Summer vacation is finally here!! That glorious time of year when kids get to stay up late, sleep in, catch lightening bugs (aka, fireflies for all you city dwellers), swim, Slip n' Slide, have sleepovers, and slurp down popsicles as the sun sets. It's a magical time of year for kids and for moms who get to slurp frozen cocktails with girlfriends as we watch the kids Slip n' Slide, swim and catch lightening bugs. And after years of being awakened in the middle of the night repeatedly, now that the kids finally sleep in, we moms get to stay up late in order to binge watch Orange is the New Black and the final season of True Blood (oh, Bill and Eric how I will miss you next summer), and anxiously await the two dreaded words that will blow out of kids mouths as quickly as summertime bubbles, "I'm bored.". Kids are such hypocrites.
These darling little children spend all year counting down the days until summer vacation begins, then before you can say, "summer solstice", these little darlings get all whiny with, "I'm bored."..."What can we do?"...."You never take us anywhere."...."There's no one to play with." and "No, I don't want to go to summer school.". And let's not forget the ongoing, never ending battle over too much screen time that takes place at least 20 times a day. Yep, a mere 60 hours after school ended, when I shut down video games, iPods and televisions, Ryan uttered that five letter "b" word, and I wasn't the least bit surprised, in fact, I was expecting it.
These darling little children spend all year counting down the days until summer vacation begins, then before you can say, "summer solstice", these little darlings get all whiny with, "I'm bored."..."What can we do?"...."You never take us anywhere."...."There's no one to play with." and "No, I don't want to go to summer school.". And let's not forget the ongoing, never ending battle over too much screen time that takes place at least 20 times a day. Yep, a mere 60 hours after school ended, when I shut down video games, iPods and televisions, Ryan uttered that five letter "b" word, and I wasn't the least bit surprised, in fact, I was expecting it.
We've all heard, "I'm bored!" weeks, days, even hours, into the start of summer break, regardless of how many camps, vacations, play dates, and day trips we have planned, the inevitable "I'm bored" echoes off the walls so quickly that we moms long for school to start again...sort of....as long as we have finished binge watching all the episodes of House of Cards. And along with the inevitable "I'm bored" whining comes the standard mom replies like, "go outside and play"...."build a fort"...."play house in the shade of the oak tree"....and the grand daddy of all mother replies, "use your imagination". And there it is, those three words, "use your imagination" that has plagued Ryan for years. When I told Ryan to shut down Minecraft and "use his imagination", he looked at me like I sprung a second head, and grumbled, "Sorry, I don't have an imagination." then quickly picked up his Xbox controller to kill a zombie.
Ok, so, just like I promised to be AWEnest, I have to ask you to be AWEnest and promise me, you won't tell Ryan I said this, but, Ryan is....(whisper) wrong. Seriously, that kid hates to be wrong almost as much as he hates to be bored, so don't dime me out, but, in this instance, Ryan is wrong. One of the myths of autism is that these kids don't have an imagination. It's true, imagining, pretend play, and imitation are not at the top of Ryan's "Things I Am AWEsome at List", but, he can do it, if he deems it worth his time, and although I am no autism expert, I believe for Ryan, that's it in a nutshell. Ryan certainly has an imagination, but, his use of pretend play, imitation, and make believe has always been, well, less than imaginary.
When my friends Denial and Clueless would spend hours with me Googling The A Word, I would frequently see, "lacks pretend play" or "plays with toys in an atypical manner" as a red flag. Well, like any of the red flags for The A Word that completely freaked me out, I would find myself consumed with watching for those red flags. I would quickly turn off the computer and drag Denial and Clueless with me to the playroom to obsess, I mean, observe Ryan.
Back before our formal living room was so formal, it was a little boy's paradise. A playroom filled with Thomas the Tank Engines, cars, trucks, balls of every size, shape and color, pirate swords, fireman's hats and gigantic tubs filled with Fisher Price Rescue Heroes that portrayed every boys' "What I Want to be When I Grow Up" dreams like firemen, policemen, lifeguards, and scuba divers. All of those pretend toys remained untouched as Ryan sat in the middle of the cornucopia of boyhood dreams with an electronic ABC toy mimicking every beep, bleet, ding, and buzz. Toys that made sounds, toys that lit up, and cause and effect toys were Ryan's preferred toys of choice, not playing pretend.
Don't get me wrong, Ryan would sometimes gravitate to the train table, but, he didn't play with the trains the same way Kyle did. There was no "toot toot, all aboard", or stopping at the water tank to fill the steam engines up, Ryan would just roll the trains along the track, up and down, round and round. The same held true for the big Tonka Trucks that Kyle spent hours crashing and taking to the gas station to "fill 'er up". Ryan would push the trucks around, but, rarely did the truck "vroom", "beep" or pull up to the gas station. Sometimes Ryan would just lay on his side and watch the wheels on the truck spin round and round. I began worrying about my sanity and my morality when I would sit and watch Ryan and pray that he would just once send that truck over a pretend cliff with it's pretend inhabitants pretend screaming. Sigh.
Don't get me wrong, Ryan would sometimes gravitate to the train table, but, he didn't play with the trains the same way Kyle did. There was no "toot toot, all aboard", or stopping at the water tank to fill the steam engines up, Ryan would just roll the trains along the track, up and down, round and round. The same held true for the big Tonka Trucks that Kyle spent hours crashing and taking to the gas station to "fill 'er up". Ryan would push the trucks around, but, rarely did the truck "vroom", "beep" or pull up to the gas station. Sometimes Ryan would just lay on his side and watch the wheels on the truck spin round and round. I began worrying about my sanity and my morality when I would sit and watch Ryan and pray that he would just once send that truck over a pretend cliff with it's pretend inhabitants pretend screaming. Sigh.
As I watched Ryan spinning the trucks wheels, not once contemplating a fiery car crash, my wheels began to spin. Denial assured me I just didn't have the "right" pretend play toys and that it wasn't that Ryan couldn't play pretend, he just didn't want to play with trains and trucks. Listening to Denial...again, I convinced myself that she was right and since Ryan "loved" to play with my friend's daughter's Littlest Pet Shop house, I ran out to Toys r Us and bought him one. And yes, Ryan did indeed play with that Pet Shop house by spinning the swings round and round, and making the elevator go up and down and up and down. The Pet Shops didn't talk to each other, have a tea party, or get into a dog and cat fight, they just spun around and around, went up and down the slide (without so much as a "wheee") and took that elevator from the top to the bottom over and over again. Cause and effect, not pretend.
For Ryan, there was no playing house, playing fireman, or playing doctor. The closest pretend play Ryan imitated was running a toy vacuum, that you guessed it, lit up and made noise. When Denial and I would see this, we would crack open a bottle of champagne and scream, "Hooray! Pretend play, he's not autistic!". You can only imagine our reaction when Ryan would play with the toy toaster...toast in, toast out, button in, button out, up and down, up and down. Sure, he didn't put butter on it and feed it to me, but he was pretending in his own way...so I believed.
In order for children to use their imagination and pretend play, they have to be able to put them self in someone else's place. What would a fireman do next? How does Mommy feed baby sister a bottle? Where does the doctor stab the hideously painful shot? Children have to be able to observe and imitate behavior in order to pretend, and observing and imitating people and their behaviors was not something Ryan spent a lot of time doing since he was so overwhelmed with sensory input and worried about surviving in a horribly chaotic world. I have often wondered, now that Ryan is older, was pretend play difficult for him because he was so deeply entrenched in his own world that he did not "see" others therefore, he failed to imitate their behaviors, or was Ryan so smart that he just didn't see the point in wasting his time on such ridiculous activities?
Why would Ryan feed a stuffed teddy bear a bottle when clearly a stuffed bear does not have an esophagus or a stomach, it is not alive, therefore it can not drink and even if it could, there was no real juice in that bottle anyway? Why would Ryan crash a Tonka Truck off a "cliff" with people screaming for their lives when obviously the coffee table is not a cliff and there is no human small enough to get inside a Tonka Truck? And why in the world, would Ryan have Littlest Pet Shop toys talk to one another when clearly a cat, a lion, and an octopus don't even live in the same habitat, yet alone have the ability to speak.
Why would Ryan feed a stuffed teddy bear a bottle when clearly a stuffed bear does not have an esophagus or a stomach, it is not alive, therefore it can not drink and even if it could, there was no real juice in that bottle anyway? Why would Ryan crash a Tonka Truck off a "cliff" with people screaming for their lives when obviously the coffee table is not a cliff and there is no human small enough to get inside a Tonka Truck? And why in the world, would Ryan have Littlest Pet Shop toys talk to one another when clearly a cat, a lion, and an octopus don't even live in the same habitat, yet alone have the ability to speak.
To this day, I still don't have the answer. Ryan's belief that he "doesn't have an imagination" and that using his absent imagination is a "total waste of his valuable time" (his "valuable" video game time) tends to lend to both theories...it's to hard to pretend or it's too dumb to pretend. Does Ryan really believe he doesn't have an imagination or does he see no purpose in using it? I tend to believe that from the get go, Ryan has always been smarter than me, smarter than most, and he tends to view the world more practically than us daydreamers. Most pretend play children imitate is grown up behavior and who in the heck wants to be a grown up? Ryan watches me grumble as I fold the laundry, unload the dishwasher and scrub the toilets so why in the world would he want to play "house" when he could destroy Creepers and Zombies and save his Minecraft World? Ryan has seen enough movies to know that policeman get shot by the bad guys and firemen get hurt in deadly fires so why would he pretend to be anyone who has chosen such a dangerous line of work. I assure you, Ryan sees no point in playing doctor and "injecting toxic poison" into the arms of innocent, unsuspecting children when he could watch Austin Powers take down Dr. Evil for the thirtieth time instead. Hard or boring? Maybe both.
Yes, summer is here, and yes, I will probably hear the "b" word 275 times until I hear the other "b" word...back to school. I will try not to sound like a 90 year old woman by starting every sentence with, "Well, when I was a kid we use to..." because I know times have changed and I don't want to be a hypocrite since I am fairly certain without Netflix, and HBO GO, I would crumble up and die. I will do my best to keep the kids busy, entertained and hydrated with popsicles, ice pops, and Italian Ice while hydrating myself with frozen concoctions that the ice cream man does not sell (wow, he is really missing a big financial opportunity there).
And I will do my best to convince my darlings that fun can be had using their imaginations and pretending, even if that means chasing down Creepers and Zombies with a Diamond Pick Ax while scripting the latest Gumball Episode versus playing the deadly game of "cops and robbers" or the horribly mundane game of "house". Ryan can use his imagination because he does indeed have one (shhh...remember, don't tell him he's wrong), he just needs to find something or someone worthy of imitating or pretending, and I found out yesterday as I picked weeds, raked up shrub clippings and watered the ferns alone, that landscaper is not one of them.
Only 1,776 hours of "boring" summer vacation left....not that I'm counting.
And I will do my best to convince my darlings that fun can be had using their imaginations and pretending, even if that means chasing down Creepers and Zombies with a Diamond Pick Ax while scripting the latest Gumball Episode versus playing the deadly game of "cops and robbers" or the horribly mundane game of "house". Ryan can use his imagination because he does indeed have one (shhh...remember, don't tell him he's wrong), he just needs to find something or someone worthy of imitating or pretending, and I found out yesterday as I picked weeds, raked up shrub clippings and watered the ferns alone, that landscaper is not one of them.
Only 1,776 hours of "boring" summer vacation left....not that I'm counting.
Ryan used his nonexistent imagination to create this spaceship for Patrick. Last time I checked there were no spaceships in Bikini Bottom. He must have used his imagination....shhhhh....
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