Negotiating My Lunch Date

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. 

Random Acts of Kindness

The holiday season is the time of year when we hear about people doing kind things.  Caring acts happen all year long, and are rarely recognized.  As a Mom trying to raise children, I am trying to teach them to be kind to others “just because”.  Some of the conversations we have about this can be funny.

We have an elderly woman in our neighborhood that uses wood for her heat as much as she can to save on her electric bill.  When we have a big storm, there are lots of branches that come down from the trees into our yard.  The children and I gather them up into boxes and take them to her.  It’s a lot of work.  At first they wanted to know who was going to pay us for this.  I explained that we were doing a “good deed”.  Since we didn’t live near our Grandma and Grandpa, we were doing it for someone else’s Grandma.  It took a long time for that one to sink in. 

My Mother had a neighbor who is an author.  When she and her husband were moving to assisted living, she had a lot of books that she couldn’t keep.  The local school wasn’t interested.  Our middle school had recently opened and had few books in its library.  I offered to come get the books and bring them back (two hour drive each way).  She had hundreds of books to donate.  My children carried them up and down the steps in her house and we packed my van full! 

We sorted the books on my dining room table.  Some titles had quite a few copies, some had only a few.  I had no idea how many books she had written over the years.  She had everything from children’s books to adult’s books, with the concentration on books for adolescents.  There are several series of books.  One of them had entertained my children during their elementary years.

The librarian was astonished when school started.   They distributed them throughout the school system here.  A few ended up at the local library.  My children got credit towards their community service in boy scouts.  The author got some nice letters from school children. 

What did I get out of all of this?  I got a feeling that I had improved my community and taught my kids how to volunteer.  We kept the rest of the books in the series that we hadn’t finished.  I also got a lovely note from the author about how she appreciated the work I had done.          

Dr. Lasermed’s Flu Vaccine Fun Facts

Don’t forget to wash your hands and cover when you cough.

Influenza is a viral illness that is more common in the winter months.  It is an infection in your respiratory area causing fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, muscle and body aches, headaches and / or fatigue.  Not everyone with flu will have all these symptoms, and having these symptoms does not necessarily mean you have the flu.  Most cases are self limited and you will get better in less than two weeks.  It’s worse than a cold.  There IS a test for it.  One you don’t want to pass (or is that fail?)

Some people get worse, progressing to pneumonia and other illnesses.  In an average flu season 36,000 people in the United States die of diseases related to the flu.  A whole bunch more are stuck in those crummy old hospitals or visit my friends in the emergency rooms.

If you have that stomach virus, it’s not “influenza”.  It’s “gastroenteritis”.   That’s a small comfort when you are cramping and feel like dying.  The only good part is you get to stay home and watch TV. 

Those who are at higher risk are:

·        People over 65 (I will NOT use the word elderly)

·        Pregnant women

·        Young children

·        People with medical conditions (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, asthma)

·        Health Care Professionals

The only way to prevent getting the flu is to be immunized.  You can have the shot, the nasal spray (if you are in the appropriate age group) or the super strong shot (new last year).  The CDC recommends everyone over 6 months old gets a flu shot.  If you are reading this, you qualify.

Flu shots do NOT cause the flu.  You may feel sore or have some aches for a couple of days.  Some years I get a sore arm.  Some years I don’t.  The year I didn’t get a flu shot (because of the shortage), I was sick all winter.  I qualify for the high risk groups because I’m a “health care professional”.  People keep bringing germs into my office!

 One other reason we should all get flu shots is to keep the virus from spreading.  There are some people who can’t get shots, but are at risk.  One example is those babies under 6 months old.  So, if the rest of us have immunity, they are safer.  It’s actually called herd immunity.  Mooooo!  And it works.  That’s why we immunize kids for all the stuff we immunize them for.  The more kids that have the vaccine, the less likely we are to have outbreaks of bad diseases.   

One of my kids has asthma.  So I take home shots for everyone every year.  I chase my kids around the house.  I have had to get them down from the bunk beds.  I finally made an agreement one year with Three Speed that he would take a shot if he could give me mine.  He was nine.  He has gotten quite good at it over the years.  Does scouting have a brave Mom badge?

A really good source of information is:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

Alzheimer’s from several points of view

I really do read all those blogs on my blog list.  Today I read this on the pharmacychic’s blog:

http://pharmacychick.blogpharm.com/2011/10/15/the-story-of-life-at-the-end-of-a-needle/

It reminded me of a story about my Dad.  The last few years of his life he had Alzheimer’s.  It was hard to watch him decline.  But he could remember things from long time ago without much problem.

Tall Guy and Three Speed are Boy Scouts.  They needed to do a project about someone who used to be a Boy Scout.  So we took a trip to visit “Pa” (and “Mema”).  It was a lovely afternoon.  My Dad (“Pa”) told wonderful stories about his days in scouting.  I had no idea.  He was at scout camp when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  He was the first Eagle Scout in his troop.  There were some issues with this because he was Lutheran and they met at a Methodist church.  He laughed over this!

After we left, Dad asked Mom which one of my boys was which.  He couldn’t remember their names.

So sad what the disease does.