Poop

Yep, you have been warned. This post is about poop, or more specifically, a conversation I had in a crowded hallway today about poop. What can I say? It is a heart breaking thing, (not to mention gross,) when your child who is 'old enough' to be potty trained is not only still wearing diapers, but every single day having the messy, dripping out, running up the back... I think you get the idea. When another autism mom approaches me with this kind of issue she is facing, I am certainly not above taking about the nasty poop in the hearing of others. I wish that I had had more real people to talk to about my son's poop woes. Needless to say, it meant the world to me to be able to sympathize and offer suggestions and hope.

A little bit of background.... children with autism often have gut issues, such as chronic diarrhea. (The reason why we started going to my son's DAN! (Defeat Autims Now!) doctor is because his pediatrician was not treating his gut and that felt wrong to us. He had no good explanation for the constant loose stools.) Anyways, in my limited and simple understanding, these gut issues stem can from two problems; food sensitivities, and yeast overgrowth. Improving the gut improves the autism symptoms because the gut issues are a part of the autism.

Since my family has been through all of this, I could tell my poop conversation companion some things that I hope were helpful. Her son is new to the DAN! program, and I explained to her how getting the stomach issues under control with the DAN! program improved things with my son concerning the issue we were discussing. I also felt inspired to tell her about how it took us awhile to catch on to Eli's corn sensitivity. He loved to eat corn, straight from the can. It would go right through him. A light came on, and she wondered if his current issues were caused by corn or another food sensitivity. Her son is currently in testing with his DAN! doctor to figure these things out... I wished her luck with all the sincerity of my whole heart. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have a great one tomorrow.

Txt

Eli has the opportunity this year to receive some extra speech therapy from college students because he is enrolled in one of the special studies sponsored by the university. He does this during school hours with his regular aides attending. One of the college students called me and asked me some questions about his speech, one being, "Does he use any electronic means of communicating with anyone?" Her examples were texting and email. I told her no because he did neither at the time.

My husband, who is very hard on his cell, snapped his flip phone right in half one day last month. We went and renewed our contracts and we both got new phones. While nothing fancy, these phones do open up to the full keyboard. Eli was so sad that he did not get one. He gets to play with my old phone, but what he really likes to do is text on ours. "I message Daddy," he says, when he wants to text. Or, "I want message Aunt." He says this several times a day, and he can text fairly independently nowdays.

Usually the things he writes are not conversational, or really functional. A common one is, "Eli is 5, Adam is 6." We are all very aware of that fact now. One day his aunt texted him back, saying, "Eli you are so cute." "I not cute, I handsome," he dictated to me. Now that is some hilarious electronic communication!