Staycation Crafternoons, Courtesy of NYPL Mulberry Street

While last summer had our girl in fantastic computer and animation workshops, and had us traveling to California and enjoying a kayaking adventure and underwater sites, this year has brought more of a staycation sort of summer. BlogHer2012 was here in New York City so there was no need to head out to San Diego for that. And my academic professional association was in a city I have little interest in visiting. And I had multiple writing deadlines. But at the heart of it, I just wasn't feeling the pull of the Pacific as I typically do this time of year.

Automat interactive installation,
NYPL Lunch Hour NYC

What to do with our girl has been a series of adventures and staycation activities. Along with watching an awful lot of Olympics, we've gone on a number of outings: a visit to the Lunch Hour NYC exhibition at the New York Public Library (a must-see as it's perfect for all ages - especially love the lunch box collection!), a couple of turns up and around the ferris wheel at Toys"R"Us Times Square (better for younger kids, but our girl still loves this activity), an adventure at the Terracotta Warriors at the Discovery Center Times Square (if you're traveling with the sensory-sensitive, best if you arrive first thing in the morning on a week day so you'll have it mostly to yourself), but the most deeply joyous of our outings has been hyper-local: our girl has been attending the Mulberry Street New York Public Library Tuesday afternoon Crafternoon workshops for teens.

Terracotta Warrior Photographer

I've had a life-long love affair with public libraries ever since I discovered the local branch of my hometown's library and learned that there was more to read in the world than the biographies of Catholic saints (that's all they had on the shelves of my parochial in-every-sense-of-that-word school library). I think I was semi-permanently damaged by all those narratives of virgin martyrs and immaculate conceptions. The public library saved my life, and certainly my psyche.  And it seems it's doing something like that for our girl this summer, where, even as I write this, she's socializing.

Yes, socializing. In fact, they're having an ice cream social today.

Last week they made bead bracelets. Next week they'll decorate their own tote bags. And the week after that they'll make hair accessories.

Peeking in the Crafternoon celebration at NYPL
Mulberry Street Branch -- a teen-only zone.

It's hard to describe how important things like this are for all kids, but especially for a kid like our girl, who is slowly figuring out what seem to be the strange steps of the social world.

She needs this more than she needs just about anything in the world: a place to hang out that's safe and where there are social hurdles, but they're low enough that she can clear them like an Olympian in training.

Thanks to the NYPL, for this uber-staycation moment.

Summmmertime, and the livin' is . . .

Summertime,
And the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy's rich
And your mamma's good lookin'
So hush little baby,
Don't you cry.

—Gershwin and Heyward*

Full-on summertime has arrived at Autism's Edges and this year the livin' is easy. And not because our girl's daddy's rich, or her mama good lookin'.  This year the livin' is easy because, for the very first time since our girl was diagnosed, we've found a summer activity that works brilliantly for her.

If you've been visiting Autism's Edges over the years, you know that we've tried a lot of things: day camps, inclusion programs, and horseback riding therapy camp. For the most part,"camp" has been a word associated with misery. With experiences that ranged from mixed to awful, in the past two summers we had opted to go with Camp Dad, using the summers to hone some math and reading skills, but missing out on the essential peer social skills activities that camp settings provide. For spectrumy kids like ours, who don't have an extended school year (or the daddy who's rich or a mamma who's good lookin'!), summertime livin' isn't always so easy.

Electronic hand puppets. Facilitated

by Becky Heritage at the Tech Kids

Unlimited Workshop. The eyes lights up 

when you close the circuits.

But this summer is different thanks to the amazing work of Beth Rosenberg, and her teams of technology educators who put on week long Tech Kids Unlimited workshops. Last week our girl took part in a computer animation and electronic puppet workshop held at the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan's Upper West Side.  

And this coming week, she'll head downtown to Pace University for a video game design workshop.  In just one short week, twenty hours all totaled, workshop participants made electronic puppets and "bugs" where they learned about circuitry, and short animated videos where they learned the fundamentals of animated movement, as well as programs like iMovie and iStopMotion.

One of the secrets to the success of Beth's workshops is that she programs the week with some of the finest tech education talent in the city, including Becky Heritage, who worked with the kids on electronic puppets; Gabriella Levine, who worked with the kids on making "Blinky bugs," whose antenna cause their eyes to light up; and Ardina Greco and Mark Dzula, both of whom are doctoral candidates at Columbia University and art educators extraordinaire. Along with amazing volunteers, the ratio of adults to kids in the room is more or less one to one, which is the golden ratio for our girl.

The electronic puppets, facilitated by Becky Heritage, was the week's first activity, and one of my personal favorites: the eyes light up when you put the hands together and close the circuits. Seems the perfect metaphor for what happens with our kids in these workshops: help them put their hands together, close the circuits, and see their eyes light up!

Our girl made this short, but epic, film:

The Battle for Love on Vimeo.

For the first summer in a very long time, we've arrived at a feeling that Gershwin and Heyward captured . . .

One of these mornings

You’re goin’ to rise up singing


Then you’ll spread your wings

And you’ll take to the sky.

•   •   •

* Postscript: The show tune Summertime was written by George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Heyward, and DuBose Heyward. Don't you love the fact that like most great works of life and art, it was a team project? The copyright for the lyrics is held by © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., EMI Music Publishing. Used here under the fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law.

The First Official Day of Summer

Yesterday was the last day of school — the last day of sixth grade — and the sweet girl announced this morning, with evident joy, "Today is the first official day of summer!"

Technically we know that summer began on Monday with the longest, brightest day of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere. But the true and official first day of summer for this girl is the first day without school.

And so what did we do to celebrate this once a year occasion?

A dip in the sweet rooftop pool at the gym.

Here the pool is seen at sunset on the day before it opened. The water is still and the sun is setting. Had you been there today when we were there during the youth swimming hours you would have seen a delicious tangle of water wings and floating noodles and beach towels and kick boards and sunscreen and a floating and bobbing and swimming and kicking mix of kids of all ages and sizes and colors in the cool blue water on the ninth floor with a view of the Jersey shore and the Statue of Liberty.

It is a luxury, a sweet summer luxury, to swim in this sweet little rooftop pool with the sweet girl. Some grown-ups without kids braved the youth swimming hours and sat poolside trying to read thick summer novels but their efforts were thwarted by splashing and the sounds of summer joy.

And afterwards, an ice cream for her on the walk home.

Summer. Splendidly officially summer.

Blue Angels

For months and months Sweet M has wanted to go to the Intrepid Museum "to see the kind of boat grandpa lived on."

I had demurred, having spent more hours than I care to remember of my own childhood summers at airshows, visiting aircraft carriers, or wandering the halls of air and space museums. I remember in particular the airshows, where the Blue Angels would soar in formation overhead, doing loop to loops and other acrobatic aeronautics.

For some people, like my father, who was a retired naval aviator, these shows were simply thrilling, and he wanted to share his excitement with his family. What I remember from these shows was the noise, the crowds, the heat — it was always on the hottest or second hottest day of the summer. There would be the burning sun, the smell of jet fuel and exhaust, the dropped sno-cones melting on the bleachers, the horrifying roar of the jets overhead. And afterward, there would be the sunburn, red and blistering. Sunscreen was a prescription-only product in those days. On such outings I often wept, or screamed, or quarreled with my siblings, or shutdown and stared at single object in an effort to maintain my equilibrium.

Now, parenting a child on the spectrum, I understand that I had been experiencing sensory dysregulation. It was just all too much for me. But then I just understood summer and these outings as something to be dreaded and endured.

So the idea of visiting the Intrepid, docked on the Hudson River, in the heat of the summer and the Memorial weekend crowds had, as you might anticipate, almost no appeal.

But Sweet M had wanted to do this for so long. She wanted to honor her grandfather's memory by visiting the aircraft carrier and seeing the airplanes. And so we went.

We had sunscreen.
And hats.
And water bottles.
And it was fun.

Neither of us could believe that her grandfather had lived on a boat like this — sweltering in the South Pacific heat. At the Intrepid Museum the bridge of the ship has an air conditioner so that the museum docents don't pass out, but there were no air conditioners in the aircraft carriers of 1940s. And no sunscreen for the sailors or naval aviators. And the noise and heat and commotion of jets taking off and landing was accompanied by the anxiety of the impending war with China (that became, instead, the Korean War.)

I wonder how they did it.

Which makes me wonder how the young women and men serving in Afghanistan and Iraq do what they do. They do have sunscreen, and there are internet connections to family and friends. But as far as I can tell those are they only improvements. There is still the heat. To which one can add the sandstorms. And the constant anxiety of the improvised explosive devices, coupled with the military commands' failure to supply them with adequate equipment like armored jeeps and flack jackets. They work alongside highly paid mercenaries who complicate and undermine their missions. And the mercenary's huge salaries make the the gift of the troop's military service look like a fools' errand. Finally they contend with public support that is muted by the fact that the invasion of Iraq was premised on trumped up intelligence.

I am thinking of them today. And of my father, who served at the close the Second World War, through the Occupation and the Korean crisis, twenty years in all.

And I am thinking of the military families, especially those with kids on the spectrum. How to they get by, faced as they are with the limited resources of military salaries and with single parent families imposed by stop-gap re-deployments?

These are the people I'm remembering today. Memorial Day, 2010.

Surviving: Six Flags, GBGB Day, and Hungry Bears

In advance of my surgery — yesterday was GBGB Day, or Goodbye Gall Bladder Day — we paid a two-day visit to the Six Flags Great Escape and Splashwater Kingdom Indoor Water Park in Lake George, New York.

Sweet M had been begging to go rollercoaster riding at Six Flags, and I'd promised her we'd go this summer — before I found out that I'd be having my gallbladder out. Since rollercoasters would be a post-operative no-go for me, we had to get the Six Flags trip in pre-op.

The indoor water park was really something to see . . . A thunderous sound of water from a giant attraction of waterslides, spray hoses and bucket showers, and simulated ocean waves for artificial boogie boarding. Quite the sight.

I don't know about you , but when I read about amusement park accidents, I usually find myself wondering "How'd they manage to do that?" But once it happens to you, you find yourself thinking "Just how in god's name did that happen?"

Incredibly, my left big toe got caught in the top of the waterslide, so I was more or less dangling by a toe. When I finally liberated the digit amidst a very un-family-friendly spew of reflexive expletives, I went zooming down the slide, luge-style, with my battered toe leading the way.

The park's first aid EMT was just about to look at my toe when a little boy of about six let out a piercing wail after colliding into another child and knocking out a tooth. Following the rules of triage, I encouraged the EMT to deal with his bleeding younger patient, and hobbled off in search of an icepack.

As my incredulity gave way to bruising, swelling, and limping, and a pretty much spoiled week, I just kept wondering, "How in god's name did that happen?" And to think I had been anxious about going to the hospital — about the impending surgery — when I ought to have been worrying about surviving Six Flags.

But the upside in all of this was that as Sweet M were reclining on the bed in our Lodge room, its Adirondack Camp decor replete with images of brown bears, she and I were musing about bears and mosquitoes.

Do bears eat people? she asked.

If they're hungry enough, I said.

No, they don't, they eat fish and berries, she said.

Yes, they do eat fish and berries, I agreed. Detecting just a bit of anxiety there, I added, And the fish eat mosquitoes and flies, so they won't bite you.

She paused for a moment, and announced, So there you'd have a food chain.

A food chain! She knows what a food chain is!

Yes, that'd be a food chain. Where'd you learn about food chains — at school?

Oh no, I learned it on TV.

I'm begining to think I should stop looking for a new school for Sweet M and just invest in a widescreen television. Some people think television is a damaging plug-in drug. I'm thinking that maybe, as one of my favorite disability writers, Martha Beck says, it's a vitamin.