It's a good job

Do you  know what's great? I can give my daughter a pack of cards and send her off to organise them and she does. And if she wanders back to me I can tell her: Girl, I gave you one job. Have you finished organising all those cards already? And, because she hasn't, she goes back to her work.

My son has autism, but it's my neurally-typical daughter who likes to organise and line stuff up. Boy prefers to organise everything in his head.

We have an airport in our backyard. It's called BC Airport, which may stand for Big Careful Airport, and boy is both pilot and CEO. Every single conversation comes back to BC Airport. We have a sign on our front door heralding the presence of BC!!!*, and this fictional** airport features in every picture he draws, every story he tells, every game he narrates.

And, so, nobody has the faintest idea what he's talking about. At 6 that's kind of cute and people make allowances. A few more years and he's that really odd kid who you can't talk to because you're never quite sure what he's on about and he refuses to talk about anything else and, anyway, seems to prefer talking to himself.

We've been advised to encourage different interests, so he's learning about Star Wars. He's not just watching and playing, he's studying, taking in every detail he can find, cataloguing these somewhere in his phenomenal brain, to be pulled out and used in what passes for conversation with Boy.

BC is still here, they've just repurposed some of their factory space to building light sabers, and outfitted their brand new space fighters with laser weapons. And rather than some special BC event, we're now eagerly awaiting a visit from R2D2.

Boy enjoys drama class, but next week's class is about "swear word"***. This, he tells me, represents a grave threat to the universe.

BC Airport is on it, however, as they've already commissioned the construction of battle droids who can work for the Republic to battle this insidious evil****.

We do get dull moments. But they don't seem to last long.



*I can't remember whether it's !!! or !!!!
** No. It's real.
*** He has an extreme anxiety about doctors and anything medical and uses swearword as a replacement noun.
**** It's ok, I'm not letting him go. Not after he conceived the idea some years ago of building a giant helicopter to round up all the doctors in the world and then execute them. It's one of those mothering faux pas you just never quite recover from.