A morning with my mom.

I spent a wonderful morning with my mom this morning and, true to our natures, food was involved. This is the result:

The best sweet potato muffins I have ever had!






There was just enough sweet potato to give them a beautiful color, great texture and hint of "something different".









Then it was time to try a new recipe for buns. Super combination of flavor, moisture (and yet not too moist), texture and crust.










Yeah, I know, we look just...GREAT in our Saturday-morning-no-make-up-or-hair-do-or-anything-clamotten, but we had a wonderful morning :-).

Proloquo2go on the iPad

Our son has autism and is deaf. He had basically no language, especially expressive language. We have worked with him since he was three months old, trying to teach him sign language. His receptive vocabulary slowly expanded but it had no real meaning for him, let alone a avenue to express himself.

After a long road of ups and down he has for the last two years had the most fantastic teacher and has made incredible progress. No, I won't tell you her name, not just for privacy reasons but I don't want anybody to take her away from David :-)

Anyway, she managed to not only introduce an iPad into David's communication schedule but also found a donor so he can have his very own.

On the iPad she/we loaded Proloquo2go and it gave our son a voice.

It is extremely user friendly with a very easy interface based on pictures with or without words. There is then also an option to let the iPad "voice" what David wrote, e.g. "I want fish movie" (see the video example at the end of the post).



On the main screen is a little icon with Proloquo2go. From there you go into any menu you set up.







This "screen shot" is just one of the menus he can choose from, but it gives you an idea what it looks like. You load whichever icons you want and how many, depending on your/your child's needs. It takes them through a simple and systematic menu to get to their choices.

Clean up - blues and yay's

(I wrote in my "About me" that this blog would at times take you through rabbit holes. This is one of them. Because this blog is for my pleasure and not focused on how many people might read it and bla bla bla, I will at times post things that are personal and not that interesting to others. And slightly confusing.....But it is my rabbit trail. :-) )

Yesterday was a fantastic day! We spent the whole day cleaning up the basement. Although I was a little apprehensive to throw out so many of my things, I was excited about the progress: storing hopes and dreams did not made them happen, it just cluttered my life.

But, this morning some of the elation has been replaced with sadness. I expected a little "clean up remorse" but I feel more than just remorse. I cannot help but to look at my life and have to admit that I am not the person I used to be or wanted to be.

Ok, so here we go: whine, whine, whine! I have just returned from India where I have witnessed people living under sub human conditions and here I am whining about my little life that hasn't panned out the way I had hoped for.

But the feelings are there and the familiar words are not helping. No, I am not experiencing a mid-life crisis. I am just looking at reality. Throwing out so much of my "stuff" is an indication how I have not been able to implement so many of my interests and I find myself at a stage in my professional career I would expect a 20-year old to be. Granted, some of that is because I am unwilling to use, misuse and step on other people in order to advance myself. I have seen and experienced that too many times, people who often have no real skills of their own but are very good at weaseling and politicking their way upward, even setting others up to look dumb. They have learned to compensate for their inadequacies by mastering manipulation. Yuck!!!!

Some other reasons are just life. It is filled with unexpected turns and events you have to adjust to. Having a multiple disabled child has turned our lives upside down and changed everything! Who plans for that? Our oldest is about to graduate from high school and move to a college dorm and the next oldest is only a year away. We would have been at a point in our lives we had talked about years ago, but David's severe disabilities have altered all our plans. And hopes.

And some of the reasons are also my own choices. And I don't like some the choices I have made. Even the ones I didn't make is a way of making choices.

I am not actually at the stage of a 20-year old. I have experiences that are definite not to be ignored, but I have no papers confirming that and I have now chosen to start a new career at a later stage in life.

My goal has as long as I can remember been to get myself in a position where I can help others. Not hand outs which just further indignant dependency, but pulling people up to a level where they can start building their own lives. What I lament is that I am not in a position to do so. Yet.

Cleaning up my basement, and my life, is a good thing. The hardest reality is still better than the sweetest lie because I can work with reality, not with lies. But it still hurts a little. What scares me is the uncertainty. If I have not succeeded by now, what will it take to succeed in the future? Something will need to change or I will just fill up my basement with new hopes and dreams.