Pedro Javier

Happy New Year!

2008-01-02T00:16:00.000-05:00

New Year's day was pretty exciting for PJ. He did not expect to have Mario, his 2-year old first cousin, and Isis, Mario's 5-year old half-sister at the house for an early 3 Kings Day celebration.

Not surprisingly, PJ and Mario ended up swapping half of their gifts, but it was something completely amicable. They had a blast, and after three hours or so they were pretty worn out. PJ and Isis have school on Wednesday, so it's going to be interesting to see how they wake up.

During the first two visits PJ kept treating Mario almost as if he was a doll or some kind of toy, but today he started being a bit more careful about not running him over, hugging him too hard, that kind of thing. The funny thing is that when they were ready to leave, Mario said goodbye to PJ a good 10 times.

Semester ends not with a bang, but with loud snoring

2007-12-22T22:14:00.000-05:00

PJ once again switched to truant mode during his last week of the semester. This time he was not upset or terrified about going to school. Instead he simply decided (!) not to go. We are convinced that something happened to him, but the teacher swears that the weeks before he was fine.

He missed about four days in his last two weeks. The last time that this happened they kept calling us every day, but this time it was obvious that we were making the effort to drag him off to school, and once he was there he was fine for the remainder of the school day.

PJ's current obsession is the Simpsons game on the Xbox 360. I thought he was going to have trouble with the weird puzzles, but so far he has either figured most of them out on his own, or quickly learns workarounds by seeing me play it.

Time flies when you are having fun

2007-08-25T10:38:00.000-05:00

While renewing PJ's domain name I realized it's been months since I have updated the blog. A LOT of stuff has happened. The more dramatic was that his neurologist put him on Prozac.

Prozac is used on autistic spectrum children as a way to control anxiety. We originally asked for the neurology consult because PJ was extremely hyper to the point that it was disrupting his school work. We were worried that he would be diagnosed as ADHD and put on a zombie drug like Ritalin, but the doctor told us that even if he was a bit agitated, it was nowhere close to the level that would consider him ADHD. Instead, he wanted to try to control his anxiety.

It worked, and we did not even have to use the full dose recommended by the doctor. The only problems with Prozac so far:

1. It works so well that he actually gained weight because the decrease in activity levels was not followed by a lowered appetite.

2. It tastes like crap, so it is always a challenge to find something to mask the flavor. So far Coca Cola, plus fruit flavoring added by the pharmacist, seems to be doing the trick.

3. It wears out too quickly. If he misses even one dose, he turns into a little tornado.

He is definitely more patient now, and even taught himself how to Google. Before we simply put him with a browser already at http://pbskids.org and he would explore it little by little. Now? Now he Googles the characters that he wants, and even goes as far as shop for DVDs, which is funny because even after Ivette orders them he knows that he has to wait for them to arrive through the mail. Whenever there is a new package he asks for it by the name of the DVD that he is expecting.

Another benefit is that he is starting to understand time a little better. When his maternal grandmother came to visit, we told him a few days before and he was very eager to see her (she visits once a year for about a month at a time). He would walk around saying "grandma is coming Saturday..."

The visit went great, even if she is much stricter than Ivette when it comes to PJ being messy. He just knows that he won't get away with that kind of behavior when his grandmother is around. When she left I expected a meltdown, but once we told him that she would come next summer he was fine. When later we told him that there was a change of plans and now grandma would come for Christmas too, he understood that meant earlier than summer.

Now he walks around saying "grandma is coming for Christmas."

PJs current food obsession is to cook his own pizza. He buys either a pizza kit and kneads his own dough, or he buys the ingredients and does all of the work. I have not seen him bake cookies for a few weeks, all I see is pizza after pizza. If there are no ingredients he will not hesitate to take a whole pound of bread, get rid of the crust and pound the center into a small pizza-dough like shape, then puts whatever tomato sauce he can get his hands on.

One day the toping was some kind of candy flakes, the ones you would sprinkle on top of a cup cake.

PJ also taught himself how to use the Comcast On Demand channel to get to the PBS Sprout channel, which has on demand programming for literally every kid show that they carry. There is little relief on it being part of our cable package, but he is still costing us a lot of money with the DVDs that he asks for once he starts liking a particular show.

Wordpress is out, Blogspot is in

2007-04-14T09:39:00.001-05:00

I decided it was time to phase out PJ's old blog, which I was hosting myself. Instead Pedrojavier.org now redirects to this blogspot site, which hopefully it is going to be easier to maintain.

Technorati Tags: Announcements

Tastes ... like ... CHICKEN

2007-04-14T09:38:00.001-05:00

As most children in this country, PJ spent most of his early years gobbling up an obscene amount of chicken nuggets, oblivious to where the "chicken" part of "chicken nuggets" originates. Same goes with the hot dogs. That said, even 8 years old I had never seen him eating meat that more or less looks like meat, with the exception of cold cuts.

For the past few weeks he decided that he LOVES fried chicken. He can't have too much of it. Fried chicken here used to be a guilty pleasure, since I am overweight (and Ivette "retains water") so grabbing takeout Popeye's usually meant going elsewhere to pick something up for PJ.

Not anymore.

Now you mention fried chicken and he goes ballistic. And worse, next morning he will eat it cold from the fridge. I know plenty of people that like fridge-cold pizza (PJ being one) but I have never met a kid that would eat cold fried chicken.

Technorati Tags: Antics, food

Bad Influences

2006-12-31T09:23:00.000-05:00

PJ is more or less embracing "parrot" mode, so he is repeating everything he hears, even things we assume he can't hear because he is at the opposite side of the house. This is one of the behaviors that helped figure out that he was autistic, since be was using scripted speech, all of it learned from watching PBS.
The problem is that now he is picking up his language from Adult Swim, not from PBS, specifically from Robot Chicken. Not good.
Another shocking development is that having his own Xbox is not distracting him from the other things that he likes to do. I honestly expected him to park himself in front of the Xbox and waste away, but in reality he spends more time reading and goofing around than the time he spends playing video games.
As for the video games, he still prefers Marble Blast Ultra, which is great since it has a big problem solving component to it. Apart from that he is playing either sports games like Amped 3 and Tony Hawk's P8, or Feeding Frenzy, which is simply a fish-eats-fish game.

Technorati Tags: Adult Swim, Antics, Robot Chicken

Politically Correct Christmas

2006-12-27T09:54:00.000-05:00

While I was importing entries from PJ's old blog I realized that this Christmas day was the complete opposite of last year's.

For starters, except for the noisemakers, he did not get any violent toys. No guns, war machines, etc. And all of this was by complete accident.

The loot was pretty good. PJ got an XBox 360 (so now he won't hog mine), with Tony Hawk's Project 8 and Amped 3, two games he had been playing the demos continuously. He also got Marble Madness II and Fishing Frenzy on XBL Arcade.

But that was not the main gift. The main gift was a harp. Yeah, that.

He started getting obsessed with harps about two months ago. I noticed that he was taking steel broom handles, bending them into triangles and using stray bits of string to make the strings for the harp. I was not sure that is what he was doing, so I called Ivette at work an had her buy him a spool of fishing line.

He immediately went back to his jury rigged harps and changed their strings with the fishing line.

A week before Christmas Ivette decided to check out and see if maybe we could find an affordable harp online. She struck gold in eBay. And more amazing: it was delivered two days ahead.

The other gifts were the usual noisemakers, about five pounds of Play Doh, a Sesame Street snow globe and a bunch of books.

Two days later and he is yet to put down the harp. He rotates between the Xbox and the harp constantly. He is also singing more, he seems more at ease with the harp than with the guitar.

Technorati Tags: amusing

Chef

2006-02-05T09:41:00.000-05:00

PJ is really taking a liking with pretty much anything that deals with cooking. He likes to bake cakes and cookies, and also boil spaghetti.

The problem is that for example, boiling spaghetti involves boiling water, throwing the pasta and waiting until is tender. No mistakes there.

But what about the cake? 75% of the time he will start the process with a box of cake mix. If he can't find it, he will try with whatever looks like a cake mix box. Like a box of pancake mix, things like that. He also loses the count when adding the eggs, so the cake may have anywhere from one to 12 eggs in it. The funny thing is that he is patient and methodical about it. He mixes everything in the right order, even uses the electric mixer if finds it. On top of this, he sprays non-stick on the cake pans.

Every now and then he makes me coffee, since all it takes is pushing a button. The problem is that he forgets to put a fresh pod, so the coffee comes out weak. On top of it he can't tell that coffee is only appropriate between certain hours, so there are times that he brings me coffee around 9:30 PM, with cream and sugar too (sometimes he adds too much cream).

Technorati Tags: antics

Politically Incorrect Christmas

2005-12-25T09:42:00.000-05:00

PJ had what was probably his least politically correct Christmas ever:

1. Drum set with heavy metal theme flames, etc. And it makes the racket from hell.

2. M1 battle tank, complete with battle sounds, "mission accomplished" recording and extra guns and missiles and whatever. Pretty loud too.

3. Police helicopter with more armament than rescue stuff. I could see a winch, the rest of the stuff seemed to be weapons. Also had recorded noises.

4. Magna Doodle with black light glass. This one is trippy, it uses magic markers instead of a magnet, and it has a black light, so the ink glows. This is the only gift that would pass as politically correct.

He also got more conventional gifts, like flash cards, animal figures (PETA hates those btw) and a lot of crap that makes noise, like party poopers and other mild explosives.

Overall he had a ball.

Later in the day we noticed the four giant Teletubbies were aligned in front of the Christmas tree. Upon close inspection we noticed that each Teletubbie had a gift: a piece of a 3-dimensional cube puzzle, wrapped with ribbons so each looked like a tiny gift box.

Technorati Tags: antics

The $1 wonder

2005-12-01T22:02:00.000-05:00

Buy him expensive toys, and $1 piece of crap toys from the Dollar Store. Then see what grabs his attention.

Yeah, the $1 toys.

He spent almost two days playing with that day-glo ball thing.

Technorati Tags: antics

Role Playing

2005-11-20T09:45:00.000-05:00

For an autistic kid, PJ does a hell of a lot of role playing with his toys, most of the times with his four giant Teletubbies plush dolls. One always thinks of the classic autistic kid as isolated and aloof, but in reality not two are alike.

Last night PJ had La-La in full-size and a second one that is about six inches tall. He had the big La-La carry the little one around as it if was a baby.

Now I see that PJ is making snowballs with rolls of toilet paper. He takes a small ball and wraps it in one or two rolls of toilet paper until it is about the size of a beach ball. He throws it across the living room so it unrolls itself, then he pushes it back into shape. Today for the first time I see he has La-La doing the pushing for the toilet paper snowball.

He also takes these huge Teletubbies on picnics. He makes us bake cookies or biscuits for him, then he sits them all around the tray. If it is dark, he pulls open the drapes on the big patio doors because then it turns into a mirror, this way he can watch himself as he plays.

Technorati Tags: antics

Seven!

2005-10-29T22:05:00.000-05:00

Pedro Javier had his birthday party in his classroom. His teachers kindly let us give him a little party during snack time, and they even got him a cake!

Technorati Tags: antics

Still with the old gang (of Teletubbies)

2005-09-17T22:07:00.000-05:00

I was lying down in the sofa, reading the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345478983/">new Godfather book</a> when I noticed that PJ was once again dragging his huge Teletubbies plush dolls around the living room. I probably read one more page and looked back up:

The Teletubbies were now in a perfect line, arranged in the same order they are shown on the show: Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po.

Business as usual, I thought. So I kept reading.

A couple minutes later I noticed that PJ had put a drum on Dipsy's head. This of course means the hat, which is Dipsy's favorite thing. Tinky Winky was holding a box of Clifford Phonics books. The box has a handle so it is like a little briefcase, but PJ had Tinky Winky hold it as it was a purse. Again, matches the character's favorite thing: in the show Tinky Winky's favorite is a red purse.

La-La's favorite thing is an orange ball. PJ's La-La was standing in front of a basketball.

The only problem was Po. Po's favorite thing is a scooter. PJ does have that exact scooter but it is at a much smaller scale, it would work only if the doll is 6 inches or so high, while his Po is at least two feet tall.

Something told me this would not last for long.

I kept reading and after a few minutes what did I see? Po was now standing on PJ's stainless steel scooter, the kind that looks like a narrow metal skateboard with inline wheels and a tall metal handle.

The funny thing is he does not even watch Teletubbies anymore. All he wants to watch now is Calliou and George Shrinks. Whenever he wants to watch George Shrinks he will actually ask for it by subject. For example, if he says "the beach" there is only one episode we have recorded where George goes to the beach. If he says "piano" it means a talent show where George plays a full-size piano by jumping from key to key. His favorite is one where George explores the migration of Monarch Butterflies. He even cuts out butterflies and flies them around while he watches the show. He also does that at school.

PJ started school last week, for the first time he has to spend the whole day and except for the consistent escape attempts and some temper tantrums, so far he seems to be doing fine. Ivette bought him a set of phonetic books and she is going to send them to PJ's special education teacher since she will be able to make better use of these than if we keep them here for him to shred to bits.

Technorati Tags: antics