divergify

Ava made a video explaining to the IEP team why she should skip 2nd grade, and they agreed to accelerate her to third. Welcome to the class of 2032!

My favorite part of Ava's abstract for her science fair

Tuesday 8:00 pm - Ava goes to bed devastated because she realizes she has chosen an overambitious project and procrastinated too much to finish in time for the science fair

Tuesday 9:00 pm - I catch her out of bed resuming her project experiment. She begs me to let her stay up and she promises she'll work hard to finish in time. As a fellow ADHDer, I can't help but relate so I relent.

Tuesday 11:00 pm - Ava goes back to bed after working on her project for 2 additional hours.

Wednesday 5:30 pm - 10:30 pm - Ava continues to hyperfocus on her project, including writing a 5-page paper

Thursday 6:00 am - 7:00 am - Ava frantically puts finishing touches on her project.

Thursday 7:15 am - Ava is the first to submit her project to the science fair in the whole school.

Thursday 7:00 pm - Ava wins first place.

And that's a case study in twice exceptionalism.

"There's a rabbit in the river!" 🐇🌊 What do you do as an Autistic or parent of an Autistic when you've prepped for an activity ✔️ in order to limit surprises and things don't go as planned? 🚫 This was the Santa Fe River beside our riverside trail 🏜😂 Luckily, Ava was mostly looking forward to going on a walk with Mochi 🐈 and Hildie 🐕‍🦺 while I was the one more disappointed with our waterfront.

Meet Mochi - Ava's prescribed emotional support animal for autism. Mochi has helped Ava learn incredible coping skills, to pay attention to body language, to know that she is worthy of love and affection.

As a bonus, its been cool to see Ava take on consistent responsibilities to care for Mochi.

What are your questions about emotional support animals?

If you have an ESA, what do you wish others knew?

Is your local police department or another public agency using the puzzle piece in an campaign this April? Feel free to borrow from what I just wrote to one near my hometown (I also tagged city leadership in that post):

As an Autistic mother of an autistic child, I'm pained to see [City] Police Department promoting the puzzle piece to "support autism awareness."

Many autistics find this symbol to be personally hurtful and harmful to our community. Research from the National Institutes of Health substantiates our concern - most people (including neurotypicals) "explicitly associated puzzle pieces, even generic puzzle pieces, with incompleteness, imperfection, and oddity."

I'm sure this was not your intention, and perhaps you coordinated with an organization claiming expertise on this matter (but maybe lacking actual autistic leadership). However, information about how the autistic community feels about the puzzle piece is easily found with an internet search. In the future, please center the perspectives of actually disabled individuals when engaging in disability awareness rather than the voices of abled people who are disability-adjacent.

So you know for next April's campaign, we generally prefer:
- gold, red, or rainbow infinity symbols to represent autism over the puzzle piece
- the term "acceptance" over "awareness"
- meaningful systems change to improve our health and safety over awareness patch fundraisers. I'd be happy to talk to your department about what that might look like.

NIH research source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6085079/ #!po=0.806452

Stereotypes about autism prevented me from getting the diagnosis and support I needed as a child and young adult. Most autism research is based on how it presents in young, white boys, but autism is a spectrum of diversity. This is one of the many reasons why "Lighting It Up Blue" for is so harmful and offensive - blue was chosen to represent autism as a boy's disorder because more autistic boys are privileged with a diagnosis.