Carrot Cookies!?

Many autistic children can suffer a range of food intolerances or allergies - our family is no exception. They are intolerant to salicylates, which are found in almost all fruits and many vegetables - symptoms may range from skin rashes to (most commonly) extremes in behaviour, notably intense hyperactivity and rage. They must also avoid many preservatives. I find most people are extremely sceptical about the concept of food chemicals (particularly "healthy" fruits) causing issues - I used to be one of them. I like to suggest feeding my kids commercial garlic bread containing preservative 282, and watch the results for themselves. Most recently we've discovered that Dairy seems to be the cause of their many gastrointestinal troubles, so are now dairy free as well.

For loads of information regarding food intolerances, the best place to begin is Sue Dengates FedUp website. The Royal Prince Alfred Allergies Unit also has a great deal of easily digestible (sigh) information, and they publish a terrific cookbook called Friendly Food.

I need to make almost all of our food from scratch, and one of my lunchbox staples is Carrot Oat cookies! It is dairy free (if made with Nuttlex) and low in salicylates - they're also DELICIOUS. If you can tolerate spices, add some cinnamon and they taste like carrot cake. I usually make a double batch and freeze for school lunches. It's incredibly forgiving so you can modify the ingredients to your hearts content - grated pear is lovely, carob chips make them interesting, or bake as jam drops with a blob of pear jam in the top.

Carrot Cookies

Melt together:
170gm Nuttlex (or butter)
2 tablespoons Golden Syrup (or honey)

Combine:
1 cup self raising wholemeal flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarb of soda
1 cup oats
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup grated carrot (I just grate two carrots)
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
1/2 dark chocolate or carob chips (leave out if you like, or just put a single chip on top)

Mix the melted butter into the dry ingredients. It will be a coarse and crumbly mixture.
Squish spoonfulls and form into balls - press onto your cookie tray - they do not spread much, so press flat if you prefer flatter cookies.
Bake 15-20 minutes at 180 degrees celsius.
ENJOY!

Tacit Does It

I was able to get out after dark for a few hours recently as I received my first ever Government Respite break - in the form of two young, nervous nannies. They visited on an previous day for a short meet and greet session with the kids, which did not go well, however that is a whole other story - suffice it to say that it was an excellent training experience for them.

Aside from meeting my four autistic children, I gave them a tour of the house and a general rundown of what they'd be required to do. Despite my efforts to keep it brief and avoid information overload, I was struck by how difficult it was to succinctly convey the bare-essential household needs, even for a babysitting session that would only be about two hours long before the children would be in bed for the evening.

I'm currently studying a Graduate Diploma of Library & Information Science, and one of the topics I'm covering is "Knowledge Management". Explicit knowledge is something that can easily be expressed, written down or stored, and passed on to someone - such as mealtimes, favourite toys etc. Intrinsic knowledge are things that you just... know. In my case, this might be the ability to determine from a kids posture that they need to go to the toilet. This is closely linked to Tacit knowledge - which is the knowledge that people have that can not be readily or easily written down, usually because it is based in skills. Tacit knowledge is extremely difficult to pass on to others, without them spending time with you and observing/learning hands on.

DS1 needs to wee. At the moment, I'm the only person who can notice, and read his subtle clues and come to that conclusion. How can I explain the sequence of events that lead to my understanding of his needs, to another person? Even if I could articulate all this sort of information, what about the endless and 'odd' needs for each of the other three children? If some of their foibles are misread or ignored, an autistic meltdown is assured.

What's IMPORTANT? So, I began a bullet list note of major points. The order they receive their dinner. The chairs they sit at. The colour of everyone's plates. The amount of food on their plates. Washing hands after dinner. No TV/Computer. The process of getting everyone upstairs. The order they use the toilet. The order they undress. The order they enter the shower, wash, leave the shower. Who needs help getting dressed. The process of teeth brushing. And so on...

My bullet list spanned two pages by this point. I realised how unrealistic this was for someone else to deal with, and also how much routine and endless individual requirements I was tacitly catering for each day! So, I kept the entire list to three short paragraphs with key times, and hoped that the older DS1 and DS2 would fill in the blanks without too much drama.

Off I went, into the night - I can't remember the last time I left the house alone, in the evening! It was 30 minutes before I got my first phone call from a frustrated Nanny.

Overall, the Nannies did cope well - however I was surprised by the amount of difficulty they had. And there were two of them - I am but one. My children are able to adjust to having strangers around, however are highly dependent on routine and have many obsessive quirks, and autistic likes/aversions spanning sounds to textures and order which I've identified and catered for, generally without concious planning, it's just WHAT WORKS WHEN IT'S NEEDED.

I briefly considered making a Family Manual - perhaps a Wiki? Time and motivation is against me, however it would certainly make a good essay topic for my Library degree. Better solution: make that clone of myself I've always longed for!

Rewarded to Fly

It is difficult to find thing that motivate my children, aside from television or computers. Over the years I've tried many standard techniques, reward jars, reward charts, stickers, motivational gifts (aka bribes), chocolate, you name it, I've probably tried it, without success. Anything with small parts like magnets or star shapes is particulary futile, as they just want to collect and hide the pieces. They seem to find the concept of a reward for accumulating an arbitrary (and meaningless) number of items is too abstract.

Saying "if you are tidy at dinner, you get a star. Get five stars and I'll give you a new book" has several problems for my autistic children - the star is boring. It doesn't relate in any logical way to dinner. The passage of time is fairly meaningless, they have difficulty understand that it is one star per day. And most importantly, despite loving books, they forget that the book is the end reward (I couldn't leave it in view as they'd steal it), and it also fails to relate to dinner, or stars on a chart. All in all, the idea simply doesn't make SENSE to them.

How to motivate?

I realised that one thing they do like - is the reward charts themselves. They're not motivated by the outcome of "getting five stars", but they are motivated by the STARS THEMSELVES. I've been pondering for quite some time how to use this realisation to come up with a new approach, and think I've got it figured out.

The reward chart, IS the reward.

I came up with the idea of using a paper airplane printable, and marking each section on it with a number (ie. 7 sections, for 7 days of the week - whatever number of reward 'stars' you need). I tend to keep time periods for rewards short, usually five days.

When the child accomplishes the task/goal for the day, they can colour in a section (or perhaps put a sticker on it, whatever floats their boat). I find it important to have the "reward time" at the same time every day. When they reach their final goal, they can cut out the plane, make it, and fly it!

An example of a printable plane:

There are all sorts of printable origami crafts, masks, flowers etc available - my boys are particularly interested in planes, so this suits their interests. Any sort of craft would work, as long as you can clearly define "sections" to use as "star spots", and you may need to find a craft that relates directly to the goal you're trying to achieve - a toilet cutout for using the bathroom? Hand shaped crafts for washing hands? A box to represent tidying up toys?

My daughter would love a butterfly craft: http://www.magicalkingdom.co.uk/craftlisting.htm

How about little paper boxes, bags, or tags to colour and hang on things? http://familycrafts.about.com/od/creativepaper/Paper_Craft_Projects.htm

Origami! http://www.origami-fun.com/

There are so many possibilities. This has worked very well for us - you can use virtually any sort of paper craft, as long as the end result requires some effort (cutting, colouring or gluing) and can be played with or used in some way. In fact, I've been amazed at how effective it's been as a motivating tool, and certainly a LOT cheaper than the endless array of other motivational aids I've tried through the years.