I call that a pretty good birthday. We were lucky to be able to snag the little gazebo in the 67th St. playground in Central Park. Our decorations (bandanas and a big red-white-and-blue thing) looked really festive. Our picnic basket got a great workout ferrying cupcakes and pink lemonade and napkins. Coincidentally, Ned was wearing an Old Navy flag t-shirt. Jeff was wearing a navy-and-white batik shirt. Alex chose a red, white and blue-striped t-shirt.

Alex's birthday is also Flag Day

Grandpa gave the hit present: a boxed set of twenty (count ‘em, 20!) Matchbox cars. Alex played with them and was completely mesmerized.

Aunt Julie gave inspired gifts: a green plastic wire thingy that’s hard to describe, easy to love. It’s intriguing, and I showed Alex how great his jungle animals look if you put them in there. Also these open-ended puzzle pieces. Alex, Ned and I had a pleasant half-hour this morning playing with them at the dining room table.

We're glad Flag Day is so near the 4th of July.

This morning, Ned gave Alex a detailed, realistic-looking toy elephant that he (Alex) had expressed interest in on a trip to the toy store yesterday. He was so delighted with it that he actually took an older elephant and tossed it in our recycling area. (I felt sad for it, so I rescued it and put it aside for our yard sale.)

Every year since Alex’s birth, Jeff has written him a letter. I guess this year my own rituals for Alex’s birthday are starting to emerge: A simple party. Cupcakes, pink lemonade. We spin out the presents (we still haven’t give him his MP3 player, which I loaded with songs I think he’ll like, or the picnic basket) so he doesn’t get overwhelmed. Every year we push him to celebrate a little more; every year we look back on the day of his birth and remind ourselves how far we’ve all come.

Operating on the principle that into every child’s life a little boredom must fall, Alex and I went shopping today. Why inflict such cruel punishment on my autistic son? It’s Memorial Day. Practically mandatory to hit a sale or two. Ned and Jeff were at the Intrepid for a morning of Fleet Week activities, starting with breakfast on the flight deck. I needed something to wear. Old Navy flag t-shirts were buy-one, get-one-free today.

Old Navy Flag t-shirt

To sweeten the deal, we planned to go to Borders if Alex was good. (That’s what I told him. We were going to go anyway. I just wasn’t counting on actually getting to try anything on.)

It actually went quite well. I repeated over and over again, “We’re going to a store where Mommy can try on some clothes. Then: bookstore!” Alex was a good and patient shopping companion. We stopped briefly in Crate and Barrel (on the way) and Pottery Barn (also on the way). We went to the clothing store. I looked for things to try on, headed for the escalator, and Alex started to balk. “No more!” he said. We went upstairs anyway. Picked out jeans and luxuriated in a perfectly sized dressing room with bench for Alex to sit on and read. After I’d tried everything on, he grabbed my sandals and handed them to me. As we left the store, he said, “Bookstore! Bookstore!” He was visibly thrilled.

Our bookstore visit was also a success. I mostly sat in an easy chair and read “Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things,” which I think will make a great gift for my sister. Alex darted around some but stuck to the children’s area. He picked out three books he knows quite well and painstakingly peeled the sales stickers off. (I replaced them and told him we couldn’t do that.) Then it was time to leave. I wrested two  of the books away and told him we’d buy one. ONE. “Pick one,” I said. “Pick two!” he answered. Sadly, he ran away when I was at the cash register so I had to take off after him. We didn’t get the book, because running away is, I explained, a deal breaker. I’m pretty sure we have a duplicate copy at home anyway, and I’ll look for it later.

I was sad not to have girls only because I love clothes. I could imagine adorable dresses… sparkly sandals… flowery headbands. Oh, well. I love my boys and it turns out I love not having daily clothing wars, like my friends who have daughters. There have been a few clashes, of course. Ned refused to wear overalls starting at age 2. (”That’s for BABY,” he declared.) And around age 5, Alex decided he would only wear black t-shirts.

Black t-shirt (photo courtesy Kansir, flickr.com)

Fine, I thought. Even though Alex and Ned mostly don’t seem to care what they wear, they have occasional outbursts of opinion. I was kind of relieved that Alex had a preference. Except that it’s not all that easy to find black t-shirts in very small sizes — especially for a very small boy. Luckily, in hipster New York City, you can find black t-shirts at Uniqlo and occasionally Old Navy.

One trick to getting Alex to branch out is to take him shopping. Unfortunately his tolerance for this is quite limited. But today we had to hit the stores for khakis (no blue jeans for this boy — sad, really, after I finally found a source for blue jeans that would fit a very skinny boy with longish legs). Children’s Place is no help. Their trousers, even the slim sizes, seem cut for a heftier kid. Old Navy has taken a huge dip in quality these last few years. So off we went to H&M, the Swedish chain known for its well-priced, fashion forward line.

We found pants and shorts, decided to hit another store, and in a desperate attempt to get us to stop shopping, Alex said, “Train? Train?” and pulled us toward the subway.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I write fairly frequently here about Charlie growing up. Of course, he’s not the only one around here getting older: It’s my birthday today, and I’m 40.

Fout-ohmygod, as one my mom-blog-friend puts it. Like the narrator in T.S. Eliot’s poem, I grow old, I do grow old, and I actually do roll the bottoms of my trousers (ok, pants), because I’m too lazy to get out a needle and thread and hem them.

My mother did teach me to hem, years ago, and it really is years ago, due to this birthday thing. She taught us the basics; I think my first “creation” was a pocket made of fabric from the scraps of the Halloween costumes and jumpers and curtains and pillows she used to make. She put together a sewing box for my sister and me and I remember trailing behind the two of them as we wandered the rows in the fabric store. I loved seeing all the prints and patterns and colors and running my hands over the bolts of material, and always had to steal a long look at what I thought was an infinite array of buttons, snaps, rickrack, ribbon, and “notions.” When I was around 7 or 8 and my sister, sewing boxes in had, took the AC Transit bus to the big town a couple miles away (we were living in what was then a very brand new suburb) and took lessons at a Singer sewing store. I was mildly terrified of the needle on the machine going through my finger and didn’t advance beyond making an awkward wrap skirt from a Simplicity pattern.

The reason we were taking AC Transit to the sewing lesson was that my mother had gone back to work and it was just my sister and me for many hours in the long, hot summer days. The once a week sewing class broke up the time (most of which we spent, quite contentedly, reading books). A year later, we moved back to Oakland, where my father’s family is from (and where he, my sister, and I were born). The sewing machine, cover clipped securely on, sat in a corner of the downstairs room where my dad had his desk, or in an unfinished storage area.

My mother also used to needlepoint and my sister took this up, and still does (the green dragon under the words “Charlie’s room” still hangs on a wall by his’s window). I didn’t think about sewing till I was in graduate school and on my own, and, finding that I really didn’t want to have to roll up the bottoms of my pants, I asked my mom to teach me how to hem, again. I did a few pairs of pants with her, yes, “helping” to even things up—-ok, sometimes my mom, who is just a bit shorter than me, would just pin up the pants, pack them up in her luggage, hem them at home in California, and send them back to me. I probably got more care packages while I was in grad school and living in my own place than when I was in a dorm in college, and felt a bit ridiculous when finding myself really looking forward to see what kind of cookies she’d saran-wrapped in pairs.

So much for me “growing up” and being “independent.”

These days, she still sends the packages (my dad was quite thrilled to discover those flat-rate shipping postage boxes). Now there’s stuff for three and, in the latest sent two weeks ago, two pairs of pants, carefully hemmed, for Charlie, who seems to have reached a stage of his life when pants grow shorter overnight and when he and Jim can pretty much share t-shirts and socks. (And when the three of us were briefly confused the other day about whose black suede slip-on shoes were whose; Jim’s appeared only slightly bigger than Charlie’s.) I not only still don’t hem pants, but work is very busy, and taking care of Charlie, and talking and thinking through things with Jim, and everything …..

But I know I could hem pants if I had to. I still have a sewing box outfitted with needles of different sizes and different colors of thread and scissors and a thimble (though I did misplace the box for awhile in one of our moves). I don’t have to roll up the bottoms of every pair of pants, having finally found some that more or less are the right length, but I like knowing that I could if I had to. In the occasional times when I’ve sewed a button that fell off a sweater or one of Jim’s shirts, or tried to patch the lining of my coat pockets, I’ve found the activity of sewing—making the knot in the thread and moving the needle and thread in and out and in and out—focusing and, while not exactly relaxing, soothing in the repetition.

And then, my wardrobe has of late been a bit over-supplied in khaki and ripstop pants and jeans, some with elastic waists: The pants Charlie was wearing last year are pretty much the right length for me.

40 years old, and wearing hand-me-ups from a not-yet-adolescent boy.

Such are life’s lessons when you know you’re older, and you’re trying, very hard, to be just a bit wiser, especially when you know you get to spend the years to come (40, 41, and counting) with your two very, very best friends.

(But how long will Jim have a few inches on Charlie—there will be time, there will be time.)

Corduroy, velvet, denim. Leather, silk, a rock. Bubble wrap, fake fur, burlap. Not a list of supplies for a craft project, but a list of things with different textures—but if you felt each, with your fingers or on the soles of your feet, would they just be so many sensory sensation? Or might one say “security” to you, or one make you agitated, even angry? Does touching certain textures evoke certain emotions in you?

If so, you may have “tactile-emotion synesthesia.” Synesthesia is an “involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense”; it’s thought to be much more common in the general population than previously thought. Someone with synesthesia might attach certain textures or sounds to numbers or colors, as Daniel Tammet describes in his autobiographical Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. It’s been found that synesthesia can be auditory (certain sounds are felt, smelled, and so forth).

Here’s today’s Neurophilosophy on work published in the journal Neurocase by researchers at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego:

In patient AW, a 22-year-old female, the most vivid emotions are evoked by denim, which causes in her strong feelings of depression and disgust, and silk, which produces feelings of happiness and contentment. Other textures evoked a wide variety of emotions and feelings: when she touched corduroy, AW felt confused; leather aroused feelings of receiving criticism; multicoloured toothpaste made her feel anxious; wax made her feel embarrassed; tylenol gel caps made her feel jealous; and different grades of sand paper made her feel either guilt, relief, or as if she was telling a white lie. In patient HS, a 20-year-old female, the same textures often evoked different feelings. She felt no real emotion when touching denim but was disgusted instead by the texture of fleece and wax; corduroy made her feel disappointed; bok choy made her feel irritated, but smooth metal made her feel sedated and calm. In this subject, the strongest emotion was evoked when she touched soft leather, which made her feel extremely scared - she described the sensation as “making my spine crawl.”

Charlie’s always been drawn to things based on color and shape and also—as we later noted—texture. When younger, he seemed to prefer toys (blocks, puzzles, beads) made of wood, rather than plastic (ok sometimes, but much more rarely) and metal (never an interest). As I’ve often noted, he (and we) have become a bit dependent on polarfleece in the form of jackets, vests, gloves, hats, and blankets. Light cotton t-shirts and pants made from some kind of cotton-based material with not too many fasteners are pretty much what Charlie wears day in and day out, along with a dark blue hooded sweatshirt—a long time since we’ve bothered with knit sweaters for him and forget the potential slipperiness of polyester. While Charlie seems quite uninterested in drawing or coloring or painting with a brush, we’ve been noticing that when he can touch the materials—-clay or putty—he’s been quite motivated.

Kind of gives the phrase “how are you feeling” a whole new dimension.

I think this is, potentially, the perfect t-shirt for Charlie.

Yes, I’ve ordered him one.

Sensory processing is the topic of a presentation at the May 20089 IMFAR conference (International Meeting for Autism Research), as well as of a number of poster presentations. Here’s the description for a segment (#148 in the Program Book) on “Sensory Processing:The Interface of Research and Clinical Practice”:

Sensory differences are commonly reported in people with autism. Often they are among the most problematic symptoms. This symposium will examine the phenomenon of sensory symptomatology, the research methodology used to characterize and explain the observed behaviors, and the treatments that are being used in the community. A translational approach will be emphasized to inform both basic researchers and clinicians on future avenues of study.

Papers will look at how to characterize sensory processing differences in autistic individuals; interventions; neural mechanisms; and neuropsychological perspectives.

When Charlie was just diagnosed, we didn’t think he had any sensory issues. I rather think, now, that we just did not know what we were looking for. The more I’ve learned about sensory processing (and reading books by autistic authors like Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay have been invaluable), the more I’ve seen that, yes, Charlie indeed has sensory processing differences and that his difficulty at telling us about these and explaining what they feel like may well lead to various sorts of outbursts and general unhappiness. The other day, I accidentally dropped my (metal) traveling coffee mug on the kitchen counter and Charlie cried out in serious pain and kept crying for some twenty minutes. After years of indifference to me vacuuming, I now tell him that I’m turning on the dustbuster and he puts his hands over his ears, tucks down his head, and steals random glances at me working on the crumbs left from someone’s snack. The key thing is that I give him advance notice about the loud sounds of the vacuum.

Charlie (according to my “research,” such as it is) has learned and is learning his own strategies for dealing with all that noise from the likes of me.

I’ve a couple of ideas for posts about topics like prenatal genetic testing, vaccines and more about vaccines, gestation and future health problems and the like but since it’s getting later in the evening (out here on the East Coast) I’m just going to reference an article from no less august a body than the Style section of last Sunday’s New York Times and specifically an article on how the economic crisis is affecting teens whose parents have never been able to say, no, you don’t need more Abercrombie. Given the near-constant talk about the “cost” of raising a special needs and specifically an autistic child, I just wanted to note that Charlie’s never been one for having anything that’s “the latest,” whether it’s clothing, electronics, tsotchkes to hang on his backpack, a particular style of sneaker. He’s easy-going about whatever he wears (not that my mom doesn’t make sure he’s well-attired) and honestly asks for little—ok, some Vietnamese spring rolls and a swim in the ocean but the former is good cheap eats and the latter, well, believe it or not, if you know where to go the ocean is still, indeed, free.

And watching Charlie swim in it beats all the razzle-dazzle fireworks of any gizmo peddled at the mall.

Hoodies banned at some NJ schools, the September 12th NJ.com reported.

Fortunately, not Charlie’s school: What would one do without a soft blue hood to pull over one’s ears and head, whatever the weather? And now that it’s gotten fall crisp and cool, a hooded sweatshirt isn’t just fashion, it’s necessary, especially while waiting for the schoolbus on a misty morning.

We’ve gotten Charlie a new blue hooded sweatshirt as the sleeves on the one he wore up till July are now “bracelet length” on him. The new sweatshirt’s big and floppy and not quite the right fit. But a little room to grow into is good too.

Size 7 1/2.

That’s the size of bowling shoes I got for Charlie on Wednesday afternoon, when we go to a local bowling alley with a group of kids like Charlie and their families. I loosened the laces and pulled out the shoe’s tongue so Charlie could slide his feet in and as he did I remembered how, last week, he’d had to struggle to shove and, really, jam his heels into a size 7—a size that was simply too (duh, Mom!) too small for him. No wonder he’d been on edge last Wednesday, told me “no bowling,” sat unmoving on a bench with his head adamantly down, and swiped at a plate of fries. Too tight shoes and smashed toes and trying to let me know by his asking to leave: I didn’t get it and Charlie’d gotten more and more frustrated until there was some loud loudness and much, too much, unhappiness.

It seems like, oh, a month of two ago that Charlie was a size 6. He likes to wear black suede-y slip-ons, as does Jim—I’d just ordered Jim a new pair last week and couldn’t help but be struck by the size similarity, which is pretty notable from this photo:

Talk about like father, like son. The question for me is becoming not how long will it be before I buy Jim and Charlie the same size shoes (pretty really soon) but how soon will Charlie be wearing, oh, size 13.

With feet where they should be on Wednesday, Charlie concentrated on bowling. He got into a rhythm of choosing a swirly chartreuse ball for his first bowl, and then a neon orange one (which was heavier) for the second. He was careful to insert his fingers in the three holes and throw, I meant roll, the ball with significant force a few times. He knocked over 8 pins one time. He shared a plate of fries and ketchup without incident and was still game to go swimming afterwards.

If the shoe does fit, we go for it.