Someday He’ll Be a Hero

It takes a courageous soul and a true downhill specialist to attempt a double diamond run in a blizzard. And only the most expert of sailors would take out a small craft under the warning flag and sail wing-on-wing. As for climbing up to the Everest base camp in a pair of flip-flops: leave that to anyone born in an afternoon’s shadow of Annapurna. And, by the way, parents of autistic kids are of a different breed of parent, though not quite gifted as you are welcome to think.

No more or less skilled than those of typical children, indeed, parents of autistic kids are like school crossing guards assigned to monitor the security of Fort Knox. We are the veritable employees of McDonald’s placed in charge of establishing a nutritional system and meal plan for the United States of America’s Olympic Rowing Team. Yes, we are like high school graduates sitting for a bar exam. Let me be clear, although my autistic child has special needs that I ought to address, my parental super powers are not superior to those of any parent of a typical kid.

Obviously, I wish I had super powers. Autistic kids are not easy kids to raise. Although an ASD kid may be gifted with early reading skills as he enters Kindergarten, he might also retain the emotional maturity of a two-year-old through the end of first grade, tearing, screaming and crying his way through the days. And he may alienate his peers with disturbing or repetitive behaviors, like, and for no apparent reason, slamming his own head into the wall over and over again. While our son’s classmates engage each other in pretend play and sports activities on the playground, he can be frequently found to be spinning himself in circles. The thing about Seb is that he spins around and around and around, but he never gets dizzy. He just keeps spinning, and I wonder, could this be a talent?

To raise a child with autism certainly requires a level of intervention that most parents simply do not anticipate that they can easily muster. It’s doable, but with ASD, there is no wait-and-see. We do not endure tantrums, continue to change diapers and foster our child’s obsession with spinning things beyond age 5 and otherwise do nothing. If we do not act while our kids are young, they will simply fall further behind and then perhaps require even more special attention. Actually, there is so much more we can do right here, right now.

If I could have one super power, I would want to be able to be everywhere at once. So that no matter where I had to be, I could also be on the playground with my son encouraging him to stop spinning and make some friends. Such persistent qualities as these, the delay in socio-emotional maturity and the odd repetitive behaviors, keep ASD kids from advancing. If they hit them at all, they reach their organic development milestones late. For now, I am simply trying my best to help my kid improve, and it seems that I will have to try just a little bit harder.

What’s Boring? Oh, School

“I want to do exciting things, for ever and ever and ever,” Seb said one summer’s eve, as we were preparing to complete his nightly check list. This proclamation followed, “But I don’t want to do boring things” like the items on his check list, which include taking a bath, brushing teeth, story time, and sleep. “Taking a bath is boring,” Seb said.

“Then either you take a boring bath, where you sit in a tub of lukewarm water up to your elbows, or you can take an exciting bath,” I said, as I turned on the shower head and hot water rained down into the empty tub. “An exciting bath is like a rainstorm, where you are taking a bath in the midst of a jungle, a rain forest. Seb, step into your own, personal rainstorm!”

Home is our platform for concocting and carrying out exciting activities. Once we organized the house, we were able to focus on weeding out the boring things from our everyday lives.

Now that Seb is differentiating between boring activities and exciting ones, to help us make the best use of available time, Seb and I are compiling lists of exciting things and boring things. We limit boring things to a simple necessity, and we create a schedule rock chalk full of exciting things.

A few boring things:

• Watching grown-up channels on TV,
• Brushing teeth,
• School,
• Playing inside,
• Time outs,
• Sleep.

Several exciting things:

• Going to the YMCA Kidzone,
• Playing Outside,
• Watching Cartoons on PBSKids.Org,
• Free Play at My Gym,
• Belmont Park, and
• Rainstorm Bath.

Across the street from our house, a park, a frequent destination of our many excursions.

The most exciting thing for us is exploring the canyon wilderness, home to bird, rabbit, lizard, snake and coyote. We have seen them all. Because our house is situated on the canyon ridge, trekking through it has proven to be very accessible. To reach the canyon, we walk out our front door, down the steps, across the street and around the park to the canyon trailhead. The way into the canyon can be a very invigorating gallop down a steep trail to a ravine, where a fork in the road leads us to our first important decision: shall we venture through the tunnel of trees or into the fur ball forest?

Seb directs my attention into the canyon, as we preview today’s pathway. Today’s trip logged a duration of about an hour and a half.

The canyon is like a beginner’s training course for future large scale hikes. We can complete a trek in less than 30 minutes in an evening, or we can hike for a couple of hours on a weekend. In the canyon, we walk along rolling foot paths or jog up short, steep foot hills. One trail leads across a stream and demands its followers to bound over rocks and across precarious concrete balance beams. Another path dead ends in a scramble of bramble thorns and thistle. And another bounds over a puddle environment for scattering pollywogs. Along the way are places to stop and catch our breaths while snacking on food items, like apples and granola bars.

Seb stands at the canyon trailhead at the edge of the park. Though we know many ways into the canyon, we established this as our favored starting point.

On one afternoon hike, Seb told me to wait down at the bottom of the ravine, that he was going to climb up one of the hills by himself. I stood down there and watched, as Seb climbed up the hill. He made it up the hill pretty well, but near the top, I noticed he was struggling. He would climb straight up the hill a short way and then slide down again. He did this several times and started yelling to me for help. His yells transformed into cries. He cried for five minutes before I climbed up to reach him and then directed him to the side of the hill for an easier way up, and he reached the top on his own. Once he made the adjustment, it was an easy trial. Since that day, during every trip through the canyon, Seb commands a moment for a similar hill-climbing exercise.

While we are shuffling down steep dirt trails and across rocky paths, I am envisioning a time when we will be together on the other side of the world. In Nepal, home of the highest peaks on earth. There we will hike through and over the Himalayas with our friends from Dang and Deukari Valleys and into the welcoming gardens surrounding the Village of Shakuma. Traveling together through Nepal would be the pinnacle of our achievement, but we know that to get into real shape, we will need to tackle depths more than a hundred times those of our neighborhood canyon. I mean, seriously, where we will go, girls Seb’s age run down and up ten canyons every morning just to fetch a couple buckets of water.

Seb walks up ahead adjacent to the Home Depot Canyon. This canyon was named for Home Depot, which was built on an adjacent ridge.

New Home, New Horizon

Friends, we are a tad beyond the halfway point through the end of the final year of the most popular of Mayan calendars. If the world as we know it would end later this year, as is widely anticipated by even quite a few who have only cursorily studied the prophesied impacts of said calendar, Elia and I would feel satisfied that we had reached one of our lifetime goals: to make our home in San Diego.

Cousins Seb, Jonathan and Hannah climb the meandering sidewalk together on a warm afternoon in Rancho Del Rey. This sidewalk straddles two shallow canyons, a wilderness preserve in Chula Vista known as Rice Canyon.

San Diego, sunny every day and a steady 21 degrees Celsius from January through December; San Diego, where countless activities abound for families with children of all ages; San Diego, one of the friendliest cities for commuters in Southern California, where, instead of the middle finger, drivers give each other the thumb–up; San Diego, which requires that more than 80% of its water to be imported from the Colorado River and Northern California via purchase agreement between San Diego County Water Authority and the Metropolitan Water District; San Diego, in the end, maybe not such a bad place to be, where in even the most blighted of neighborhoods, a stranger is friendly enough to host a spontaneous stoop talk.

Seb relishes a moment in the Skyfari Aerial Tram at the San Diego Zoo. Aunt Sally, a dedicated volunteer at the Safari Park, shared a few zoo passes she had earned from her work and invited us for a day of animal gazing.

We are settled in Rancho Del Rey, a sprawling borough planted across a ridge separating two canyons in the North of Chula Vista. Highlighted on the map just east of I-805, the neighborhood of Rancho Del Rey is one of the most surprisingly beautifully landscaped suburbs that we have ever seen. Prior to the development of this master planned community, which includes tracts of housing, green ways, churches, schools, upmarket strip malls and Olympic training facilities, this land was a coyote wilderness and a thriving coastal desert ecosystem. Chula Vista’s namesake is a term of endearment that translates literally into English as a pretty view–though, as the bitter fox shrugged off the grapes that might as well be sour, this place is commonly derided as Chula-Juana or Cholo Vista. In fact, it is as if a clearing crew made way for suburban neighborhoods by wielding power machetes and hacking cactus plots to clear space just large enough for a house, street and sidewalk. Much of the natural habitat has been preserved, as green brush, stalks of fur balls, scraggly weeds, and cactus flowers light up under the year-round sunshine.

Seb and Millie catch a glimpse of the evening sun as it sets. While picnicking at a nearby park, we caught the moon nibbling at the sun during a partial solar eclipse on May 20, 2012.

As a result of the compelling beauty of its nicely planned neighborhoods, a frenzied demand exists for housing here. After tendering my resignation at the water utility in Los Angeles, Elia and I spent two weekends poring over Craigslist advertisements and MSL blurbs and driving all over San Diego, from Scripps Ranch to Carmel Mountain to Otay Mesa. Before we signed our lease agreement, we visited over twenty prospective houses, each of which was promptly rented within a few days of its initial listing. Frankly, we toured more than a few potential duds on what were otherwise great streets nearby elementary schools, which boasted of high test scores. Once we happened upon this place, we hurried to submit a rental application, expedited its approval, packed our belongings and arranged to move in only a few days time, faster than the landlord could clean up all evidence of prior inhabitants.

Grandpa and The Little Baby relax after the day’s adventure, which included furniture restoration and assembly and grilling. Grandpa and Grandma visited for couple of weeks and helped us settle in.

Since arriving in April, with our family, friends, and neighbors, Seb and I have been wandering and exploring the meandering sidewalks of Rancho Del Rey. Elia has landed a part-time job teaching music to young children all over South Bay. Elia and I feel fortunate that the house we are renting is cozy and located across the street from a park and down the street from a decent school. We are nearly, completely unpacked. Our furniture has been located in a practically permanent configuration. Some boxes just need to be tucked away into one of the many built-in hidey-holes of this house. What’s more, once we have finished, we will invite everyone to Rancho Del Rey for a home-warming celebration!