This is the third day we spent here at the Option Institute at the New Frontier’s program. I wish we could attend all the programs they offer. We had Bears again this morning. His teaching “style” is very unstructured, making a great memorable teaching moment out of everything. I find the sessions with him amazingly helpful. He questions everything, he is keenly observant of our every posture, every gesture, word spoken and unspoken. I’m learning that the Son-Rise program really is not about Ezra. It is about me. It is not a 3 year program that I run with Ezra to help him recover from autism. It is a lifestyle philosophy, a commitment to be open, authentic, non-judgmental, and completely loving and accepting everywhere and with everyone.

We work a lot on stimulus, belief and response. This is the basis of everything they teach here. Our actions, our choices are not involuntary consequences of outside stimuli (for example, if we get angry at someone cutting us off in traffic the stimuli is someone cuts us off, the reaction is we get angry). We could say, that we got angry because of what someone else did. The belief behind becoming angry though, is that the person was thoughtless, unkind, out to get us, or whatever it is that makes us angry. What they teach here at the option institute is that we can’t change the stimuli, or the reaction. But changing our belief, can change our reaction, and therefore no matter, we have the choice to be happy. This is meaningful to me, because often I do get angry when Ezra does things like slam the door. What is my belief: he slams the door, because he is not aware that i am angry about it, therefor he can never learn. So i get angry. This morning I worked on flipping that. This is a tool for me to change the way I act, so I can act and feel the way I want to feel, regardless of the situation.

I have just a few minutes before we start our second day here at the Autism Treatment Center in Massachussetts. I haven’t had much time to update our website lately. We are very mindful and grateful of all of your help and sacrifices that made it possible for us to come here to get help for Ezra.
We spent yesterday morning with Barry Kaufman, the originator of the Son-Rise program. He is very charismatic and an amazing teacher. There are about 40 parents in attendance. We are all staying on property, room and board are included in the program cost. Already we have made friends. One of the major benefits of attending the program is to see that we are not alone in our struggles, and that many parents share the same difficulties and concerns. For once we feel completely understood. In the afternoon William Hogan helped us understand how exactly to assess our child and write goals for his progress. That is one of the main reasons we came. The start up program gave us tools and techniques, but as the saying goes: it doesn’t matter how fast you run if you don’t know where you’re running to. Knowing how to assess and set goals will allow us to give us and our volunteers a clear direction on what to work on.

Great learning moment of the First day: love first, act second.
I’m learning that the son-rise program is more about recovering myself, than Ezra. As they say here: Ezra is our teacher. He is our special gift to us, to help us become the people we want to be. Total love and acceptance have to be practiced everywhere, with everyone, at all times, not just in the playroom during an hour.

Couple of good quotes from today:

It’s about what you do in your life, not in the playroom.
Trying is what people say when they are “not doing”.
Be in the world what you want to see in the world.
The biasis that we have within ourselves we take out on our children.

This is a picture of Ezra’s favorite ism: watching TV. I love this picture. It expresses exactly why autistic children withdraw into their own world. This picture was taken on our trip home from Paris. Ezra had slept very poorly the night before. He was overwhelmed, tired, and let us know that he wanted to go home pretty early in the day. We continued sight seeing despite his complaints, and then drove direction home for two hours, and stopped at some friends place. They left their TV on, which was showing some old 80′s show, in French, with sound muted. Ezra didn’t care. You can see from the look on his face what the flickering images on the screen do to his brain. It is like a drug for him, which is why we usually don’t let him watch. It damages his brain, kind of like putting his brain into neutral, which is bad, because he already doesn’t have enough connections (or too many of the wrong ones, however you want to look at it). Anyway, here is the picture.

And here are some more pictures showing what Ezra does to cope. These pictures are him playing with a water fountain next to Notre Dame. It was our last stop that afternoon and he had had it. Water is an ism for him, and buttons that turn things on and off. All he had to do here was push the button for water to run over his fingers. He loved it.

And this is how he made it through our sight seeing trip, even though he said he was tired and wanted to go home. He simply put his head under my thick jacket to minimize any visual and auditory input. Clever boy.

It has been a while since I’ve updated on Ezra’s progress. These last few weeks have been a bit difficult for me time-wise, because Aaron was gone for a conference in Atlanta. Ezra missed him fiercely. I felt myself becoming very tired, and was all the more grateful for our volunteers, at this point still only Grandma and Grandpa, who worked with Ezra.

Here we are then, another month into the program. We don’t always know what to make of Ezra’s behavior. As of late he has been extremely hyperactive. He was hyperactive before, but we’ve seen it increase. I’ve put him on some more supplements. We now give him acidophillus, an omega oil mix, and a super greenz. I’ve also started disguising more vegetables into his foods. Often I feel at a loss to know how to help this hyperactivity. Aaron thinks that his natural self (the ADHD) is emerging as his autism is diminishing. My intuition tells me it is linked partially with what he eats. He shies away from protein as if it was poison, and eats carbs from sun up to sun down. He always seems to be hungry and wanting to eat, and frankly with the energy he expends, I’m not really surprised.

Nonetheless the progress we’ve seen makes us continue.

1. He for the first time ever started to talk about something that occurred in the past during the day. I has asked Micah what he had done that day, and Micah with his new speech skills started to list off some things he had done. I praised him with enthusiasm for sharing things with me, and Ezra caught on to the idea, and proceeded to tell me some things as well. That is a major step forward.
2. His language is increasing. He is commenting on things more, and we can see he is desperately trying to make longer sentences and express things.
3. His eye contact is ever increasing.