Things that go bump in the night.

In our house that’s Andrew. He goes bump in the night as he hits the wall with his head repeatedly through the night. Their bedroom is adjacent to the office where I sit at the computer far more than I’d like to admit and late into the night. Seriously, I don’t know how the kid hasn’t given himself a concussion. Most mornings he has tossed and turned so much during the night that he will be laying on the opposite end of his bed. That dude is mega-weird, but I love him more than my own breath.

Most people used to assume that Joel was more severe on the autistic spectrum because his behaviors were so wild and violent, but in fact Hannah and I have always known that Andrew was a little more severe than Joel. Joel was just more vocal about it, and because of that it’s been really easy to forget about Andrew. He’s still a little more delayed than Joel. He’s a little farther behind on reading, speech, social skills, and most other things that can be evaluated. One thing Andrew has had as long as I’ve known him is that he is absolutely the perfect little cuddler. When he was an infant he loved to snuggle up against me and it just strummed my heart strings. When they were starting to catch up developmentally, before autism set in, he would snuggle up in my lap in the afternoon and just melt away whatever trouble and pain the day had brought my way. That was one of the areas where I felt the deepest loss when they started to regress. I lost my little cuddle buddy there for a few years and it was like a piece of me had been stolen.

Andrew used to avoid human touch with amazing agility for a kid who was so delayed in his gross motor skills. If you asked him to hop on one foot for an evaluation (if he ever understood you) it always proved an impossible task. Put him in a room with a huggy little girl though and he would juke and jive like a Heisman candidate to avoid being captured for a squeeze. Once Hannah and I learned about the sensory issues that autism brought to the table we decided that the best way to fight them was head on, so we absolutely smothered both boys with physical affection. We touched them at every opportunity. We would grab them and hug them every time they walked by. For a while we would get a punch on the nose for our reward. After a time they finally resigned themselves to the reality that they were going to be hugged, and they slowly started to open up to it. Today, we sometimes have to beg for a hug, but they are good little snugglers again. Now we’ve actually led them to a point where they are under-sensitive to touch and want to touch everything and everyone that passes by. Honestly I’ll take that over what we battled for the first season, even if, just like today, it means they both reach out of the basket in Sam’s Club to grab at the nice elderly woman passing by with an interesting looking sweater on.

Andrew wears his emotions on his sleeve. Every afternoon when they arrive home from school they are scheduled 1 hr of video game time. Joel is always intent on actually playing the game correctly, while Andrew gets a little more creative. In Mario Kart, Andrew is most amused by the little cloud that picks you up and places you back on the track after you’ve driven off into oblivion, so he spends the entire race driving off of a cliff over and over again just to belly laugh at the little cloud with the fishing pole putting him back on track. Most of the time, Andrew just observes Joel so they can actually see some game progress. For as much as Andrew doesn’t care if he accomplishes anything in the game, he cares desperately that Joel does it right. One of our biggest battles lately is helping Andrew to control his emotions when Joel loses a game. Most kids fight over who comes in first place, Andrew couldn’t care less if he wins, but if Joel loses, the world is quickly coming to an end. It sounds kind of funny, but honestly it’s really obnoxious. I love Andrew so much, but I desperately wish he would just get over the fact that it’s a dumb game and you can always try it again. He has been grounded from watching games (as traumatic for him as taking the car keys from a 16 yr old) more times than I know how to count. He will get a few days worth of monitoring himself before he spirals into emotional turmoil because Joel decided to restart the last level. It’s a constant back and forth between he and us, but I’m more stubborn than he is so I will eventually win, and winning is what it’s all about when it comes to your children.

Every little kid finds their way to a word or two that should not be in their vocabulary. Caleb found his at about 5 watching “The Sandlot”. Joel and Andrew found theirs in a recent animated version of “The Green Lantern.” What the H…… Needless to say we don’t watch that show anymore, but what took one correction with Caleb has been a yearlong battle with Andrew. We fought with Joel for a few weeks teaching him that it wasn’t a word we used. Andrew still…. He finally learned to say it under his breath, or when we weren’t in the room. What made the whole ordeal worse was the way he said it. Because his speech is a little delayed it always came out, “Whatdehey-owe?” I’ve heard him say it a hundred times but I still find it hard not to laugh, even though I am fuming because he knows better and still chooses to say it.

Stubborn, stubborn precious little boy our Andrew is. He endures his punishment every time like the world has all come crashing down upon him, and promptly forgets everything so he can let another one fly in a few days. Andrew is such a special little boy and in some ways he will always be that tiny little lump snuggled up in my arm in that tiny house in Missouri. THUNK. There he goes again.