A Little More...

One last Autism page for the month of April... this week at the MDC Challenge blog the challenge is to scrapbook a cause near and dear to your heart. Being Autism Awareness month, I knew for sure I would be scrapping another page about Autism, but I also got all kinds of ideas for other pages, so they'll be on my task list! I would love to do a page honoring my aunt, whom we lost last year to breast cancer, and of course a page honoring my brother whom we lost due to an incorrectly diagnosed heart attack. I don't want to do depressing pages, though, so it may be better to wait a bit on those. I think it's important to scrapbook the bad things along with the good things in your life, because that's the only way someone looking back will get a real picture of your life. But, I don't want all of those pages to be morbid or angry - I think it's more important to tell the story.


Scrapbooking about Josh is the perfect example. When my kids were born I was heavy into scrapbooking and made pages on EVERY little event :) But then, since Josh has regressive Autism, the pages were kind of invalidated. After all, he lost the first words he spoke, he lost his ability to eat with fork and spoon, he lost, he lost, he lost. So for a long time I just stopped scrapbooking about Josh. I still took lots of pictures, but I was just grieving so much and I didn't know how to put what was happening in to words. Now that I am (mostly) past the grieving stage I think it's really important to just give a picture of what our lives are like. Hopefully, one day he will be able to look back at these pages and see just how far he has come! Even in this past year he has progressed leaps and bounds. I would guesstimate that he has jumped from cognitive abilities around those of a 17-24 month old up to about the 3 year old phase now.



Yikes - I'm going on and on again! Let me just show you the page:



This was a very easy page to do because the Bo Bunny background paper actually has a lot of character all by itself, so I just added matted photos and journaling strips along with my title, which I created with Quickutz lettering and a 7 printed off my computer. I used Sally's sketch from this week's sketch challenge at Splitcoast Stampers. The page is just about Josh's accomplishments at this point - here is the journaling:

-You can say short sentences, mostly for things you want. You've started doing a lot of echoing, and you like to use the word 'No!' Still no conversational speech, though.
-You've started changing the language selectors on your videos, so now you spell all your favorite words not only in English, but in Spanish and French as well. You like me to write the words down, and when I can't recognize them (because they are not in English) you spell them out for me!
-Still not potty trained, but you seem to understand what's supposed to happen and you clean up after yourself. It's just getting you to recognize when you need to go and getting you to stop what you're doing.
-You're ALL boy and you're a happy boy. You find beauty in unusual things. You love to be tickled, take baths and showers, and play in the dirt. You put yourself to bed if we don't do it on time. You still do a lot of stimming, toe walking, and jumping. We're working on that!
-You're a really awesome little guy!

OK, thanks for hanging and sorry about going on and on (and on!) I hope you all enjoy or are at least interested in learning about Joshie - he's such a great kid!! (I'm not biased at all... he really is great!)

Make sure you come back and visit - today starts the BIG BLOG ROLL at the MDC Challenge blog - lots of prizes and fun to be had!!! Have a great day!