My autistic son, Mr. Impatient, often makes announcements about what he wants to do on certain dates. He doesn’t ask, he just announces. This week he announced that he wanted to go out for pizza on Saturday. He loves to go out on what I call a “lunch date” on Saturday “just me and Mom”.
Another feature of autism is the love of routines. For the last million years or so, we have had to have pizza on Thursday night. That’s the night that Three Speed and Tall Guy go to Boy Scouts. They pick up pizza at the local joint on the way home. We have trouble right now because MI’s favorite place is closed for renovations.
I explained to MI that grown-ups get tired of eating pizza after a while. It was the same thing with McDonalds when my boys went through that phase. I got to the point where I almost got sick when I walked in. Thank goodness I’m over it now. But I can’t tolerate the concept of pizza more than once a week. Some weeks I think once is too much.
This whole conversation was extremely difficult for my poor son to understand. How could anyone get too much pizza? He was very confused. I vaguely remember that concept from my teenage years back in the stone ages. The explanation took almost the whole drive to the big box store that we go to every Friday. That is another routine we have established that I would miss if we didn’t do.
But I wouldn’t miss the pizza.
So I negotiated other restaurants. The place we went to in this post is one of them:
Mini Melt Down in a Restaurant: http://dr-lasermed.blogspot.com/2012/02/mini-meltdown-in-restaurant.html
I still don’t want to go back to the pizza places.
2 comments:
Just wanted to comment and say that I've been reading your blog for the past hour, and have bookmarked it to check back later. I've really enjoyed your posts, and plan to show some of them to my husband. My husband is an internist. He is currently a hospitalist. I used to be a registered nurse once upon a time. We also have 3 boys. Our oldest, who is 9 years old, has high-functioning autism & ADHD (although ADHD meds & my son don't seem to get along, unfortunately).
Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful night and I look forward to reading more of your posts in the future!
Nancy
@nurseminako - congratulations on keeping it together with an autistic son with ADHD. One of my triplets is autistic and one of them has ADD. I was told that the autistic one had ADD, but I think he was just bored at that evaluation. He's very bright and high functioning. They are 17 now. It gets somewhat easier as they get older.
Hang in there.
I'll vent for you - and tell my funny stories of Mr. Impatient.
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