Will Work for Cookies (Our Seder Recap)

Well, we survived Passover. Next year, I’m going to have t-shirts made up: We survived our seder! On the back: Next year at someone else’s house!

Match the egg with the picture of the egg!

Jeff thought I should give a run-down of what went right and what I’d do differently next year, and here it is.

Drilling and practice were definitely a good idea, but on the third or fourth night of sitting around the table, all four of us, reading the parts of the Haggadah that we thought would interest Alex most, he seemed to lose interest, jumping up and helping himself to crackers, going to the bathroom, and in general just seeming like he was kind of seder’ed out. By the time it was the day before the day before Passover, and we were going to have our dress rehearsal seder with some neighbors, Alex was clearly put out. He watched TV, he decided it was bath time, he strolled around naked. (Our neighbors, two girls age 6 and 8, screamed. “This is definitely R-rated,” they said. So there’s next month’s project.)

Wednesday, showtime, had more ups and downs. I baked Passover-recipe chocolate chip cookies and had them stored safely for the grand dessert extravaganza that ends a seder. Like Tuesday night, Alex loved helping set the table. He liked helping set up the seder plate – ours has pictures as well as words, so it’s fun to put the egg on the little picture of the egg. He was insistent that the red armchair be returned (again, and again, and again) to its usual place at our little workspace. Then it was time to sit down. He didn’t want to sit, but he did (briefly). Then he jumped up. Jeff and I got our troubled, we’re-the-burdened-parents-of-an-unruly-autistic-on faces on. Then we started hissing at him, “No cookies unless you sit down! No present unless you sit with us!”

Next year, I think we’ll have some reading practice and more talking about what the kind of behavior we expect from him. Though he didn’t sit with us the whole time on the real seder, he kept his pants on the whole time; he read the four questions in his soft little voice; he was delighted with his Afikomen present (a little farm book from Grandpa); he was thrilled when the chocolate chip cookies were served.

We tried to stress this year that Passover is a special time, and the seder is an extra-special occasion, one that’s very important to us. I think he got some of that, and Ned says Alex was thinking something like, “Oh, I realize this is Passover. They were trying to tell me this all along, and now I get it.”

I’m not sure all that’s true, but I think we’ll stress next year how this is a holiday that requires special behavior and extra attention to other people’s feelings. We’ll run through the high points of the Haggadah, but we’ll also talk about how we sit… we read… we do not watch TV… and we will get cookies and a present if all goes well. It was better than last year, and hopefully not as good as it will be next year.