instead I bring it IN :) I filled a bowl of the nice fluffy white stuff and placed it on the kitchen floor, Hunter was in his glory :)

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 :(

Welcome to Holland ...

Written by Emily Perl Kingsley


I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this…

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!" you say. "What do you mean, Holland?" I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy.

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

From Hunters point of view...

If you want me to join your world, join mine first :)

To the untrained eye he fits right in :)...

We had such an enjoyable day yesterday! :) Our mall has this new play area in the food court so I thought Stephen, Hunter and I would head on over so they could play. What I loved most about being there was that my son fit right in and not a single person there noticed the little ASD quirks he did :) The trained eye would clearly have seen the flapping and jumping he did when he had to stand in line waiting to go into the tree house slide or the hesitiation at times when he struggled with motor planning or the repetative behavior in having to use the antibacterial gel on his hands every 10 minutes or how when he came to talk to me he turned his eyes in a slightly different direction so as not to make direct eye contact since the multitasking of standing close to me, looking directly at me and making perfect eye contact with nice communication was a bit to hard for him. It was a wonderful feeling watching my son play with the other children. It definately was at times more parallel play but it was play none the less :) Seeing my son successfully engage was wonderful! It is also a reminder though of the importance of education and understanding of ASD. Hunter is one of many that are high functioning that will be integrated into the "typical" society and school system and when he has his moments in which he struggles it is important that he be understood and helped. Not judged or misunderstood as just having behavior issues.

I had the trained eye yesterday since he is my son and I've done my best to understand him but that isn't enough. We need all of society to have a bit of a trained eye. They may not know what it is that they are seeing if they are not directly effected by autism but they DO need to know that many Hunters will play and walk among them and to never assume or judge what they see. To never judge a book by its cover, there is often more to the story :)