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<\/a><\/div>\n(An aside here, for the young men of Teh NetarWeb: don’t make the same mistake I did and fail to become a special education teacher. It’s a field populated exclusively by smart, beneficent, and heart-breakingly lovely lasses. I am so totally not kidding about this. Four years at a university and I did not spend as much time in the company of pretty college girls as Squiggle has in the two years since his diagnosis<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The preschool occupies the upstairs floor of a house of worship, which means that I now got to church several times week. A very strange twist of events for a guy like me. It would be as if a religious person were to attend one of my Secret Atheist Meetings, where we plot our War On Christmas and write letters to the Supreme Court urging them to replace “In God We Trust” on coins with “Ask Us About Our Secular Humanism!” We are of course deathly afraid that Squiggle might catch The God while he’s there, but we have a plan in place: if anyone speaks to him about how to live a meaningful life or help his fellow man, he knows to immediately pull his emergency copy of “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell” from his backpack and hold it in front of himself while slowly backing away.<\/p>\n Squiggle is still not much of a communicator. He’s great at labeling things and he vocabulary is pretty vast, but he rarely makes requests or tells us things unprompted. It’s like the idea of doing so doesn’t even occur to him. Still, there are great improvements. He’s begun using complete sentences, which is a pretty big deal. He’s gotten better at selecting from a verbal list of things to choose from (in the past he would just reflexively repeat whatever you said last). And he’s become drunk on the intoxicating power of “no.” In the space of a few months he went from a Know-It-All<\/a> to a No-It-All, cavalierly nixing all of our proposals.<\/p>\n Me<\/b>: It’s pretty late. Do you want to go to bed?<\/p>\n Squiggle<\/b>: No go to bed.<\/p>\n M<\/b>: Do you want to read a book?<\/p>\n S<\/b>: No read a book?<\/p>\n M<\/b>: Do you want to do a puzzle?<\/p>\n S<\/b>: No do a puzzle.<\/p>\n M<\/b>: Do you want to sing a song?<\/p>\n S<\/b>: No sing a song.<\/p>\n M<\/b>: Do you want to play a game?<\/p>\n S<\/b>: No play a game.<\/p>\n M<\/b>: Well, then what do you want to do?<\/p>\n {Long pause while Squiggle considers.}<\/p>\n S<\/b>: Go to bed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He’s gotten to be such a contrarian that he naysays all comers, even himself. One recent morning he was in the next room coloring, and I heard him sing: “Take me out to the balllllll game. Take me out to the–no song!” {Silence}.<\/p>\n By the way, someone asked what Squiggle did for Halloween. The answer is: fell asleep in the car on the way over to our friend’s house<\/a>. We threw him on a spare bed and he snoozed through all the mayhem.<\/p>\n S’okay, he didn’t have a costume anyhow, just a stylish shirt with pumpkins on it. And he got plenty o’ Halloween at preschool that day. While he was there, I got an IM from The Queen:<\/p>\n The Queen<\/b>: When I dropped him off, his teacher was wearing pumpkin glasses Me<\/b>: hahaha![\"Slid\"](\"https:\/\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1383\/1154152385_458cd2bbba.jpg\")
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\nQ<\/b>: But she had to take them off
\nQ<\/b>: Because they were terrifying the kids.<\/p>\n
\nMe<\/b>: That’s the great thing about Halloween with autistic kids
\nMe<\/b>: they’re easy to scare.
\nMe<\/b>: “Today we’re going to drive to pre-school …
\nMe<\/b>: by a different route!!”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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