What day is today?

My youngest son, who is 12 and is autistic, likes order very much. Very much. Now, this could be any child, really, but all of his Transformers are put together as robots on his shelves in his room. (Autobots separated from the Decepticons, of course.) We don’t touch them.

He also has all of the Spongebob Legos put together on the shelves in his room. He hasn’t played with them since he put them together, but they are there and aren’t going to move.
The remotes in the bonus room upstairs stay in the same spot. The coasters on the table go right next to the placemats.

He likes order.

And he likes knowing what’s going on. He does pretty good with change, but he still needs to know what’s up ahead. Which is totally understandable.

(He did great on vacation, although he did wake his brother up the morning we were leaving to say, “It’s time to get up and get ready to go.” That was before I was even up. Too funny.)
Since he likes knowing what’s up ahead, I really tried working with him on days and dates. I honestly thought he was never going to get it. He could understand that today is Monday and tomorrow is Tuesday. But don’t try to explain to him that in ten days we are going to do such and such. He just didn’t get it.

And then one day it just clicked. Thank you, Lord.

Now he knows the day and date every day, and if you asked him what the date will be two weeks from tomorrow, I would bet you that he would be correct.

Me, being the wise-and-with-it mother realized after months of giving him information and trying to explain when it was going to happen, that maybe he would do better with a CALENDAR! You know, that thing with all the days and dates already on it?

So I got him one. And he loves it. Every night he goes upstairs and pulls his calendar out of his sock drawer. He marks off the day with a big X. It’s very cute.

There are only two things that he has written in his calendar (I wrote lots of stuff for him)-- the dates of the State Fair from last year and from this year. He talks about that day all year long, because that’s where we win the enormous Sonic the Hedgehog stuffed animals.
(Yes, he’s 12 and he still has one of those. It’s the last thing he has that I wish he’d get rid of. He ditched all the other stuff on his own, so I’m hoping he’ll do the same for this one. And we don’t bring it in public. But it does ride in the car with us. And it went to Destin, too.)

ANYhoo.

I was cleaning out the closet under our stairs as that is where I keep all of our home school stuff and school is about to start. (And it was starting to smell funny.) I have a whiteboard calendar in there, and I finally decided it was time to add August’s info.

I wiped it off clean with alcohol and a paper towel, and I wrote out all the dates. Then I looked at my trusty personal calendar and realized I had started August on a Thursday instead of a Friday. So I went to get another paper towel.

Before I got back to the calendar, my son was there pointing at it and said, “You wrote the dates wrong.”

The boy likes order.

Originally posted August 2008 @ Mom in Transition