Life with Aspergers

I just want to draw your attention to what is quite simply the best article I've ever read on Low Muscle Tone in Aspergers Children; It's called; Low Muscle Tone and Motor Clumsiness in Aspergers Children http://www.myaspergerschild.com/2010/11/low-muscle-tone-and-motor-clumsiness-in.html The article covers detection of low muscle tone (or hypotonia to give its "proper" name), how it presents, exercises that you can do with babies and age-specific exercises you can do with older children. It covers a wide range of topics from motor clumsiness to handwriting, grasp and balance problems. It even looks at the social implications. It's well worth a read.

I apologise for the excessive "male-orientated" viewpoint in this post. I tried to keep it neutral but somehow, it just works better when explained from a male viewpoint. Here's a phrase that I've seen repeated throughout the comments on this blog on several occasions; "I know that he won't miss me when I'm gone because he's aspie" Today, we're going to (try to) bust that myth; Individuals I'll start off with a reminder that everyone is an individual. If all aspies were completely alike and predictible, they'd be a stereotype but they're not. Each is shaped by their background, their upbringing, their beliefs and their local customs. An aspie who grew up with loud abusive parents has a reasonable chance of becoming loud and abusive themselves because in some cases, that's all they know. That's how they think adults are supposed to behave. In other cases, aspies who grew up in those circumstances do a complete about-fa...

Acting is a gift which seems to come naturally to many people with autism and Asperger's syndrome yet only a select few follow it as a career.  Dan Ackroyd and Daryl Hannah are some of the most obvious and vocal examples but there are plenty of others.  Dan Ackroyd, on the extreme right has Asperger's Syndrome We are always acting I have a theory that people on the spectrum tend to be good at acting because they spend so much of their daily lives acting - and from a very early age. For example, it's true that autistic people often don't get jokes (although you rarely hear us complaining when neurotypicals don't get ours).  Young people quickly learn that it's easier to "act like you got the joke" than it is to take the brunt and embarrassment of being the only one who didn't. We are quite often called upon to "act amused". Then there are those sad and solemn occasions where sometimes we feel intense waves of emotion - and sometimes we don...

Today (Yesterday for people who live in my timezone) was supposed to be a day of silence on the web. It was supposed to mark (or model?) the concept of people on the spectrum having communication difficulties. It's not working. There's quite a lot of opposition to this idea - here are my thoughts... People with autism are not silent. We do have communication challenges but we overcome them. In fact, computers are one of the best tools for overcoming these challenges and it's amazing how much has been said recently by so many people whom others believed couldn't communicate at all. Why would we want to be silent? Isn't silence a mark of respect for someone who has died? We haven't died. In fact the new-found freedom of the technological age has given us new life. The rapid shift from slow letter writing, to email and then to instant messaging has had the effect of making us louder and giving us a chance to be heard. Not that we couldn't always be heard....