Yo, Adrian
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating on October 25, 2010
We had been at the sprawling horse farm for about 45 minutes, when the owners popped the question.
Do you think Clay would like to ride one of the horses?
Clay had loved almost everything about his trip on this sunny fall day so far, but we weren’t sure how he would answer that. Read the rest of this entry »
Nature Boy
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on October 4, 2010
Clay loves the nature center near our house, so when we discovered one a couple towns over a few weeks back we figured it was worth a visit.
The first stop on the trail was a blind for bird watching.
My wife and I sat on chairs looking out through a wall-length picture window while Clay explored the room. Illustrations of birds ran above the glass. After a bit, the little guy joined us.
“What are your favorite birds?” my wife typed on the keyboard Clay uses to communicate. Read the rest of this entry »
A Clay Storm
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Daily Life on September 17, 2010
Got caught in a perfect Clay storm yesterday afternoon. Here is what happened:
I take a shower around 4 p.m. (A busy day)
Head to the kitchen to get started on dinner. While I chop zucchini and peppers to roast on the barbecue, Clay alternates between scarfing the vegetables out of the bowl and diddling around with the sealed bottle of marinade.
Vegetables chopped, I pull off the tight seal on the top of the marinade, not realizing that Clay has managed to unscrew the top almost completely. The key word there is “almost.”
I shake the marinade vigorously to mix the oil with the other ingredients. Read the rest of this entry »
Diving Butterfly
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating on September 13, 2010
The night before we met with Clay’s “team” at school last week, my wife told me a story. A story I hadn’t heard before. It explained how—after years of silence from the little guy—we wound up at our kitchen table preparing for a meeting to integrate a computer keyboard into his high school classroom.
A year ago, we didn’t know if Clay would be able to type. We weren’t completely sure if he could read. We certainly didn’t know he could do addition, subtraction and multiplication in his head. He hadn’t used speech to communicate in five years. I had my darker moments, but I don’t think my wife ever stopped believing that underneath Clay’s often distracted and hyperactive exterior lived a boy who was listening, learning and longing to do more with his life than he had thus far. She had spent a weekend at Syracuse University learning about typing with support. She read herself to sleep at night with books on the key techniques and stories of people with autism who had broken through the silence.
We had talked about the possibility of Clay learning to type, but hadn’t taken concrete action to get it started. Read the rest of this entry »
3,877 Hot Dogs
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on September 3, 2010
This past Wednesday night, Clay was upstairs with the aide that works with him at home when I heard the robotic sound of the keyboard he uses to communicate.
“I am really hungry.”
Not surprisingly, moments later he and the aide tromped down the stairs to the kitchen, where I was chopping vegetables for dinner.
“What would you like to eat?” I asked. In her daily report, his teacher wrote that Clay was “very hungry” at school that day. He had been eating all afternoon, and already had inhaled a plateful of french fries. But it was 6 p.m., and I know he was looking for more.
“Hot dogs,” he typed.
“OK. How many do you want?” Read the rest of this entry »
So Sorry
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on August 31, 2010
Clay is usually a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, so it got our attention when he was visibly upset one day last week with the aide that works with him at home.
The county provides us with a TSS (therapeutic staff support), who works with Clay four or five days each week. One TSS left about a month ago, and our new guy is still getting his feet wet. He is doing a great job, but transitions are tough. He and Clay are still figuring each other out, circling one another like heavyweight boxers in the first round of a championship bout.
The biggest issue came when the TSS showed up 30-minutes earlier than usual. Not a big deal, except I forgot to warn Clay, so he was already caught off guard on a day when he wasn’t feeling 100 percent. Bad start. Read the rest of this entry »
A Little Nervous
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on August 29, 2010
Clay starts high school tomorrow.
We went to a restaurant last night at his request. He and his Mom held the following conversation using Clay’s keyboard while waiting for our meal to arrive:
“You start high school on Monday. What do you think of that?”
“Scared.” Read the rest of this entry »
Floppy Tails
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on August 26, 2010
The last few weeks of camp Clay often came home with thoroughly soaked sneakers and socks. We’re talking socks so wet that you could twist them and squeeze out a cup or two of water. Niagara Falls socks. We kept wondering what was going on. Was he wearing them in the pool? Were there big puddles in the playground? Was he pouring juice in his shoes in case he got thirsty during the heat of the afternoon? After it happened three days in a row, we sent in a note asking his aide.
Turns out one of his favorite activities near the end of each day was feeding the goats and sheep, and filling their water buckets. You have to wonder how much water they actually got.
Knowing how much he took to the animals at camp, we figured he might enjoy a trip to the annual Grange fair near us this past weekend. When my wife asked if he wanted to go, she got a one word response on the keyboard, “Excited.” Read the rest of this entry »
Not-So-Happy Camper
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on August 18, 2010
In retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised when the phone rang an hour after Clay got to camp Monday morning.
Yes, he woke up at 4:30 that morning with no intention of going back to sleep, but—sadly—that isn’t all that unusual. Yes, he did seem a tad warm. And, yes, he had been dragging a little over the weekend, typing “stay here” to all our offers to go somewhere, but we didn’t think much of that, either. Camp takes a lot out of him, and he needs the weekend to recover. It was his last week of camp. I had a busy day of work ahead, and my wife had a late meeting that would keep her out until past nine that night. So, we packed him off on the bus as usual.
Then came the “dreaded call.” Read the rest of this entry »
Happy Camper, Part 2
Posted by Larry Blumenthal in Communicating, Daily Life on August 11, 2010
Last Friday afternoon, Clay’s camp put on a show on the stage at a local middle school. A musical history of the past 50 years, of course.
Clay’s group danced to “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog.”
Afterwards, while the crowd surged out of the school headed for vans and cars, his aide (he has a one-on-one aide working with him throughout the day) shared a story with my wife.
We have been sending Clay’s keyboard to camp, and his aide has been using it to communicate, play games and generally interact. (Turns out Clay has a good grasp of Disney trivia, mostly garnered from the endless trailers the company piles on to the beginning of all of its videos.) One day recently the camp director came over to see what all the fuss was about with Clay and his typing. To demonstrate, his aide started with what she thought was a direct and simple question:
“Where do you go to school?”
Clay typed the name of a local bartending school. Read the rest of this entry »
Life With Clay 
