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.

Beautiful little pedant

Some people on TV were singing happily about having the cleanest kitchen in the world - thanks to their sterling cleaning efforts.

Boy says: They're just showing off. Pffft.

I'm so proud that he can see through this pathetically meaningless, self-congratulatory celebration of ordinariness. He's also rather pedantic.

When Peppa Pig and her friends sing Peace and harmony in all the world, Boy rejoins: Well, except when there's a war.

And when his teacher puts him in time-out - it doesn't happen often, but it does elicit a lot of due consideration from  Boy - he critiques their management techniques, concluding that their methods do not work on him.

Boy: When we're in time out, the teachers think we are thinking about good things that we should be doing. But I'm thinking about even worse things that I could have done.

Nation building

This morning Boy presented maps he'd drawn of two countries he's planning to make.

OK.

"And now, I have to write some numbers so you know how many babies you need to have to live in these countries."

OK.

"Don't worry, they're not that big. You won't have to have like 10,000* or anything like that."

Great.

"So, the plan is that they'll grow up here in Australia and then when we have the right number of adults, they'll go to their countries."

He has to buy a flotilla of boats to get them all there, and teach them all their new languages. He's going to be really good at this, however, since he's the one making it up in the first place.

Sounds like I may be busy...


*Final tallies: 76 and 60 each.

He said, she said

Picture an open-plan kitchen/dining area. A mother sits at the table, turning to drink. A boy and girl run around, sometimes playing, mostly bickering.
Imagine the girl suddenly pulls up short and, hands pressed to the side of her head, she lets out a piercing shriek.
"Nobody understands me! But, only the triangles do."

Another scene: a mother is driving, two children in the back. A boy is screaming and crying. A girl is yelling at him to be quiet: "You're hurting my ears!"
The mother agrees to buy popadums, but only if the boy stops screaming.
"There's no way I can take you to the shops like this."
And, suddenly, the boy falls quiet and his tears stop.
"OK."
The mother congratulates the boy on his emotional regulation (wondering all the while why he couldn't have just done that 10 minutes earlier).
"Yes, mummy, I just figured it out. If I stop making noise and then wipe my tears away, I feel better."
"No you don't, because everyone has to be sad."
The mother tries to ignore the ensuing argument about whether or not the boy is happy.

Now: the mother elsewhere, two children are watching television.
"I like Peter Rabbit, because it teaches you what to do if you have enemies."

You make scarecrows out of their clothes.

Life's lessons learnt

Nobody likes it, but it's an important life lesson. And, yanno, if you try sometimes, you might just get what you need.

Girl was raging about an injustice, as she's wont to do and has done since she figured out how to scream.

I told her I understood that she was angry, but no she couldn't have juice because, despite her protestations to the contrary, we really and truly didn't have any. Because, you see, we can't always get what we want.

Boy: Yes, I know that. It's like when I want the house to take off but I don't have my jet packs.

Yes. Exactly this.

Laying down the law

My children do not suffer from identity crises, nor do they have any problem perceiving their place in the world.

Boy: I am Boss #1, and Girl is Boss #2.
Dad: Does that mean we're Bosses # 3 and 4.
Boy: Nooooo! You're our slaves.
Dad: Which is Slave #1 and 2?
Boy: Well.... Mummy is Slave #1.
Me: Girl, am I your mummy or a slave?
Girl: [smiling sweetly] You're my slave, mummy.

I'm assuming that Slave #1 is the person responsible for the bulk of the slaving that goes on around here.

Boy has the makings of a sociopathic supreme leader. Nothing is ever his fault. Everything should be precisely as he wants it. Everyone else in the entire English-speaking world is wrong, you do so spell it bloons.

Girl's a bit more like the quirky dictator who sometimes indulges in benevolence. She finds everything hilarious and demands lots of cuddles, but then sometimes she gets angry and starts raging, which is funny for everyone else (though it won't be once she's in command of an actual firing squad).

A spoonful of trouble

Boy drew a picture at school of a worry bag, in which he was to add all his troubles.

He is worried about (in no particular order):

Planes dropping bombs on his house in a war.
The earth exploding
And...
An emu running off with him in its beak.

He agrees that the first two are unlikely.