Happy Place

So, when we're feeling stressed, we're supposed to imagine our happy places, right? Instead, I thought that I'd show you some happy pictures of my babies.

• Cory got a haircut! No more piggy tails! The new hairdo makes her patented "snotty look" look even snottier. (see the first picture below!)

• Our friends Eric and Carrie visited for dinner and to show off their new Saturn Outlook on Wednesday. Eric is Cory's godfather and a cop, which isn't so much a coincidence.

• We went to Kid's N Stuff, a hands on "museum" for kids in Albion yesterday. It was great. We met up with another kid from our Torrent group and her dad and sister. It was fun, and I actually ended up buying a year pass.

So, I'm pissed.

OK, so our insurance has decided not to cover Chase's speech therapy any more. And, it was only a mistake that it was covered.

The reasoning is that being a pervasive disorder, the insurance company does not feel that autism is treatable. I pretty much had the nurse who reviewed and denied the request in tears. I said, "So, you're telling me that the insurance company believes that my son is a lost cause and that treatment is useless?" It's insulting and ridiculous.

So what about someone that has HIV? Are they going to start telling those people that they're really just a lost cause and don't deserve treatment because they're not ever going to get rid of it? Cancer? People would freak out and rally to have that covered, but not this. Why? Without help and serious intervention, we are losing our children. Why doesn't anyone seem to care about that?

This therapy has been a huge factor in Chase's progression with speaking. Before we started, he didn't say Momma or Daddy. Now he uses both. If we had been denied the coverage in the beginning, I would have accepted it more easily. It is in our plan wording that speech is just covered for stroke, head injury, and congenital anomalies. The reason that it was approved was that the person compared our diagnosis to the Medicaid covered diagnoses.

I have a serious problem with the fact that the State of Michigan dictates that for Medicaid, speech therapy is covered for diagnoses such as language delays, but Physicians Health Plan does not offer any plans that do not specifically exclude all Autism Spectrum Disorders. So, even if my company wanted their insurance to cover ASDs, they could not purchase a policy that covers it.

This is why the Speaker of the State House of Representatives in Pennsylvania has introduced a bill that will force health insurance providers to cover ASD therapies up to $3000 a month.

http://www.autismspeaks.org/press/pennsylvania_autism_bill.php

http://www.repobrien.com/?sectionid=75&sectiontree=75&itemid=417

I've written some emails to my local rep to try to get him to introduce some bill in Michigan. Of course I haven't got a message back yet. I'm going to try calling today.

Anyway, if anyone has any connections to your state government, please think about trying to help. If someone high up in our State government had a personal connection to an Autistic child, I guarantee that they would introduce a bill. It's such BS how government works. Personal agendas, not anything to do with the good of the children they represent.

OK, the rant is over... for now. I'm still pissed.

Where does the time go?

Well, again I totally suck at keeping this updated.

Sucky things
Cory has picked up hitting when she doesn't get what she wants. Nice.
Even nicer? Chase has started hitting, too. He hits a lot harder than Cory. We're working on curbing this, but it's just so darn funny when Cory does it...

Exciting things

• Chase is using "Daddy" consistently. Craig's happy about that.
• Funny Kids
• Thomas the Tank Engine
• Greenfield Village
• Book Club

5 Days to go & Easter recap

Have you seen the commercial for TurboTax where the girl freaks out when a guy asks her what time it is? I'm starting to feel that way. I used to have my taxes done by the second week in February. It's amazingly easy to make excuses of why not to finish them: "I'll wait until the kids are in bed. Well now that they're in bed, I'm sooooo tired. I'll do it Saturday. Oh, the kids didn't take a nap at the same time. Maybe tomorrow..."

I just hope that we don't owe money.

Chase
We had a good Easter. We colored Easter eggs on Saturday. Chase really got into it, and his hands are still red to prove it. I forgot my camera today, so I'll have some pictures up tomorrow. He cracked all of them while he was coloring them, but he had fun.

I hid the eggs yesterday morning and he actually got that he was supposed to find them. They were pretty obvious, but it was fun none-the-less. He did enjoy the baskets, dumping everything out of Cory's and placing all of the plastic grass on his head. He ran around just enough to spread the fun plastic green stuff in every room on the first floor of our house. Of course, this was about the same time that Cory discovered the wonders of Peeps. So she had sticky blue hands that easily collected the little plastic shreds. Well thought out, Mom.

We then went to my Grandma's house in Toledo. The kids were pretty good. Everyone can't get enough of Cory, and Chase was loving everybody and jellybeans. He probably ate about 200, according to my mom. He was finding them everywhere. We'd put them up, but he'd find some in another place. Oh well. He worked the sugar out running around with a booster seat strapped to his midsection. Pictures tomorrow!

He was a little hyper, but he played with the other kids, listened to me some of the time, watched out for the littler ones, and gave everybody big hugs and kisses. I would say that he just acted like a sugar-crazed two year old, which he was, with a few speech issues. Nothing that was too "autistic-y".

Now for my rant
The one thing that really got to me was one of my aunts. She has something about her that anything that Chase does, she feels that she has to point out that it's "weird". When he was running around with the booster, he thought he was funny. He was being goofy on purpose. But, she had to point out that it was "weird" to anyone that could hear. She did this before at my mom's house. When Chase wanted her to unzip her sweatshirt, because he thought it was a jacket and saw it as a sign that she was going to leave, she said, "Whoa! That's weird!"

Um, you think that's weird, but the fact that you're a chain-smoking drunk with a gambling problem is normal?

I'm not saying that I'm the nicest person in the world, but saying things like that around a child who can understand you and other children that can understand you makes me so mad. Her grandkids really like to play with Chase. They think he's fine, so why point out to them that he's different and being different makes him weird?

Of course I said none of this to her. It's easier to ignore her than talk to her. I'm madder now than I was yesterday. I hadn't thought about her grandkids taking this all in. I guess that I can only relate her stupidness to her feelings of inadequacy when comparing herself to my mom and her son to me. She's never liked us very much. I don't think that I'm going to be able to let it go next time. I don't want to start anything big with her, but I'm not going to allow her to keep up this negativity around Chase.

Anyway, that's my rant.

As promised...

So, how did the week go?

I totally feel like it’s Monday. Being out of the office for three days make Fridays feel like Mondays. But then free lunch comes, today it was pizza and ice cream day (YUMMY!) and I remember it’s Friday.

Chase
Chase was pretty good this week, although he’s having some issues with pushing and hitting this week. We haven’t has our group therapy for two weeks because of an inservice and spring break. I can’t tell you how excited I am that we’re going back next week.

I started letting him into speech therapy without me in the room. They have a two way mirror so I can watch what’s going on. It’s really interesting to watch. He really likes Robyn so he’s pretty good in there with her. Being on the outside of what’s going on, it’s much easier to see how much he doesn’t make eye contact and doesn’t initiate contact. On the other hand, he did ask to go through the cards and even said what a lot of them were without any prompting. The biggest thing was that he sat in a chair and stayed focused the whole time.

I also released how I talk too much when I’m working with him. I need to give him more opportunities to initiate and ask for things, instead of me asking him what he wants. At home he does initiate more than at therapy, but I still have to work on it.

Me
Have any of you lost track of old friends over the years and want to find them again?

There’s a few people that I’ve found (thank you Google and MySpace) and tried to start talking to again. I think that a lot of my interest in finding people is that now at 28, I’m more like the person I was before I graduated from high school and early on in college. In my later college years, I had many of my priorities really messed up. I guess now that I have my old children, I’m more sensitive to some of the stupid things I did and bad decisions I made. The worst was allowing myself to loose contact with some very close friends.

Now that there’s Google and MySpace, I’ve been able to find people that I’ve randomly thought about and looked for, but now I’m not sure what’s worse: not finding them, or finding them and having them not answer.

It’s funny, several years ago, I would have been the one that wouldn’t have wanted to make the effort to answer if some one tried to contact me.

Amazing how our priorities and outlooks change, isn’t it?

I love people!

I've never been a real "people-lover". I've sometimes enjoyed picking on people (not to their faces, of course), gossiping, being sarcastic, and not always giving people the benefit of niceness. But, today, I am amazed at the number of people that are not like, well, me.

I sent an email out to my company about Chase. April is Autism awareness month, so I thought that I should let the company know about the walk. People have responded in such a nice way. Some have donated and some have sent very nice, encouraging emails to me. THANK YOU! Wow! I guess I'm going to have to start thinking better of people in general! ;o)

On a related note, I should mention that I work for THE best company ever. TechSmith Corporation is the most employee-friendly company ever, and they are smart enough to hire very good people. It's those great people that have been so supportive of me and make the company an awesome company to work for. I am so privileged to work here and be in the company of such great people.

To anyone that I used to work with at Unisys, read this as "TechSmith is pretty much the polar opposite of what we were used to."

I'll hopefully have an update about this week later today.

April is Autism Awareness Month

What Kind of World Do You Want?
I just found out about a new way to help raise money for Autism Speaks, and all you have to do is watch a video.

Here's the description from AutismSpeaks.org:


Click the image above or go to http://whatkindofworlddoyouwant.com/videos/view/id/213154 to view the video and send some money to Autism Speaks. The video made me cry, I'd be interested to know if you do the same.

As if you needed an excuse to take the kids to Toys 'R' Us?
Right now you can donate money to Autism Speaks at Toys "R" Us. We did this yesterday. You can just add a little bit of money onto your order. You can also donate online at http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2474404
There's also some links to various information, including a list of toys that they recommend for autistic children.

Finally...
We also finally got our camera back. Craig had left it at the cabin in January. So now I that I don't have to count on my sister or mom to send us pictures, maybe I'll get more pictures up, more often.

Update
Over the weekend, Chase did pretty good. He's been pushing Cory a little more often, but we're working on that. He started saying "Pink", although it sounds more like "Tink". He also got on his little Harley Powerwheels yesterday and LOVED it! I did take a picture with my new phone, but now I have to figure out how to get the picture somewhere besides on my phone... I might need to figure out my phone number first...