How Tristan is this July

* Tristan has been going to summer school. He seems to like it better than he liked his former classroom during the normal school year. At least he says he wants to go to school now. We had the option to send him on the bus, but the bus schedule called for him to be picked up at 7am for an 8am class. Who thought it was a good idea to keep an autistic 3 year old on a bus for a friggin’ hour? But, I digress. School is going well. He still takes the bus home from school, which is only 15 minutes. And he’s afraid to use the classroom’s toilet.

* Toilets. He loves them. Flushing them, looking at the name brand on them, talking about them, trying to draw them (I cannot draw them much better, either), writing out the words ‘restroom,’ ‘women,’ ‘men,’ and ‘unisex’ while drawing bathroom doors (which he draws far better than I do – I can’t really draw a convincing door), and doing pretty well at pooping in the toilet at home. His fear of autoflushers is getting pretty nasty instead of getting better, unfortunately. He is especially afraid of the all-metal variety. But his anxiety can be worked through if you handle him gently.

* He loves his little sister and fully considers her part of the immediate family. He writes out her name along with his and ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy.’ He is happy when he gets to play with her hair. He still gets jealous if I need to feed her and he wishes I were playing with him instead. He expresses it by going into hyperactive ‘act out’ mode where he touches every single thing that’s forbidden to touch and starts being careless physically.

* He is starting to state a lot of facts. He’s going to say something truly embarrassing soon, I just know it. He will state that “Mommy is peeing in the toilet” or some version of that, depending on what he thinks is happening. But he’s making a lot of comments about what is going on around him, which is awesome. And it’s rather amusing that whenever we’re driving, he comments on the traffic lights – “Red light. Red means stop. One stop, two stops, three stops. Green light. Green means go.” and so forth.

* He has an app on his iPad that is meant to practice writing letters. Troll and ninja that Tristan is, he writes what is NOT being asked for. If the sample letter is uppercase, he writes its lowercase, and so forth. If it’s in cursive he writes it in print. He doesn’t write in cursive very often, but he will occasionally bust it out.. didn’t I learn cursive in fourth grade or so? His fun game of giggles is to draw a broken letter and ask me to say “fiiiiix iiiiit” and he will.

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