Saturday, February 8, 2020

Screwdrivers, Autism Evaluations, and a Collapsing High Chair

I have big news but first a smaller story about our tiniest kid.

There was a day last week when this girl was walking around the house with a toy screwdriver. 


I saw her crouched next to the giant chest in the dining room where I keep my yarn stash for knitting, but I didn't pay much attention. I mean, this particular toy screw driver was a very clunky plastic flat head. I didn't think that she could actually use it to unscrew an actual screw.

Do you see where this is going?

I was making dinner.

In this house, if something mischevious is going to happen it's going to happen when I'm making dinner. But Tessie wasn't alone. There were four other kids running around as she seriously walked around the dining room with her grey and orange screw driver, investigating.

She was very quiet, but Tessie's often very quiet so it's not quite the red flag it is with just about any other kid her age.


So imagine my surprise when Paul lifted her into her high chair the next night and it collapsed. 

She was fine, thankfully, simply a little startled from the legs of her high chair suddenly giving out.

Upon closer examination we realized that several key screws in her Eddie Bauer wooden high chair had been removed and were missing. 

Since only one person had been walking around testing out any kind of a screw driver, we're pretty confident in the culprit. 


The high chair had probably stayed around so long because it was an extremely convenient place to put Tessie when something needed to be cleaned up. If she'd dumped a glass of water and was trying to swim in it across the dining room floor I could lift her into her high chair until I was done mopping it up.

If she'd broken a Christmas ornament (there was a thankfully short lived glass breaking stim at the end of last year) I could whisk her up before she attempted to stomp on the glass with her bare feet and safely put her in her chair until the broken glass was no more.

But the chair is gone now and she's doing remarkably well in a big kid chair at the table after a couple of rough weeks transitioning. It took a little bit of time to understand that being out of the high chair did not mean that everyone's plates at the table was a Tessie buffet.

In other news we had a busy January.

Patrick and I bother ended up with referrals from our doctors for neuro-psych testing.


And we both ended up getting identical results.

Although we were tested on different days, when I went to get my results they happened to have his results ready as well, and so they gave me both.

We both are autistic. We both have ADHD. And we both have anxiety.

And honestly when I got my own results it was an incredible relief (which I made a video explaining right after I got the results). I might try to explain in writing more at a later date but I know it would completely overtake this post and I'm not quite up for that on this Saturday morning.

Patrick's reaction was pretty awesome too:



Meanwhile I just realized, that I never shared that Sadie was also evaluated.

Now Sadie's evaluation was the result of Sadie learning about autism because of her sisters and saying "hey that's me too."

She then came to me and asked if she could be evaluated. She told me she would save her allowance to pay for it.

I told she didn't need to do that, we could talk to her doctor. And we did.

And she is also autistic.

Her reaction, like Patch's was pretty amazing.

Also can you believe this kid is as tall as me now? Where did the last 11 years go?



And in totally unrelated to everything else news I just love this video. It's Maggie doing something she really loves and also talking with me a lot while she does it. And that makes me so incredibly happy.



Anyways I hope that you are having a great winter (or summer if you're in the southern hemisphere) and that you have a good weekend too.

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