Category Archives: Autism Stories

Pathway Accepts Jason

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Present word count of WIP:  59,985

Jason got accepted! In this next phase of his ongoing autism story, he’s been admitted to the BYU-Idaho Pathway Program, which is perfect for someone like him with Asperger’s.

According to the letter, as a new Pathway student, he’ll begin his studies in the Academic Start Curriculum. Once he completes three semesters satisfactorily, he’ll be a regular online BYU-Idaho student and able to pursue any of a number of college degrees.

Here’s a short video about the program:

While the program is new and really still only getting started, it’s going to have a tremendous reach all over the world eventually. Here’s a map showing how far it had expanded last year:

I guarantee it has grown since then and it’s exciting to think Jason will be a part of it come September. This will give him the opportunity to continue to live at home and even hold down a job or serve a local service mission while completing his course work.

Now if I can only talk him into learning how to drive. That’s the next big goal.

Originally posted 2012-06-29 09:49:07.

Jason Conquers Grilled Cheese!

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After only a few weeks of practice, my son has finally learned how to make his own grilled cheese sandwiches. This is a BIG accomplishment in my book. It means Michael and I can perhaps go away for a weekend without worrying that Jason will have to subsist on Costco rolls and Ritz Bits with cheese.

(How convenient that our anniversary AND my birthday are right around the corner. :D)

Anyway, in case you don’t already know, Jason won’t eat just ANY grilled cheese sandwiches. Due mainly to his Asperger’s, he likes them done a particular way and so I decided to begin teaching him the easy part first–everything but the buttering.

On our recent trip to Utah, I challenged him to take over the placing of the buttered slices on the grill, the placing of the cheese slices, the flipping (more about that in a minute), and the cutting off of the crusts.

He got better the more he did it, though he wasn’t always happy about having to do it. Still, as we all know, practice makes perfect. He’s proven himself to be an accomplished flipper, in particular, as will be demonstrated in a video below.

Once we returned home, I finally made him take up the dreaded knife and begin to learn how to spread butter on a slice of bread without demolishing it. It took some coaching and I even had him place his hand over mine a few times to get the feeling of the knife’s angle, etc. But it worked!

And here are the pictures (and video) to prove it:

IMG_1098(First, the set up: Orowheat Country Buttermilk Bread, Country Crock Spread with Calcium, Kraft American Cheese Slice Singles, one of our blue Tupperware plates, and an unplugged griddle…the knife and spatula aren’t shown here)

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(Jason lays four slices out on the plate to be buttered)

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(He opens up the butter…hey, sometimes it’s not easy!)

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(Now he’s dipping in with the knife)

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(And he begins to butter the first slice)

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(Here’s a closer look…it’s a very meticulous process for him, but that’s fine.)

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(With all four slices buttered, it’s now time to set the top two, upside down, on the griddle.)

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(And then comes a slice of cheese for each)

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(As you may imagine, he’s very careful about placing the cheese slice just so. In fact, he’s a little perturbed that cheese slices aren’t made to fit the bread better.)

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(See how perfectly he’s centered them?)

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(Now it’s time to set the other slices on top…)

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(And finally plug in the griddle, turn it to 325, and start the timer)

NOTE:  After years of experimenting, we discovered that Jason’s preferred grilled cheese sandwiches turn out perfectly when heated at the above temperature for only 2 minutes and 5 seconds for the first batch, and 1 minute and 35 seconds for the second batch. Yes, he eats four grilled cheese sandwiches at a sitting…four for breakfast, and another four for dinner. For lunch, he snacks on a banana and some Ritz Bits or something.

IMG_1118(Now he waits as the timer counts down)

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(A closer look at the sandwiches as they are grilled)

Then comes the flipping:

(Quick and sure)

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(He begins cutting off the crusts after first turning off and unplugging the griddle)

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(Then he moves the crustless sandwiches over to the plate)

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(Like so)

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(And now the cutting into bite-sized squares)

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(First the top sandwich…)

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(And then the bottom before moving to the horizontal cuts)

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(Making 16 small bite-size squares in all)

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(E voilá! Grilled Cheese á la mode de Jason!)*

*I apologize if I mixed my French and Italian a bit there. Can’t recall if it should be “de” or “du”

Originally posted 2013-08-30 06:00:46.

Jason Kills Off Cinderella’s Stepmother, Lady Tremaine

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I haven’t posted a Jason update in a long while. To catch you all up, he’s finished all his Pathway courses . . . except the dreaded Math. He’ll be taking that one come January. In the meantime, he’s enjoying some freedom, and the only assignment he has these days is to learn how to make his own grilled cheese sandwiches. He’s halfway there and I’ll be posting about that next Friday, complete with pictures.

(Part of the reason we’re not pushing the driving, the math, or the mission right now is that we’re getting ready to list our house and looking into moving to Southern Utah. We want to downsize, be closer to both our families, and give Jason more opportunities to meet other LDS singles. But more about all of that in future posts.)

As I wrote on Monday, to help pass the time while driving down to Salt Lake City (and then on to St. George), I reviewed Agatha Christie’s writing methodology with Jason and proposed we give it a try. He agreed and so, first, we had to come up with a plausible victim who would have enemies.

JASON:  How about Lady Tremaine?

ME:  Who?

JASON:  You know, the stepmother from Disney’s “Cinderella?”

Lady Tremaine

ME:  Oh, yeah. Okay, she’ll do. Now we need to come up with the murder method.

He thought about that for a minute and shrugged. So I prodded his recollection of her fondness for shopping.

ME:  We could kill her off during a shopping trip in town.

JASON:  Huh? How?

ME:  Let’s see . . . since Agatha Christie was into poison, let’s come up with a really sneaky way to poison her while shopping.

JASON:  (No response)

ME:  Okay, how about this? . . . The killer applies an odorless poison to a dress Lady Tremaine has admired before, counting on the fact that she’ll likely try it on. Once she does, the toxic concoction seeps into her skin and 2-3 days later, she’s dead.

JASON:  Cool!

Now that we had the victim and the method all set, we had to determine the killer.

JASON:  It can’t be Cinderella and it can’t be the Prince. That would just be wrong.

Cinderella and the prince

ME:  Okay, who else wouldn’t like Lady Tremaine? Who else would have a motive and yet probably be overlooked by the reader?

JASON:  Maybe Anastasia would work.

ME:  Who?

JASON:  You know, the younger daughter. The one who was sort of kind to Cinderella . . . at least in the sequels.

Anastasia

ME:  That’s good. People probably wouldn’t suspect her because of that. But what would her motive be? Doesn’t she like her mother?

JASON:  Well, in the sequels, we find out that she doesn’t really like her mother’s iron grip on her life and that she just wants to be free to marry for love, not money. So that could be her motive.

ME:  Perfect! Now we need to figure out the motives for all the rest of the characters (not including the animals).

JASON:  Okay. Drizella, the eldest daughter, could have done it because she wants to inherit the family fortune sooner rather than later after her mother dies naturally.

Drizella

ME:  (Nodding) Good. Go on.

JASON:  Who else is there?

ME:  How about the dress shopkeeper? That’s where the murder takes place. Wouldn’t she naturally be a suspect?

JASON:  I guess, but what would her motive be?

ME:  I know. She could have done it because Lady Tremaine hasn’t been paying her bills on time and the woman is about to lose her shop.

JASON:  Hmm . . . that will do.

Finally, we needed to come up with the right detective to ferret out all the clues, with the help of Cinderella and the Prince, of course. Thinking back on the movie, that left only one possibility. It was apparent to me, but I had to bring Jason around to the realization.

ME:  Okay, Jason, who was the one in the film who went all over the countryside asking questions?

JASON:  Huh?

ME:  You know, he had a glass slipper and . . .

JASON:  Oh, you mean the Grand Duke?

grand duke 2

ME:  Exactly. Even though he’s kind of a bumbling fool, he’s the perfect type to put people off their guard while secretly he’s observing their behavior and asking all kinds of innocent questions.

JASON:  You mean his clumsiness is just an act?

ME:  Precisely. Now all we have to do is sit down and plot it out.

Et voilá. An Agatha Christie-styled murder mystery. Anyone want to write it? (We won’t for fear of being sued by Disney. Although perhaps Jason might give it a go as a piece of fan fiction. I’ll let you know if he does, but I can’t promise to post it here. He keeps his fan fiction private.)

In any case, it was a fun exercise and took a good bit longer in the car than it took you to read about it here. By the way, Jason helped create this post, so give him half the credit, okay?

Originally posted 2013-08-23 06:00:17.

Sometimes I Just Want to Go Waaay Back in Time

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By the time Jason gets through college, I think I’m going to feel like I’ve earned a brand new Bachelor of Arts degree . . . in Empowerment. Or at least I’d better feel that way.

This Introduction to Writing class that he’s taking this semester in Pathway is unbelievable! I mean, hey, I’m a writer and even I think it’s challenging. When I read his first assignment, this is how I looked (and felt):

IMG_1363(Yes, I wanted to run . . . either that or attack the teacher)

One thing the class is NOT is an introduction. Jason had to dive right in on his first essay the first week and learn to debate in order to prepare to write an argumentative essay.

Now arguing doesn’t come naturally to my sweet, nonconfrontational son (except in choir when members were not paying attention or getting their notes right…he’s even tough with our ward choir). He tends to believe most anything anyone tells him because he doesn’t expect people to say anything but the truth. So I had to acquaint him with the nuances of political opinion as opposed to fact before he could take a stand one way or the other on gun control–his chosen topic.

By the time he wrote the paper, he seemed to have gotten the hang of it, though. He had argued back and forth with two different online classmates on the message board (and pretty much handed them their hat, in my unbiased opinion) and that helped him solidify his position.

IMG_1340(He always writes his papers on my computer)

Actually, the hardest part about writing his first paper was having to cite sources for EVERYTHING! The paper was supposed to be 2-3 pages long double-spaced. His was 4 and a half, so he emailed the professor and asked if that would be okay. The teacher responded affirmatively, as long as provided a source for every piece of information he brought up that he didn’t know before working on the paper. Jason ended up with 2 pages of sources!

This week’s paper wasn’t quite as demanding. It was supposed to be a problem/solution essay, so Jason wrote about the growing unemployment problem among those with autism and proposed a solution at the end. Only 3 pages long plus 1 page of sources.

He’s learning a lot, but sometimes I wonder if he and I wouldn’t have been happier living in the days before school was invented . . . say, back in the Cretaceous Period with that Dromaeosaurid up there in the first picture.

Originally posted 2013-03-01 06:00:45.

One Thing at a Time

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Back before Christmas, Jason was thinking about meeting with our new Stake President (who oversees some ten congregations) some time in January to set in motion his full-time, local service mission. As the holidays came and went, he seemed to get more and more nervous.

Finally, we sat down with him and explained that this was going to be his choice. We weren’t forcing him to do anything. Don’t misunderstand. Jason wants to serve a mission. He was simply nervous about the idea of doing it at the same time as he was focusing on completing the Pathway Program. As with many on the autism spectrum, the idea of multi-tasking is a bit daunting. One thing at a time works best.

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I have to admit now that his reservation may have been inspired, given the challenge of his current online Language Arts class (more about that next time). In any case, he did finally meet with President Powell and, together, they agreed that it would be best for him to complete Pathway first then begin his mission in August.

It looks like he’ll be meeting with President Powell again in May to work out more specifics, but he’ll likely begin at the Family History Library, where the need is apparently greatest. Personally, I think that will be great experience given his academic interest in library science. By serving there, he’ll get a firmer idea of whether he really enjoys library work or not. Of course, an LDS Family History Library isn’t quite like a regular library, but he’ll learn about cataloguing documents and he’ll be working with computers.

Our next goal: Getting him to take Driver’s Ed and get a license by August!

Originally posted 2013-02-15 12:21:22.