A language of his own

My son could already make some verbal requests when he was two years old.  He invented words, and by trial and error we learned what each word meant.  Balloon, for example, is "daw-daw."  When my son wanted to watch the videos of the animated TV series "Noddy," he would tell me "Apukutch."  For the films featuring a dog named Beethoven, he would say "Bow-bow."  "Garfield" is "Afee."  This system worked for some time until autism began to erase his limited language.  It came to a point where he would cry aloud each time he wanted to watch a video as I was making a futile attempt to guess what he desired.  Eventually, we just had to let him pick the disc of his choice and assist him in operating the player to

Miracles

I grew up thanking saints at the bidding of my mother who claimed that those saints cured me.  I was sickly when I was young, and although my mother brought me to medical doctors, she also made deals with these saints to heal me in exchange of a yearly pilgrimage to the church dedicated to them during their feast day.   She brought me in these churches throughout my childhood, but she never explained exactly whose saint was involved in which disease.  In my early teens, I would go all by myself to honor my mother's pact with these saints and to have fun as well.  A feast day, after all, is also a time of merriment.  Eventually, my mother would have to remind me of her panata (promise), and I would tell her that she should be the one fulfilling

Overture

My son's pediatrician in the Philippines was obviously choosing her words.  In June to September 2008 my son and I stayed in the Philippines and during that time we were seeing her original pediatrician regularly for his vaccines and whenever he has health issues. In this particular visit, she was inquiring about my son's tendency to cry aloud while waiting for our turn in her clinic's crowded reception area.  It had been a month since we came back from Thailand and she was wondering if his behavior was occurring only in her small clinic or elsewhere.  She asked if my son had acquired new friends in our neighborhood.  She also asked if he already learned to talk.  We discussed during our previous visit my son's delayed speech, and she recommended to use only Tagalog or English when communicating with him, in case the reason for the delay was due to the confusion from hearing different languages.  Although she was smiling

Lost in the Spectrum

A dot of light for me to see/ is like a million rays of light/ for all my life I'm in the dark.


These are the opening lines of a poem I wrote for my high school paper.  I already forgot the title, the rest of the poem, and what made me wrote those lines more than a decade ago.  Lately, I found myself reciting these lines in my mind because they aptly

Drawing a cat

When I started homeschooling my son in December last year, I had the impression that he didn't know how to draw anything all by himself.  I had not seen him draw anything independently, although I noticed that he loved connecting dots and tracing dotted lines. He appeared to abhor coloring, and I devoted extra time to train him to tolerate, if not like,  coloring pictures.

In January I discovered that he already knows how to draw the parts of a human face -- eyes, nose, mouth -- inside an oval representing the

Really, what's love got to do with it?

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"He responds well because he knows you love him."


My son's former teacher reached this conclusion when she observed that all the while that we were talking along the sidewalk, my son was sitting quietly behind me in our bike.  It was the first time that she saw my son in more than four months.  Before I came to Thailand, my wife could not talk to anyone she met on the street for more than a few seconds if my son was with him.  He would wail and wriggle until his mom began to pedal again.  Now, due to the intervention that I have been implementing since December, he doesn't mind if I stop to say hello and have a chat with friends we see on the streets.  He patiently waits, and if ever he gets bored, he tells me that he

Talking in sentences

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When I learned that my son could already read common words from memory, I decided to train him to read sentences, hoping he would acquire language at a much faster rate.  I focused on the "I want . . ." sentences, to complement the single-word manding behavior that he had just acquired.  


Since last week, he has been consistently saying

Today's surprise: He can spell "apple!"

Life is full of surprises.


One of the things that I learned through the years of coping with my son's autism is to constantly lower my expectations.  It breaks my heart each time I have to accept the sad reality that my son have limitations and that he may have a hard time overcoming his shortcomings.  I taught myself not to expect too much from my son, to be patient with the pace of his development, and to appreciate the

Brownies for Mom

My wife is one of the lucky moms who receive Happy Mother's Day greetings twice a year -- one on the second Sunday of May, the Mother's Day in the Philippines and another in many other countries, and on August 12, Thailand's Mother's Day which is also Queen Sirikit's birthday.


For the first Mother's Day celebration of the year, my son and I gave her a cherry and walnut brownies adorned

Classroom in the bathroom

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In the middle of an activity, my son would run into the bathroom.  Giggling, he would wait for me to call him, or for me to go to the bathroom and to prompt him to return to our study area.  He would not cry when I lead him back to his chair.  He would laugh and drop on the floor because every part of his body would be so sensitive that he would be tickled by the slightest touch.  He would need several minutes to calm down.  It was December 2011 and we just started

Kissing the pain away

The blinking LED signs of the mall’s cinema just across the supermarket where we left my wife attracted my son.  He walked towards the foyer and stopped to watch the lights move from left to right to spell some acronym over and over again.  I stood behind him, constantly reminding him to stay quiet and to keep his hands close to himself.  It was time to teach him good manners while