#148 Monday 17 January 2011

The morning began at 4am .... Kaylia has learned to change her clothes when she wets the bed in the night ... so when she comes upstairs, she seems dry! So I send her back down saying "Wait till 6am and then come upstairs". After several tries, I go downstairs and find that her bed is sodden! No wonder she's not sleeping. So I change the sheets and then she is happy to stay down. It will be wonderful when she is able to say "The bed
is wet." Although her use of language is improving day by day, it seems that it requires conscious decision in her mind before she actually commits to saying something .... her natural action is to not use words.

I often ponder the effect of autism on the mind ... obviously it affects people differently as no two forms are exactly the same ..... but for people similar to Kaylia, the image of a glass sphere (with Kaylia inside) seems apt .... or at least it provides a way for me to understand. She is inside the ball .... she is entranced by the sounds & images that bounce around inside the ball. Sounds & images from the real world struggle to penetrate the 'ball' and when they do, they're distorted, muted .... not nearly as interesting as her own "ínside ball" sounds.


If this is the sort of experience that Kaylia can be having, what must it be like for adults who have lived their whole life with autism? ... but without any help! They have learned to cope with a strange outside world but they still struggle to deal with the distractions.

I note from my new calendar reminders that a full moon is coming on Thursday at 5:20am! Not much sleep this week!

16 days till I go to Bali! When I booked this trip, we hadn't started on the new office venture .... now that the office is up & running, I have to deal with the worry that it might fall into a mess if I'm not there! Pinch, pinch .... get real .... others will cope.



- Posted by the Kaylee Blogger