Surviving Sandy

I am a worrier.  I can't help it.  It is something that is ingrained into my psyche as it were.  I think it is one of those personality traits that I inherited from my mother.  She worries about everything.  That is why last week, as soon as the weather forecasts began forecasting Hurricane Sandy's potential impact on the DC area, I started fretting and keeping up with the forecast of the path of the storm.

Saturday was when my concern really started to multiply.  You see, my son attends and lives at a school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  Saturday afternoon, the projected path of the storm was right over the town that my son's school is in.  My preoccupation with tracking the storm started to grow exponentially.  It prompted me to ask for prayer requests for the safety of the kids at the school on my social media sites.

Over the next few days, I either had a weather app on my phone, and internet browser open, or both, tracking the path of the storm.  Even as the projected path moved north of us, I still worried.  As wide as the storm was, I knew that even if we did not have a direct hit we would both still get some nasty weather.  This past summer, we lost power for several days due to the derecho storm that came through the area, and I had seen pictures of my son's campus where some flooding came through.

From a personal level, we made it through the storm unscathed.  Here at the home front, we had some heavy rain and some strong wind gusts but fortunately never lost power.  Just an occasional flicker now and then.  Likewise the school also made it through the storms without incident.  They never lost power.  To their credit, the school director called the parents to let us know that things were going well, the kids were safe and dry and handling things well.

Sadly, as we have all seen on the news, other parts of the country were not as fortunate.  Obviously, my thoughts and prayers are with those folks.  We can only hope that their lives resume some semblance of normalcy rather quickly.  Below, is a time lapse video that I saw through PetaPixel.com.  It captures the power of Sandy over a two day period as the storm came through New York City.

 

Communion and Confirmation

Image via Wikipedia

As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, my son attends and lives at a school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  I believe I have mentioned this, but just in case I haven't, it is a Catholic school.  My religious background is Protestantism, primarily Baptist, and I have studied other religions such as Buddhism and a few other Christian denominations, including Catholicism.

My wife, on the other hand, was raised in the Roman Catholic Church.  Our first marriage occurred in the country clerk's office in Key West.  We then had a church wedding a few months later to make it official in the eyes of the church and her father.  During the early years of our married life, we did not attend church much.  However, when our son was born, we had him Christened in the Catholic Church.

From then on, we pretty much stopped attending church.  I had a few bad experiences with some of the Protestant churches that I had attended.  I do a lot of studying on my own, but quite frankly nothing on a consistent basis.  My wife eventually became totally disenchanted with the Catholic Church.  I think a lot of her disenchantment occurred during the time frame of all the reports of priests molesting young boys.  She eventually decided to seek a new church and decided on the Mormon faith.  She attended regularly for a while, but has not attended regularly for the past year or so.

Cover of Rich Mullins

The bulk of my son's religious instruction in his almost 18 years has been through children's religious music.  I also introduced him to the music of Rich Mullins.  We used to watch one of his concert videos together for hours on end.  I still remember my son reciting one of Mullins' monologues when Mullins talked about Jesus being a little boy and imagining him playing baseball.  "If Jesus was going to play baseball, just how many windows would he knock out around Nazareth, and who was going to make him pay?"

The reason that I bring all this up is that we had a meeting today at his school to discuss his IEP (Individualized Education Program).  When we got home from the meeting a couple hours ago, we had a letter from the school.  At first I thought it was going to be an incident report from the school that they talked about at the meeting where he ended up getting a bruise on his back from some behavioral incident.  Instead it was a letter from a woman at the school who prepares the kids for their First Communion and Confirmation sacraments.

I would like for my son to go through some sort of religious training.  Even though I do not agree with everything that the Catholic Church teaches, he is there and I think it would be important for him.  I do wonder if he would be able to understand what they are teaching him.  Another question that I would have is would he eat the Communion wafer, or would they have to douse it in BBQ sauce?  The biggest question would be whether or not my wife would want him to go through it given her disenchantment with the Church.    It could make for interesting dinner conversation this evening.

A Bittersweet Day-Update

Image by sofafort via FlickrLast week, I posted about the efforts that my wife and I have been undertaking in trying to get our 16 year old son placed in a residential educational facility on Maryland's Eastern Shore.  After months of battling with the school system, they finally agreed that it would be the best place for our son. I talked about the mixed feelings that I had regarding that decision.

At the time, we were not sure when his start date at the new facility would be.  There were a few more forms that needed to be updated and filled out.  Yesterday, my wife called me to inform me that we now had his start date, Monday, November 8th.  I had just left the office and was on the beltway headed to my part time job.  I wished she had waited until I got home last night because my eyes immediately began to fill with tears.  Less than two weeks away.  My immediate thought was, "I'm not ready."

This morning, I woke up thinking about a lot of different things regarding the situation.  All of which made me tear up a bit.  At times, I wish I were stronger about these things.  There is the question of how to tell him what is going to happen, or whether to tell him anything at all.  If we tell him ahead of time that he is going to a new school, he will drop to the ground and refuse to budge.  I suppose we will take him and try our best to explain it to him when we drop him off.  He loves crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, so hopefully that will get him out the door.

While there is a huge part of me that isn't ready for this to happen, there are times when I want it to happen now.  Those times are when he angers me.  Earlier today was one of those moments.  He asked me if we could go to Borders in Annapolis Mall.  That in and of itself isn't bad, but we have had two bad incidents with him at Borders recently when he wanted me to order a DVD for him that you can not buy, usually it is a DVD of Wheel of Fortune or another game show.

He doesn't fully comprehend that you can not buy everything.  I have recently started downloading game shows for him off of YouTube and burning them on to DVD for him so that he will have them.  Still, he wanted to go to Borders.  He told me he wanted to go there so I could order him a Wheel of Fortune DVD.  I tried to explain that we could not get that there, and we were not going to go.

He immediately went into one of his meltdowns.  For those of you with experience with an autistic child, you know what those can be like.  For those of you who don't, you would think it is a temper tantrum, but it really is more than that. He dropped to the ground and started getting angry.  Anything near him, he picked up and threw across the room.  At one point, his glasses went flying.  Still it is better to have had the meltdown here than at Borders.  I wanted to drop him off to the school right then.

There is so much that needs to be done between now and then.  He is going to need a whole new wardrobe because the school has uniforms.  We will also need to supply him with a fresh supply of his own toiletries and such.  He usually share mine at home.  It would be nice to have a party for him before he left, but we already have plans for the next two weekends, so we won't be able to do that. 

The school usually has a rule that we won't be able to see him for 5 weeks, but with the timing of his start date and Thanksgiving, I think he will only be gone for two weeks before coming home for a long weekend.  When he goes back after Thanksgiving weekend, he would be back at school for four weeks before Christmas break.   Hopefully, the transition won't be too hard on any of us.         

A Bittersweet Day

If you know me personally, or if you have read any of the posts regarding my 16 year old son, then you know he means everything to me.  You also know that he is autistic and has had his share of issues. 

One of his issues has been a severe lack of attendance at school.  Whenever my wife or I try to get him to go to school, he would drop to the ground, hit, kick, and refuse to budge.  He is about 5'10" and I would say weights between 170-180 pounds.  I have to estimate because he refuses to get on a scale.  So you can see, we physically can not get him off the ground and to the car to go to school. 

For the past two years, this has been an ongoing issue.  For most of that time, we had been able to get him to go to school 2-3 days per week.  Since August, we have not been able to get him to school.  There have been a couple occasions when my wife was able to get him in the car, and he unlocked the car, opened the door, and got out of the car while it was moving.  Fortunately, he never got injured.

For several months now, we have been trying to get the school system to allow our son to go to a residential school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  We our familiar with this particular school because our nephew, who is also autistic, just graduated from there.  They did amazing things with him there.  It is astonishing how similar the two boys are.

Unfortunately, as much as we tried to convince the school system that the best place for our son would be the residential school, they refused to consider placing them there.  In the past few months, with the assistance of our in-laws, we have stepped up the efforts to get him the placement we felt he needed.  Several meetings and home visits later, they finally decided to recommend his placement in this school.

Here is where the bittersweet comes in.  Other than one or two nights spent at his grandparent's house, my son has never been away from both his parents.  Once he is at the new school, we will not be able to see him for five weeks so that he can adjust to his new situation.

The thought of being separated from him breaks my heart.  In my mind, I know that this is the best place for him to get the education and help he needs.  I have seen first hand the love and caring that the people at the school have for the students.  I have also seen how much they can help these kids.