It’s sometimes funny to see how Zip controls the inputs he receives. He has a hand-me-down computer in my home office. It’s full of preschool and kindergarten games, and locked down with a whitelist for the internet. (I forgot to lock it once and he had a blast at YouTube. Kideos.com is a good alternative.) He plays the same things over and over again but seems to be learning from it, so we’re okay with it.
A few weeks back, I checked out what he was doing and he had the Windows Start menu and other directories open, covering most of the Starfall word game he was playing. (We love StarFall – the extra paying section is worth it.) It looked so strange. I closed the boxes, thinking that he had just hit a bunch of keys by accident. Then, he did it again.
I was puzzled. He can’t tell me why he would cover parts of his game. He doesn’t do it everytime, just once in a while, mostly in a word-building game. My theory is that he is controlling and decreasing his inputs. Maybe it’s sensory? Continue reading
We’ve learned the hard way that if you do the same thing in the same way, Zip will think that’s the only way and protest any changes. He gets stuck on certain things, like the same two pairs of fleece pajamas, even though before that he would only wear green cotton airplane pajamas. This may seem like pattern recognition but it’s just the autistic tendancy towards rigid thinking. Since we prefer him to have a more flexible approach to life, we try to change things up.
We had a great week last week. Zip is feeling so much more guid-able. Is that a word? Perhaps I should define it. Just in the last few weeks, Zip has begun listening to me, doing what I say, staying near me when we’re out. It’s a remarkable change. I have to chalk it up to Dynamic Listening.