Alex’s top ten
May 31, 2009 by Jill Cornfield
Filed under Health
1. Elmo (sadly) remains a favorite. Maybe it’s just a comforting habit now; he doesn’t seem riveted the way he did when he was younger.
Photo by Kitten Fleming
2. Chocolate chip cookies. (Never-fail recipe secret here!) Equally enthusiastic about homemade and freshly baked or dusty old Chips Ahoy.
3. Prefers homemade brownies. The first time he had them, on Christmas Eve about four years ago, he followed me around for about an hour saying, “Brownie? Brownie? Brownie?” (Note: After several different recipes, I’ve settled on the sublime Katharine Hepburn brownies with an added half-teaspoon of almond extract.)
4. The part of “Arthur’s Pet Business” where Arthur’s baby sister Kate wails. Loudly. He loves to rewind to this part. Sometimes I hide that tape for a few wail-free hours. It is permanently seared into my brain.
5. Have a hardcover book with dust jacket? Alex will thoughtfully separate them for you. (He’ll also slip the bookmark out, so I’ve gotten in the habit of glancing at the page number.) If it’s a library book and the jacket is in the plastic slipcase glued to the book, Alex will rip it off. I don’t know why he does this. Usually he looks for things that go together and reassembles them (like slices of watermelon).
6. Bathtime. Warm water, splashing, no one to bug him (we’re usually watching TV while he bathes) — what’s not to love?
7. Alex loves repetition and predictability. A bookstore provides both in the form of endless shelves of similarly shaped objects and copies of his old favorites, which he revisits for a satisfying hour or so.
8. The epitome of order and routine — with accessible shelves of books to boot — school is such a favorite place that Alex often stops at the locked doors of whatever school he happens to be passing on weekends and holidays.
9. We might be going to a suburban supermarket, a Westchester museum or Stew Leonard’s. Alex is always up for a car ride. (We occasionally rent from Zip Car.)
10. Sometimes it’s the farm yard assortment of ducks, cows, chickens, geese; other times lions and tigers and elephants entice him. Either way, plastic animals remain a source of great attraction.
My son also removes dust jackets from books. Why must these things be separate? I may never know.
What is it about that dust jacket? My son also removes them. He would also eat brownies and cookies exclusively, if I let him.
Weird, I know! Especially when, as I said, Alex seems to see the world as a puzzle to be reassembled.
I also remove dust jackets from books–and last I heard, I’m not autistic. I just like to remove them when i’m reading the book so they don’t get all tattered. the problem with this system is that i then have a stack of book jackets that somehow don’t find their way back onto the books. but they’re PRISTINE!!
I don’t know… but I’m finding it interesting to see that Alex isn’t the only kid on the spectrum who is drawn to this. So maybe it’s in the category of behaviors like lining up toys (which he never used to do but does now).
Eric is also a “liner-upper.” More so when he was younger. He’s now 7 and does it once in a while – mostly with action figures.