Image world-war-2-airplane-model.com

The 1/48th Corsair fighter plane was going to be my comeback piece, the plastic model kit (”hobby kit,” now that I’m almost 50 and can afford the good kids) to prove that my eyes were as sharp and my hands as steady as when I was 16 and building the bargain kits.
I put it right up on top of the bookshelf, out of the way, with the now-empty boxes of the snap-together airplanes I did with the boys. “Airplane? Airplane?” Alex kept saying.

I had some computer work in the afternoon while Ned built a model on his own, and as I’m making dinner now that pretty took us to about 7:30, when the dishes were put away and I decided that Alex was owed some airplane time.

He didn’t help so much as watch: I felt a warmth to think that for Alex it enough just to be near me as we built a model airplane together. I do hope he wasn’t paying too much attention, after under my once-skilled fingers one piece went on crooked and then another went on slanted and then the tiny cockpit tinkled out of the half-finished fuselage and bounced across our floor.

Somewhere about the moment the Corsair’s canopy received a giant impression of my thumbprint in glue, it began to hit me that whatever skill I’d once had in this hobby had deterioriated. In the chair beside me, Alex drew his knees up inside his T shirt and sometimes watched me, sometimes stared off as I smeared glue along the inside of one wing and then the inside of another and mashed the two halves together. “Alex, wanna hold this together for a minute?”

He did. He slipped the propeller onto the front of the plane — right in front of the complete hash I’d made of the cowling assembly — and he took a tissue gently in his fingers to dab at the decals. I bent one of the “U.S. NAVY”s upon itself and I couldn’t line up the American stars on the wings (decals are my favorite part of building; they make the model).

I really meant to give this kit more love than this. Somewhere along this time, I decided to just do the landing gear and the missiles later, and just stick the damned wings on the damned plane — the part of the construction Alex seemed most keen on, anyway.

“There, Alex. Airplane. Let it dry a minute.”

He did. Then he took it over to the couch and methodically, wordlessly stripped off all the decals.

Early on Father’s Day Alex held up his hand toward the top of the bookcase and kept saying “Airplane? Airplane?” He wanted the plastic model kits I keep up there, since my current apartment is a lifetime removed from the private basement bedroom I had in in high school, with its permanent card table splashed with enamel and covered with plastic parts of models under construction.

Image: upload.wikimedia.org

I’ve stored boxes up there of models the boys and I have built. Some months ago, I began buying plastic models, mostly planes, for the boys and me to do together. (I’m not the most experienced parent in the world, but I do think that if you’re going to try to ensnare your sons in one of your retrospective hobbies, you’d better get to it before they’re 16.) For Alex I’ve bought simpler kits, snap-togethers of jets, and one tiny snap-together Fokker Triplane. It was wicked cool!

“Alex, you want to build an airplane?” I asked him. “Airplane?” I had a few things to do but am always up for a 1/48th scale fighter plane, so I pulled down the box containing the parts of the Corsair I figured would be done by now in my unemployment, and the empty box of the snap-tight Spitfire the boys and I did a while ago. Alex opened the Spitfire box, and his face seemed to fall at seeing it empty.

“Alex, you want to build a plane?”

“Build a plane?” This caught me a little by surprise. I was missing a lot of chances here as a dad of a child with autism, most notably the chance to get him to speak and write a full sentence motivated by a deep desire to do something at that moment. He grabbed my still-unbuilt Unemployment Corsair and twisted a fuselage half off the running. “Oh, Alex, wait!” Every chance he could break it that way. But of course that’s what I bought all these models for: not display, but to play with. The Spitfire is all busted up in their toybox right now, and that’s great.

My mind was just running toward the glue and the paints when Alex wandered away. He’ll be back. I’m hope I’m more ready when he is.

***

Tips for activities for and with children with autism.

Parents struggle with the costs of their children’s autism treatments.

We’re on the beach and I look up and see a small airplane pulling a banner that advertises a certain movie whose words have been under discussion here.

Kind of sums up much of the past two weeks.

• A “Feral Child” Found in Florida?
  In 2005, a girl named Danielle was found amid the most literal squalor and neglect; she was diagnosed with “environmental autism.”
• The Parent Activist
  Once the parent of an autistic child, always the activist (and I don’t mean about mercury).
• Amanda Peet Says Something Sensible
  “My main message to parents is that they should not be taking medical advice from me or any other celebrity. They should look to their pediatrician, the AAP and other experts.”
• Autism, Representation, and the Case of Hannah Poling
  The words one uses to describe and represent autism can profoundly shape our understanding of it.
• What Sound Does a Color Make?: Auditory Synesthesia
  Synesthesia is an “involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense”—-and now it’s been found that some people “hear” colors.
• Beyond Anecdotal Evidence: Clinical Trial of the GFCF Diet
  The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston has begun one of the first double-blind, clinical studies about the gfcf diet.
• The Skies Aren’t So Friendly For Autism Assistance Dogs Either
  Karen Shirk, the director of 4 Paws for Ability, and three trained autism assistance dogs were blocked from boarding a Qantas flight at the Los Angeles Airport, en route to traveling to Waikato in New Zealand.
• On the “Autism Card” and a Deficit of Compassion
  About “compassion deficit disorder” and Michael Savage, and college admissions.
• A Thunderous Slight: Disabilities Groups Call for Boycott of Movie, Tropic Thunder
  More than a dozen disabilities groups—including the Arc of the United States, the National Down Syndrome Congress, the American Association of People With Disabilities—-are calling on Monday for a boycott of the movie Tropic Thunder, for its used of “the r word.”
• Changes at the Beach House
  Another year at the beach house with a boy who’s growing up.
• Mitochondrial Disorders Common in the General Population, But What About for Autism?
  An article in the July 31st American Journal of Human Genetics suggests that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are “common in the general population” and the usual suspects offer the usual over-rhetorical “interpretation.”
• The Last Acceptable Prejudice?
  Hollywood’s got the “developmental delays”—is being “a little slow to get it”—-at least when it comes to understanding why mocking the “retarded” may be the last acceptable prejudice.
• YouTube May Be Evil, But Thanks for the Memories
  Charlie discovers YouTube and its seemingly infinite store of old kids’ videos.
• Genetic Predispositions and Environmental Triggers
  How often have you heard it said that a child may have a “genetic predisposition” to autism, but that it’s an “environmental trigger”—-it’s something in the environment—-that leads to a child “having autism”?

Money, books, finches, the calculus of parenthood, and a sort of fashion statement: How does it all add up?

• Who Pays For What? (2)
  Costs for special education are rising twice as fast for regular education in Massachusetts.
• Two New Autism Books
  Two recently published autism books are selling fast, Jenny McCarthy’s Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism and John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s.
• Language Genetics: Knots and Finches
  Is language (like tying knots) unique to humans—is being able to talk and think in language part of being human?
• 3, 5, 8: What awaits?
  On some significant dates in the life of an autistic boy.
• Yet Another Theory About What Causes Autism
  This one is not about mercury, or TV, or the environment…….
• Not a Sacrifice: The Autism Mother Makeover
  For myself, I prefer not to use the word “sacrifice,” as if I have made myself a martyr to the cause of Charlie. I do know that I have given up things to do my best by Charlie.
• The New Black (for now)
  Autism is the “new black” according to EOnline.

Two autism fathers mix praise for the passing of the Combating Autism Act (CAA) with a call that greater resources be devoted to autistic children and autistic adults now in an op-ed in the December 24th Washington Times entitled A key achievement of 109th Congress. Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and father of an autistic daughter; he and his wife, Cathryn Garland, wrote an editorial in the November 21st New York Times on the CAA and calling for more attention to treating autistic children. Stuart Spielman, father of a 12-year-old autistic son and autism advocate, contributed to the drafting of the CAA and also to Maryland’s Medicaid autism waiver.

As we work to fund what is authorized by the Combating Autism Act, we also need to turn our attention to the often neglected public policy question of how to help those already affected. This agenda includes everything from improving the quality of adult care for those needing intensive help throughout their lives, to helping autistic individuals find and keep work for which they are best suited, to making therapies more available to young toddlers in the crucial preschool years when the most can be done to help them.

Health insurance companies should be encouraged to cover more therapies “documented to work,” and other states should follow the model of Maryland’s Medicaid autism waiver, which covers intensive therapy “regardless of whether a family’s income makes it eligible for most Medicaid services.”

I am very glad for O’Hanlon’s and Spielman’s call for more resources to be allocated to helping autistic persons now. My son Charlie has been flourishing in his school program thanks to us having moved to a school district with sufficient resources to provide him with an ABA classroom setting with a ratio of 1 student: 1 teacher. Charlie talks, rides his bike, plays the piano, and enjoys a transcontinental airplane ride thanks to all of the intensive teaching he received from the time he was just over two years old.

All autistic children certainly deserve a chance to be in educational programs that will help them to thrive as Charlie has been doing, as do all autistic adults who still need services, too. Charlie is fortunate to live at a time when understanding about and awareness of autism have evolved to the point that we have a better idea of how to educate him, and when he is not sent away to a “school for kids like him” (not that these cannot benefit autistic students), andattends a school in our town where he is regularly seen by the other children, the teachers and staff, and the other parents.

O’Hanlon and Spielman rather write that more educational and other resources are need for those “affected by autism” because there are more such children—because of “America’s autism epidemic”:

Autism spectrum disorders are the most prevalent and rapidly increasing set of serious developmental challenges facing American children today. More than 1 in 200 are believed afflicted, and since the condition affects males disproportionately, that means about 1 in 100 young boys can be expected to display some type of autistic problem early in life.
    Although debate continues over how much of the increase is due to better diagnostics, these statistics constitute much more than a tenfold increase in the reported rate over the last quarter-century.

Note that O’Hanlon and Spielman mention the “reported rate” of the prevalence of autism—this would be the number of autism diagnoses actually reported, but not the actual number, which might indeed to be higher: What about adults who have “undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome“? Children considered ”mentally retarded” in the past who might today receive an autism diagnosis? Children with speech or language disorders who might also be considered “on the autism spectrum” today? 

 ”1 in 166″ is the oft-cited figure for the number of children estimated to have an autism spectrum disorder today; what if this figure is an underestimate—and what if we see the “1 in 166″ not as an alarmist statement about an “autism epidemic” that requires us to solve the riddle of what causes autism (O’Hanlon and Spielman note theories abotu autism’s cause ranging from “early childhood vaccinations to heavy metals that enter the body”). What if the “1 in 166″ is a sign of an epistemological shift—-an enlightened understanding of what autism and being “wired differently” are?

I will be honest here. I would not be surprised if 30 years ago, even 20 and 15, Charlie was diagnosed with mental retardation and packed off to an institution, never to be seen again except by other disabled adults and by an undertrained staff. Never to be seen by a planeload of passengers, by all the holiday travelers in the Philadelphia and Oakland airports; by so many residents of our town in New Jersey, by who knows who in in New York City. A child Charlie’s age knew about autism when he gave her a tap in the airport today; a child his age recognized that he has autism.

I take joy in that.

In preparation for Saturday’s transcontinental airplane flight from our home in New Jersey to California (where my entire extended family lives), I spent a good hour at the toy store (I also did Christmas shopping for several nephews, one niece, and Charlie himself). I walked out with miniature puzzles, magnet Tic-Tac-Toe, and much else, and a bunch of Buki Books. Charlie has always warmed up to this brand of children’s activity books: The designs are mostly of a single object (animals, a mushroom) in coloring books with pictures drawn in bold lines, dot-to-dots that don’t have the numbers arrayed helter skelter, color by letter books, and more. I also found Amazing Paper from Alex Toys that changes color when you color with the “magic pen” and a Rainbow Vision Sandbilder.

And if that sounds like too much child’s play, a copy of Revolver is due to come tomorrow: Jim has discerned that it is time to introduce Charlie to the Beatles.