CareGiver360 was created by Ken Ziel, a Colorado father whose son has a range of developmental and physical disabilities. Ziel was inspired to create CareGiver360 from his experiences raising a son with an array of special needs and trying to communicate all of those needs to multiple care providers.

“When providers left or new providers came in, I could see that the process of being brought up to speed and adapting to new procedures was just as hard on the caregivers as it was on me and (my son) Austin,” Ziel said.

Caregivers can also use the tool to streamline updates in care procedures, treatments and conditions.

CareGiver360 creates “care guides” tailored to the unique needs of those receiving long-term care, and streamlines and safeguards critical information to caregivers. Families are able to share a record of a loved one’s care, condition and personal preferences. New care providers can use the guide to become familiar with their care recipient.

The idea came one evening after Ziel and his wife left Austin with a caregiver to go see a movie. “The amount of time it took to go over all of Austin’s care instructions with the caregiver, and the anxiety it caused my wife and me, was incredible,” Ziel says.

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The National Autism Association provides relationship-coaching tools at no charge to qualifying couples who have a child with autism.  Couples in need will receive a book and DVD presentation at no charge. To qualify, couples that have a child with autism should write to lori@nationalautism.org outlining their special circumstance. Qualifying couples will then receive both the book and DVD in the mail. Lifetime partners that have a child with autism also qualify. Counseling funds are also available through Family First. To apply for a $500 grant towards marriage counseling, couples can visit www.nationalautismassociation.org/familyfirst.php.

Jill sat reading in the good chair in our living room while I tried to coax Alex to pick up the sheets of his homework that had fallen on the floor. She sure seemed to be studying her book; Alex wasn’t exactly flying into the task.

“Can you help me here, Jill?” I asked, frankly too lazy to stir off the couch after just getting home from work.

She did, but added, “I’m steamed at you for letting me get up for Alex last night.”

“Why didn’t you wake me? You always have before.”

“Oh you were just SLEEPING!” She holds her hands to her cheek in prayer position and closes her eyes with elaborate sarcasm, then dives back to the book.

Jill and I split what we once called “night duty” (in blended tones of reverence and dread): The one who had to get up first in the morning didn’t have to get up to handle Alex if he woke up at night. So why then, somebody ask her, did Jill let me sleep? I would’ve gotten up with no more snapping at Alex and grumbling to the universe than normal.

What is normal in a sleep-deprived life? “Lack of sleep makes everything impossible” Jill has said, and it’s true. Can’t think, really, can’t plan. Once solid ideas fragment as you stumble through your day jet-lagged though you’ve flown nowhere.

I think Alex’s sleeping is getting better. Now it may a solid week before we hear his footfalls through the dark, like those of Mr. Marbles in that “Seinfeld” episode in which Jerry tries to sleep in Kramer’s apartment. Alex also used to stay awake for two hours or more overnight, giggling and laughing. (Granted, better than crying and moaning, but two hours?! Was that the best we were going to get to say in life?)

“You CANNOT yell at Alex in the middle of the night!” Jill has said. “I was HOURS getting back to sleep!”

“You’ve yelled at him too in the middle of the night!” I reply.

“But not like that!” she says.

No: The difference was I had to listen to it when you were yelling, trying to get back to sleep. That’s the difference.

Nonetheless, I opt for the hiss, SnakeDad urging his autistic boy back to bed at 2:23 by the green numerals on our bedroom clock.

We give him Melatonin (”God’s gift” as one parent of an autistic child once called it). We used to do two capsules at bedtime; lately Jill has tried one in the late afternoon, a second at bedtime. Out of sympathy, I guess, I take it, too.

Sometimes I’ve envied Jill her time at home, away from an office, much as I haven’t liked the job (see “insurance policy”) I had to take 11 years ago. To me she had much of the free time in the marriage, and I conveniently forgot what my mother used to tell me before Alex was born (“When you have a baby you’ll probably want to go to work!” – was that an insult? – just as I conveniently forgot much of what it must have been like for Jill at home alone while I was in some hotel on a business trip.

(In the past six months I have, of course, learned to be out-and-out thankful for having any job.)

Once the boys were old enough, I wanted Jill to return to work for, in equal parts, her own career advancement after Alex’s birth and hospitalization (a job in itself for Jill), and for the spirit of teamwork I’ve come to need in a marriage. I often felt I was carrying the whole load of a special-needs family, though I knew I wasn’t. Sometimes in this kind of parenting, there’s a wide gap between what you feel and what you know.

Jill is moving back into the workworld – amazing enough in this economy – but it was a source of friction. Sometimes less, sometimes more. (“You don’t know the numbers of resumes and letters I’ve sent out,” she’d say.)

Jill and I haven’t come close to adding to the supposedly higher divorce rate among couples parenting a child with autism or other special needs. After the National Autism Association launched a study on the subject a few years ago, in fact, the previous author of this column found no evidence to support the bandied 80-to-85% divorce figure for couples parenting autism. And as Lisa Jo Rudy points out on her about.com Autism page, that a recent study reports that the divorce rate for couples parenting children who have ADHD (which Rudy terms similar to autism) is much lower than the incidence of stress in such families.

Stress we have. Online spots like ACT offer primers on relieving family stress, as does Terri Mauro’s excellent About.com channel on raising special-needs children.

From a November 16, 2006, post on autistic adults in relationships, a couple of questions and comments from readers: A suggestion about a dating agency—–queries from mothers—-and some comments on those who are dating or married to autistic individuals.

Seven extra hours of washing, dusting, vacuuming, tidying up, putting away: A new study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has found that that’s how much more housework women who are married do. From Science Daily:

“It’s a well-known pattern,” said ISR economist Frank Stafford, who directs the study. “There’s still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage—men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor. Certainly there are all kinds of individual differences here, but in general, this is what happens after marriage. And the situation gets worse for women when they have children.”

The researchers did find that the amount of housework that women have been doing has steadily decreased since 1976.

Well. Until we bought our house in a town in northern New Jersey in 2003, we always lived in apartments or condos and, aside from more clothes and a few more dishes, I don’t recall any significant increase in housework on my part after Jim and I got married. Charlie’s birth definitely inaugurated a new era of Lots to Clean, mostly in the form of laundry (clothes, sheets, towels upon towels) and the floor (whether linoleum, hardwood, or carpet.) Some experiments making gluten-free bread on a hot summer day in Minnesota and some memorable “it’s all over the rug and spreading!” moments have tested my cleaning and multitasking skills, as has the need to mop up a major mess while simultaneously tending to a distressed child in need a shower.

And of course, it’s not just the house that needs to be cleaned, but that other place where we semi-live, the car, proper cleaning of which would probably add a good hour or two of “carcleaning” time (a whole 40 minutes would be needed to pry out the dimes, French fries, pens, and plastic utensils lodged under the front and passenger seats and in one of the seatbelts). And the soda, and the sand in the summer (but what’s a trip to the beach without getting sandy?).

Happily, as Charlie has gotten older, he’s been doing more and more around the house, from taking out the garbage to folding laundry—-if (quoting Prof. Stafford above) the “situation gets worse for women when they have children,” it’s possible for it to get better as they grow up, and for more hands to lighten the (house) work load.