Inventory of skills or Lack thereof

It occurred to me; after writing about the notebook that I had worked on so many years ago; there were many items that Dakota has either made significant progress on or None at all. So in an effort to keep things as current, as well as shed light to other parents about issues they may be dealing with along side of me, I decided to add this entry.

Birthing and raising a "typical child" there are all kinds of measurements to gage your child's progress. When you have an Autistic child the truth is no one knows SHIT.Sorry to offend anyone who reads this but it is so true. Each child has such extreme highs and lows in performance half the time you aren't sure if you had a genius or dare I say an idiot--but to be a compassionate loving paren't and person who respects others I prefer to say severely challenged child. AND everyone is the expert they try to tell you "oh they should be doing that by now" or "haven't they done this yet" or "my kid did that a year ago" but the ones who really get me are the "professionals who work with our kids everyday as their job. They are theeeeee most idiotic of all. Funny thing is that you are trying to do the responsible thing and put your trust into someone who has made it their profession to know about our children-- these people have gone to school for years and have worked tirelessly most of them for years and most NOT all don't have a fricking clue what our child can or cannot do-- I mean no disrespect I am just tired of people expecting me to respect their opinions,listen and act on their advice when they cant even tell me anything about my child without opening up a file on them.

As a paren't who has 21 years under her belt I can say one thing that is "It is my opinion and Observation that the one thing about these kids that makes them so interesting and different from other disabilities is that every one of them cannot be measured by how a typical child performs and certainly not by another that has the same diagnosis" You can line 10 Autistic kids up in a row and not one will have the same issues. One can tie his shoes, answer the phone, mow the lawn and the next cant do any of those but he can do 10 things that the first kid cannot do--- It's quite interesting and perplexing. The other thing I can say is "It is incredibly important that you know your child strengths and develop all learning around those strengths!"A basic example would be when Dakota was first learning the "cost" or concept of money he had no clue. All of his toys required batteries so rather than use money for him to learn; if he might want to buy a toy> I utilized batteries to equate the cost of an item. Four batteries cost approx $2.50 and if the item was $10.00 it was equal to giving up 16 batteries that powered 4 toys if he wanted to get another toy---[clear as mud--right]

The key is know you child --- inventory his strengths and weaknesses and always use that to teach him---