DSM-5 AUTISM DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA---REWRITTEN BY A REAL LIVE AUTISTIC PERSON

Dear Persons,

Here, as promised, is my rewriting of the most commonly used publicly available DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for autism. 

It’s still clinical and doesn’t reflect what I personally would say about my neurology, never mind the brains and minds of the many, many Autistic people I’ve come to know. I myself would write a very different definition (we actually discuss this in our recent podcast).

And please note that I have issues with diagnosis, considering that autism is more properly an identity and way of human being than a “condition.” 

I’ve spoken frankly about “medical” diagnosis and the diseaseification/pathologization of autism in many of my talks, especially in this keynote about developing better neurodiversity paradigms. And I’ve written about it at length here on my blog and here [click on “Free Resources and Downloads”] in the FREE online fourth section of our most recent #ActuallyAutisticBook, under “Working for systemic evolution, No. 1: Shift professional paradigms.”

But I know that a diagnosis is still needed in many educational, therapeutic, medical, and other gatekeeping contexts. 

And it can give people really helpful tools and resources. 

So I thought perhaps this primary aspect of most diagnostic processes could benefit from improvement! 

It took a long time to update just this small amount of text because I had to do it in small doses. Kind of made me sick every time I would start. Traumatic. 

Please don’t force yourself to read it if it feels potentially painful! 

...Unless you are a professional, in which case, onward—please. 

I usually write first and foremost for my Autistic brethren, but this one is especially directed toward professionals. 

To be clear, this is a work in progress, a draft evolution of an inherently discriminatory and harmful system.

 

To that end, I have tried to eradicate words and phrases from the original text that were triggering, condescending, and discriminatory.

 

To offer just one relatively benign example, I might change the word “excessive”—which implies that the Autistic person is doing “too much” of something—to “intensive,“ which has the connotation that there’s a goodly amount of said activity, but doesn’t carry a negative  judgement or labeling aspect. 

I have included the general format and most of the original text, with updated language and descriptions of the differences we Autistic people share, as compared to neurotypical people, while attempting to erase the implicit and explicit negative connotations incorporated in the original text. 

The word “spectrum”—which I myself incorporated into my blog title more than a decade ago—is increasingly seen as an imperfect representation of our diversity, but I am not sure “wheel” (a more nuanced vision of neurodivergent variations) works in this setting, so I have simply removed the former.

 

I do want to say that even this updated criteria list can still be disturbing and upsetting. 

It’s really hard to be different in a world that does not always welcome, never mind celebrate, neurodivergence. 

That’s one of the reasons I set myself this task: to shift one element of this challenging world—these brutal diagnostic criteria—into something more useful, truer, more affirming.

Idea: Could these standards be subbed in for what clinicians use now in order to more realistically and fairly diagnose this common and equally valid neurological way of human being? 

Let me know what you think!!!

Autism DSM-5 diagnostic criteria: 

A. Persistent differences as compared to neurotypical social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by all of the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive; see text):

• Differences in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from unusual social approach and disinterest in typical back-and-forth conversation; to reduced or increased sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to a lesser tendency to initiate or respond to social interactions.

• Differences in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from less integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to variations in eye contact and body language or alterations in understanding and use of gestures; to a lower propensity for facial expressions and nonverbal communication.

• Differences in developing, maintaining, and navigating relationships, ranging, for example, from challenges with adjusting behavior to suit various neurotypical social contexts; to difficulties in sharing standard neurotypical imaginative play or in making friends via standard neurotypical means; to a lower or higher level of interest in peers.

Specify current impact: Impact is based on social communication challenges and focused and/or repetitive patterns of behavior.

B. Focused patterns of behavior, interests, or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive; see text):

• Specific and/or repeated motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor or vocal repetitions, lining up toys or flipping objects, idiosyncratic phrases).

• Insistence on sameness, adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal/nonverbal behavior (e.g., distress around changes, difficulties with transitions, entrenched thinking patterns, greeting rituals, need to take the same route or eat the same food every day).

• Highly focused interests that are extraordinary in intensity or specificity (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with particular subjects or objects, very circumscribed or concentrated interest).

• Higher or lower reactivity to sensory input compared to neurotypical standards or strong interests in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g., apparent indifference to pain/temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, intensive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement).

Specify current impact: Impact is based on social communication challenges and focused and/or repetitive patterns of behavior.

C. The above neurodivergence must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until neurotypical social demands increasingly misalign with neurodivergent capacities or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).

D. The above aspects of neurodivergence create significant impacts in social, occupational, or other important areas of current context.

E. These differences are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay. Intellectual disability and autism can co-occur; to make simultaneous diagnoses of autism and intellectual disability, social communication should vary from that expected for neurotypical developmental level.

Dear reader, thank you for taking this hard journey with me to reimagine these criteria, shifting from diagnosing a “problem” to describing a neurotype. 

Please be well and take care of yourself. Know that you are worthy. You matter. 

Little by little, we are together helping this world become more welcoming for all of us. 

Thanks and love,

Full Spectrum Mama

A SENSORY PROCESSING/NEURODIVERSITY MANIFESTO

My challenges have always been social–neurological–ethical-familial, never academic. My first encounter with academic challenges came when I – in my third and final (and, finally, successful [after a year as a runaway in the East Village]) attempt at high school – landed in a struggling Quaker boarding school that accepted a lot of students with learning differences. The dean there, the man I now call “Dad,” shepherded his motley crew of misfits with infinite love and respect. Students like me who were fleeing troubled, if wealthy, families, were treated just the same as wealthy, healthy, happy-familied students, scholarship students, “learning-disabled” students, all combinations thereof...all students, period. That is to say, equality really happened under his watch.

Until I began raising my son, who happens to have some learning differences, I actually never knew that the official term for such differences is “learning disability.” You see, Dwight, our dean and my “Dad,” referred to students who learned differently from the "average" student as having...wait for it...”learning differences.” And I spent most of my life thinking that this was how everybody thought about the matter.

How much did that linguistic switch mean to those students, my friends, some of whom had felt “less-than” most of their lives because they didn’t process and/or express information in just the same way as everybody else? You can bet it meant a great deal.

G’s early life involved quite a lot of testing, always at the request of his teachers. I began early on to use different terms for many of the labels that were used by professionals for my son and, later, me. I’ve suggested -- whenever the online or in-person conversation comes up -- that we use the phrase “Sensory Processing Differences” in place of “Sensory Processing Disorder,” and people have generally agreed. I do understand that there are contexts in which a disability label may be more effective in managing our differences. However, for the sake of our selves, and our communities, and our children, I contend that the following labels need to be changed, for daily use, if not for services and adaptations (and this is by no means a comprehensive list, just getting this here manifesto going!):

Sensory Processing Disorder              to                     Sensory Processing Differences

Autism Spectrum Disorder                 to                     Autism Spectrum

Accommodations                                to                     Adaptations

Disability                                             to                     Diffability 

Disabled                                              to                     Differently-Abled

Yes, we are different. That doesn’t always make us fundamentally disordered or syndromed.

We are all different. All that difference is not the same. Some of it is MUCH harder, because this world was constructed primarily by people who are embodied and think in “normal” ways. The adaptations some of us may need are framed as “special” “services” because of the way this world is designed – and for whom – NOT BECAUSE THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH US.

Here’s an example I see as very simple and non-loaded: because of my Sensory Processing Differences, when I go into a big box store the artificial scents used in cleaners and scented candles etc. give me an instant migraine. Does this make me defective? In my humble opinion, it makes me more of a canary in a coal mine: Nobody should be breathing those chemicals...and it’s not “disordered” to know so in a very visceral way. 

Another thing about language: it’s okay to ask! There’s been so much discussion, much of it rancorous, around whether or not to use person-first language. How about using the language that the person/people in question prefer/s? I, for one, aim to use language that is respectful and egalitarian. When I speak with others, I am willing to use the language they deem respectful and egalitarian, so long as it does not demean me.

Changing the ways we talk about difference are an important step toward healing this world so that we are all included in the spectrum of equality. Although there is some weight to having “differences,” the word itself also implies variety and, in some important ways, validity. We must continue striving to speak and write in ways that are increasingly fair, as language evolves to better fit reality..

You’ll note I’ve no cute rainbow graphic for this Full Spectrum manifesto. (Please see Figure I.)

                                                    Figure I – No Cute Rainbow Graphic

...because the way we talk about stuff is serious.

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

Welcome to the Sensory Blog Hop -- a monthly gathering of posts from sensory bloggers hosted by The Sensory Spectrum and The Jenny Evolution. Click on the links below to read stories from other bloggers about what it's like to have Sensory Processing Disorder and to raise a sensory kiddo!Want to join in on next month's Sensory Blog Hop? Click here!

An InLinkz Link-up

“Do you attend this scholarly institution?” or, “Do I know you?” or, Shifting Gears IV*

One minute I’m making good-natured fun of my son; the next I am realizing we share a ridiculous amount of stuff I didn’t even know about prior to becoming his mother. Obviously, learning about ourselves is NOT the main point of parenting (!), but it sure is a side effect!

Take face blindness (prosopagnosia). I always thought I was “bad with names” or “not really great at recognizing people I don’t know well.” I assumed that everybody was pretty much the same in this regard, that it would take anyone months or, more likely, years to even begin to distinguish, for example, between the fifteen or so medium-sized, slightly sporty/preppy mothers at school with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. Hey, if not for my flashy/freaky clothing I could be one of them and I still can’t tell them apart.

But I guess everyone else...can?

Face blindness is common in people on the autism spectrum and presents in a range of degrees, in this as well as in the general population. G’s is somewhat more severe than mine, but I know he will develop coping mechanisms. In any case, if G sees someone dressed like me with hair like mine and pinky-beige skin, he will think it is me. His mother. He might figure out pretty quickly, from other cues like voice or not being recognized, if he’s got the wrong Mom, but there are moments like that, and many similar…

Age is a tough one for him, especially because he doesn’t really care about it; Gender he usually gets (though that can be fluid, which he is totally comfortable with…). But once gender is clear, other aspects are fuzzy. The boys in his old fifth grade class, all of Caucasian descent, to me were basically either stringy or pudgy at this age, and I could not tell them apart aside from that. With a few exceptions, G seemed to feel the same.

Both G and I saw the diversity at his new school as potentially a big boost in this area, especially as compared to his profoundly homogenous prior school.

Or take another commonality: vocabulary and formality of speech. Watching G interact with his peers has taught me that most people of all ages speak much more casually than we do. By the time I realized how this might impact G, we were already far too deep into a lifetime of reading old-fashioned books to backtrack.

Here’s a little vignette that illustrates both qualities, face blindness and unintentionally hifalutin speech:

We went to check out the kids’ new school a few days ago. There were two upper elementary school age looking boys riding bikes around the playground in the company of a young man in his upper teens or early twenties.

G approached the man. “Do you attend this school?” he asked.

“No, but my friends here do,” the man replied.

G got right up in one of their faces (which one? Not sure. They looked the same to me!) and asked, “What can you tell me about this school of yours?”

“I dunno, regular stuff,” the kid said, in regular kid fashion. “We eat pizza, play on the playground…have lunch…”

“Thank you very much,” said my son. “I appreciate your input.”

The next day, Noodle and I were talking about a college friend of hers who “got religion.’

“Did you anticipate this propensity throughout prior interactions?” I queried.

Now, Noodle being Noodle, she didn’t blink an eye. But I burst out laughing. I mean, who am I to worry about my son making friends on the playground?

Soanyway, amidst this huge shifting of gears -- today being the first day of school -- I am happy to report that the very first two kids G met in his new class BOTH had “differences” from the white, able-bodied, neurotypical norm in which we were previously immersed. This will make them easier for G to recognize and, perhaps more importantly, will also render G himself less “different” in the scheme of things.

Double yay!

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

 * Shifting Gears I (http://fullspectrummama.blogspot.com/2013/06/shifting-gears-part-i.html) was the most polarizing post I ever wrote. In Shifting Gears II (unpublished), I couldn’t help but perpetuate that polarization. Then, in Shifting Gears III (unpublished), I began to try to break it down and make it a spectrum rather than a bifurcation. But I had to…ahem…shift gears for the new school year!!!

Speech – III/Tools - II

In “Laugh Like a…” and “Gortles vs. Vocal Fry” I began to write about the Full Spectrum of speech expressed by my children and our family approaches to some of our challenges in that realm. These include, on the one hand, exceptional sassiness or dorkiness of oral interaction styles and, on the other, widely disparate levels of verbal agility.

Here are two more topics to consider: repetition and volume.

G and Z loooove to repeat. Single words, questions, quotations, astute observations, not-so-astute observations, random sounds…all are fodder for extensive repetition. This shared habit is rooted in two very different sources: G’s mind seems to get drawn into a pattern - he’ll blurt out a word or phrase from time to time, sometimes for days, as the neural impulse strikes; Z likes uninterrupted attention, which speech can bring, but she also self-soothes – and learns --with patter.

We use the same tool inclusive of these two distinct contexts. Since it works well in our household, it just might work in a wide range of families. I therefore offer:

A Good Rule for Parents and People:

1.     The One Time Rule

Things may only be said ONE TIME.  If something is repeated, Mama – often in cahoots with the currently non-repeating child – may utter the powerful phrase, “One Time Rule”…as many times as is necessary.

a.     The Awesome [or insert your dreadful trending word here] Rule

Each child may utter the word “awesome” ONE TIME per diem.

For some reason, this has worked. Good thing, because we have yet to work out the Consequences.

Partly because of low tone, G also has issues with volume modulation. More specifically, he speaks very, very loudly, especially when excited (and he’s an enthusiastic guy). His speech volume is probably the single biggest obstacle to other kids’ acceptance and comfort in his presence.

When we are together as a family, I might say, “Stop shouting in my ear,” “Turn it Down, please,” or “I am RIGHT HERE.” I don’t want to humiliate him in public, though, so we have devised a sort of turning-down-a-radio-dial type motion that is meant to indicate to him that he needs to try to modulate his voice to a quieter level.

Alas, unless he is looking right at my finger, he doesn’t notice this signal! My gesture, then, gets bigger and bigger, progressing initially to something resembling the “cuckoo” finger swirl and then evolving, as it widens, into a one-handed version of Jazz Hands.

In contrast, and no, I am not making this up just to, as it were, fill my proverbial Spectrum, Z has issues with speaking at LOW volume. Specifically, she prefers to speak At All Times, and so, if she has been asked to be quiet, she simply speaks much, much more quietly, typically in a very special language of her very own. This brings us to:

2.  The No Poltergeist Voices Rule

If your attachment disordered, or otherwise anxiously garrulous, or perhaps even happily loquacious child has not stopped speaking in approximately seven hours (years) and if he or she insists upon whispering “ZI-guh-sa-ba ZI-guh-sa-ba” over and over near your ear while you are on the phone for Three Minutes after Paying Attention to her or him the Entire Day (or some similar situation), simply invoke the No Poltergeist Voices Rule.

This might work.

Jazz Hands!

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

Vocal Fry vs. Gortles

Z was waiting for me at pickup the other day with a big, saucy grin on her face. She held up the latest Scholastic book order and announced: “Justin Beaver is in here?…He’s HOT!”

In a sudden transformation as surprising to myself as to Z, Full Spectrum Mama turned into a fascist, super-conservative, sexist anachronism. I heard the following phrase burst from my formerly liberal lips: “You are! Five! Years! Old! Okay, Six! You will NEVER say that word again!”

My rule of fear and oppression complete, Z felt able to respond: “Um, okay Mom.” Eye roll.

Then, resisting the urge to prove that ***I*** am the one who knows not only how to Read but to correctly pronounce Justin Bieber’s name as well, I took a step back to dispassionately analyze my reaction.

The first language Z heard was the local dialect in Fuzhou (a.k.a. Linchuan), in Jiangxi province in China. I am sure she also heard some Mandarin (which I have continued to integrate into her life, though not as much as I’d like). Until she was almost ten months old, she’d never heard a word of English. Nonetheless, Z has been speaking it in complete sentences with perfect diction since she was 18-months old.

What is truly remarkable about her speech to me, though, is the apparent savviness of her tone. She comes across as authoritative yet casually chatty -- much like a clever, popular, connected teen. Perhaps the most obvious element of this mature tone is how she uses the ultimate tool of with it girls everywhere: vocal fry (http://gawker.com/5867222/vocal-fry-is-the-hot-new-linguistic-fad-among-women), see also (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html). Vocal fry sounds rather like a crumpling up of the inquisitive at the ends of her sentences. It’s a mini-hipster-rumble that signifies at once being totally in-the-know and a lack of caring too much.

G rumbles when he talks, too. Because he has some low muscle tone, phlegm often catches in his throat when he speaks and he makes a slight gurgling sound behind his words. I call this “gortles,” as in, “Honey, clear your throat – ya got gortles.”

Low muscle tone also results in lax enunciation of many sounds. This, coupled with his unique cadence -- Pardner often notes how G “sounds like John Wayne” – makes G sometimes hard to understand, particularly for other children.

G has been receiving speech therapy through his school since he his IEP (Individualized Education Program) was initiated years ago. His speech therapist initially maintained that G would “never” make much progress in his speech. I have been able, however, using a rewards system that actually matters to him (pokemon cards), to ease him into the habit of pronouncing many sounds correctly and he has become much easier to understand.

Recently, our dear friends Shu Shu Chuck and Fern Ayi (Auntie [in Mandarin] Fern) came to visit us. They brought lovely educational gifts for the kids and spent lots of doting time with them. Fern Ayi, was even kind enough to get up before dawn with them (“Would it be okay with your mom if you got up?” “Yes!!!” [“No.”]) and feed them bottomless bowls of cereal.

At brunch on Sunday, Chuck noted that same John Wayne cadence to G’s speech. I immediately began to explain that we are working on his speech, that he has help at school and so on.

Chuck looked a little sad. “Why?” he asked. “Why try to change what is unique about him?” He said he thinks G is a “wonderful” kid just as he is and decried our culture’s tendency to try to make everyone the same, and to treat difference as if it is a sickness.

I agreed with him wholeheartedly. Without really considering my audience, I had been making my standard excuses, not really lies per se, but statements intended to placate others who may be critical -- when in fact I think G is PERFECT EXACTLY AS HE IS.

Now to give some legitimacy to Chuck’s words: he is none other than Chuck Hoberman (http://www.hoberman.com/home.html), an amazing inventor and brilliant thinker. Among other things, Chuck designs marvelous toys for curious people of all ages. I think his life and oeuvre give great weight to his contention that we should NOT necessarily try to “normalize” our children’s every atypical quality.

Speaking of normalization, if truth be told, I’d like to ease Z’s speech away from the conformi-cool area of the speech spectrum:

The other night, we went to the local café for pizza night with another family. The sweet, smart mother of Z’s good friend brought her two girls - Z’s good friend and friend’s little sister. I brought along G’s best friend too, to be fair. (The injustice of unequal playdates is one felt and expressed powerfully across the FSM household spectrum.) The boys had their own table and the five of us girls sat at another.

I am always a tiny bit wary of consorting with intact (i.e. not gobsmacked by divorce) families who seem like “normal” people with seemingly neurotypical, psychotypical kids. I am well aware that “seem” may well be the operative word in most cases; also, the above describes most of my friends…I am just setting this story up here. Our family is blended in several more ways than average and I hope I may be forgiven a smidge of healthy, wholesome paranoia.

At the boys’ table, G was talking about one of his favorite subjects, marine biology. He kept referring to “aminals” and his friend would get frustrated and correct him. After resisting the urge for some time I finally butted in, letting G’s friend know that I thought saying “aminal” was “pretty darn cute.” He remained unconvinced. “I think it’s annoying,” he informed us. G’s face fell.

Over at the girls’ table, Z was holding up her knife and fork and looking through them to frame my face. Then, still looking at me, she began to move them around in a kind of criss-cross pattern. In her perfect, angelic, singsong voice, she began to sing a perfectly enunciated little tune: “Cut, cut, cut…Cut my mommy’s face.”

The mother, who was seated next to me, leaned in and asked, very quietly, “Does she have violent tendencies?”

At that moment, I wished for Z to be much, much less comprehensible.

Not for the first time, I found myself simultaneously
1. wishing two opposite things for my two dissimilar children: that G’s speech would be more clear and compelling, and that Z’s speech would be less clear and less compelling; and
2. wishing that in each case I wasn’t wishing what I was wishing.

Despite knowing it was a kind of funny situation, and even with all those nice people around me I felt very lonely just then.

Love,
Full Spectrum Mama

"Laugh Like a..."

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting Cow.”

“Interrupting Cow—“

“--Moo!”

If you don’t think this joke is funny, or if you think it should be told Only Once, you are probably on a different part of the humor spectrum than we are. Lucky you. We are a very corny, silly family with penchants for repetition and nonsense. Z’s sense of humor tends toward the witty, G’s toward the baffling and awkward; both love a good potty joke. As for me, sometimes I feel as a Full Spectrum Mama that if I am not laughing I might well be crying…So when my head is clear enough to make that choice (which is not a given), I choose the giggle. That shared sense of humor may well be our saving grace.

This happened when Z was four years old. In order for the story to make sense, a few preliminary details are necessary. First, we do not have any broadcast television and live in a pretty idyllic and sheltered rural area. Second, we do not cuss in our home. I believe I may have said the “S” word once or twice, but that’s it. I manage to eff up on a daily basis in plenty of other ways, but non-cussin’ is one area of success. It is possible that Z and G have heard profanities at their father’s house, but always as exclamations, never as vernacular. Finally, at the time this incident occurred, my now-husband (henceforth referred to as “Pardner”) and I were dating, and the kids called him “Shushu” (uncle in Mandarin).

We are at a cute little restaurant in trendy, charming New Hope, PA enjoying some adequate Mexican food on our way home from visiting with family. Again, Z is four, a sassy, going-on-25-going-on-75-four, but nonetheless she is barely as tall as the table at which we are sitting. Our little family – Pardner, G, Z and me – is enjoying some jovial repartee and eating tacos and sides. Z likes her food spicy and G likes his bland, so I have apportioned the food accordingly.

In my memory, I am looking at my yellow rice and lumpy brown pile of beans when Z turns to me and says, “Mama, Susu Pardner makes you laugh like a bitc#!”

I turn to Pardner, sotto voce, “Did she just say laughlikeabitc#?” I feel, simultaneously, a very wide range of emotions. The dominant feeling is: I am about to crack up laughing worse than ever before in my life in a way that will be highly inappropriate on many levels. Also, I will not be able to stop laughing, either, should I start.

I lurch into autopilot-damage-control: “Snitch,” I say, “Where did you learn that funny, funny word?”

“I said Bitc#.”

“Oh, hahahahaha, ditch, yes, that IS funny. Hahaha.”

“Bitc#.”

Has it ever hit you full on that your child, your tiny little child, is already much cooler than you ever have been or could hope to be? The best part was how she said it, all feisty and ghetto, and like she knew what she meant. Head bobbing a little from side to side and the pointed finger going. For real.

Let’s face it, hearing babies and little kids swear is funny. It just is. Cute, too. Yet of course Full Spectrum Mama has to protect her daughter from her own precociousness and from apparent insidious influences. As much as Z has seemed all her life to need nobody, nohow, she’s still a child and she needs guidance.

Somehow I kept a straight face. I used the famous parental move “ignore and move on,” (a.k.a. “Cuban Missile Crisis”). Afterward, I did do my best to figure out where she got the idea to say “laugh like a bitc#,” although I never did find out. I believe she has forgotten this particular phrase, though she still can be plenty fresh. I remind myself on the daily that Z may seem like a cooler, more socially-adept peer, even, ahem, someone who might’ve been mean to me in high school but – she isn’t. She is my little girl. So I need to be the grown-up.


I thought about “laugh like a bitc#” the other day when we were walking home from school. There is a beautiful forested area right next door to our house and I sometimes allow G to walk through it en route. That day he asked, “Mama, may I venture into the woods?” “Why, yes, my son, go in peace,” I replied.

Wonder where he gets his quirky turn of phrase?

G, a major bookworm from birth, has always talked as if he lives in medieval times, or is in a Poke´mon program (he sees them chez the ex). Back in preschool, he would literally ask the other kids questions like, “Would you care to engage in a playful interaction with me?” (Sample, highly effective Z preschool utterance: “Gimme that if you wanna play with me…whatever.”)

How did it evolve that my two children – who have the same parents* -- express such a Full Spectrum of speech patterns? Ways of speaking -- how we tap into the vernacular (or not), how we draw from our reading and other parts of the world around us…how we hit the coolness nail on the head or NOT -- can be seen as more Full and rich Spectrums.

(*Oops, I totally forgot that Z was adopted for a moment there – but let’s agree that certainly she has had the same parental environment as G since she was 9 months old…)

Z remains the sharp-witted queen of kindergarten, whilst G’s courtly language flies about as well in fourth grade as it did back then. Oh, someday he will find his tribe. But…Goddess? PLEASE get him through middle school with his sweet soul intact. And please, please -- I know it is not my girlbaby’s job, but she can handle it -- make Z protect him once they are in high school together.

I will do anything!!!

Laughing like a bitc#,
Love,
Full Spectrum Mama