Crockpot Catalina Cranberry Chicken

Chicken (bone-in)
Canned cranberries, whole
Catalina dressing
Onion soup mix

Cook in crockpot til done.

Breathe Fellowship

From the Breathe web site:

"BREATHE Special Needs Respite provides a fun, safe, evening out for families with special needs kids. BREATHE takes place monthly (except during December) at Fellowship Bible Church in Chagrin Falls.

At BREATHE, kids enjoy an evening of food, games, and fun while parents and caregivers get a well-deserved break. Each child attending is paired up with a trained volunteer for the evening. The best part? BREATHE is FREE!

All children 0-18 years of age are welcome, along with their siblings. Each guest may participate in as many activities as he wishes. A quiet room is also available for kids who prefer peaceful activities with fewer transitions. All special dietary concerns are accommodated, including gluten free/casein free, color/dye sensitivities, and standard food allergies."

This is a wonderful program that we're very thankful to have found. Get more information and register online here:

http://www.breathefellowship.com/

Patient Voices: Autism

It's always interesting to me to hear other parents & people on the spectrum talk about how autism affects their lives. Check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/02/health/healthguide/TE_autism.html

Hooray for melatonin!

We suffered with a horribly messed up sleep schedule for several years. It wasn't uncommon for Rhys to stay up until 6am, which meant I had to try and stay awake, too. If he napped too late in the afternoon (he never napped early), we knew we were doomed. And it's not like we could MAKE him sleep at a reasonable hour. I mean, how do you MAKE a child sleep? The old hypnosis, swinging watch, you-are-getting-sleeeeeeepy routine? Nope. Even if we got lucky and he fell asleep at a "normal" hour like 9 or 10pm, he would just wake up at 2am, as if he were just napping and not down for the night. And the irregular cycle continued. He would sleep when he was tired (because you can't keep a tired child awake, either, no matter how much you poke at him), and no matter what we did to try & regulate it (and believe me, we tried & tried), nothing worked. We gradually eliminated naps when he got a little older (while most kids his age were still taking naps), but it still wasn't enough to get him on a regular sleep schedule. I was exhausted almost all the time.

I finally found something online posted by a mother of a child on the autism spectrum. She said it wasn't uncommon for autistic kids to have sleep issues, and she had found success with melatonin supplements. Her post made me do even more research, because while it sounded promising (and to be honest, we were pretty desperate for a solution), we aren't in favor of using artificial chemicals on our child, and "drugging" him was out of the question. But a little more digging revealed that melatonin is a chemical that is naturally produced in the brain. It's sold as a nutritional supplement, over the counter, at various places including health food stores. The research I found online suggested that autistic kids' brains don't produce enough melatonin, or don't produce it regularly. Melatonin isn't like "sleeping pills" by any means, and it's not addictive or dangerous. In fact, if Rhys isn't tired they won't work. They just trigger the part of his brain that lets him know he's sleepy, and within about an hour of taking his minty chewable tablet, he curls up and falls asleep. We have confirmed the safety of using melatonin supplements with Rhys's neurologist. She says we could be using up to 9 mg, but we only give him 1 mg and it works like a charm. It's also safe for long-term use.

This is what we give him. Kirkman is a wonderful and much-respected company:

http://www.kirkmanlabs.com/ViewProductDetails@Product_ID@202.aspx

So, hooray for melatonin! While Rhys still likes to drag out his bedtime as much as he can get away with (hey, he's a kid!), he's on a very regular sleep schedule. And Mommy's sanity is saved.

Here Come The ABC's

If your child is going to watch something a million times, it's helpful if it isn't something annoying. Here's a DVD/CD combo from They Might Be Giants that Rhys absolutely adores, and getting these songs stuck in your head (trust me, they will be) is really no hardship at all. In fact, you might even join your child in learning a thing or two.



Here Come the ABCs [CD/DVD Combo]

FREE text-to-speech software

Here's another piece to the Rhys puzzle that contributed significantly to his language development. Some very dear friends of ours gave him a laptop computer, and we set it up for him to use in the living room (where all his toys are, and he spends the most time). We knew he had expressed a little interest in our computer keyboards, and he has been interested in the alphabet almost from birth. So we set it up and opened Word Pad, so he could "play" with it. Then we got the bright idea to look for a free screen reader, and we found a great one:


http://www.screenreader.net/

Thunder is completely free, and although it's not very customizable, it's still fantastic. Now when Rhys types words, it repeats the letters as he types them, and then it says the word when he hits 'enter'. Suddenly our mostly non-verbal boy was typing (and spelling correctly) 20 words... then 30... then 50... then we lost count.

No Mess Fingerpaint - Genius!

We got some of this Crayola Color Wonder NO MESS Fingerpaint for Rhys this evening, and he loves it so much that he fell asleep clutching it in his fist.




What we bought is a little different from this, but it's very similar.

It's really nice for kids who crave that sensory, tactile connection, and it's perfect for Rhys because he loves art in any form, especially if he can really get his hands involved in it.