I can't NOT write about this. When we see huge and sudden improvements in speech/language it's a time of celebration in our house, and every house that lovingly contains a child with autism. I use the word contains loosely. We'll never tame this kid. We can only hope to contain him. Haha!

The other day, as my autistic son Braden recovers from Strep Throat, he really began using his imagination and generalizing with his toy Hotwheels. Nearly every car he put his hand on was somebody's car that he knew. Grandma's van. Mrs. M's car. Uncle Jason's truck. None of his Hotwheels looked anything like the real cars these people own, but that was PERFECT. Let me explain why.

Follow up:

Braden didn't need a perfect representation of the Hotwheel's counterparts, yet he was generalizing it anyway and using his imagination like crazy! Grandma's van is a 2000-something Honda Odyssey. The car that Braden picked out was a metallic blue 4x4 baja van with huge wheels. Grandma doesn't drive one of those! And he knew it! But it was a van and that's all he needed to go on.

Above is, well, (I guess you can read the words in the image) our Jeep Liberty and the exact car from Braden's collection that he says is "Mama's Jeep". See the differences? There are probably more differences than similarities. BUT, both are Jeeps and both are SUV's. And my son also loves how I make a big stink over the little orange car being dirty. He loves to roll it my direction just so I'll say, "I don't want that dirty car! Somebody needs to wash it!" Then I promptly roll it back to him.

At the time, me and Braden were playing in his room down the hall. Braden kept getting up and jovially walking/dancing out to the living room where Anne (his Mom/my wife) was sitting. Braden said, "Look! It's Mama's Jeep!" He did that a number of times with different Hotwheels pointing out to Mom whose car it was in his hand. He was doing it every couple minutes with several cars, one at a time! This was huge! Not only was he using his words, but he was also using his imagination! And he was doing it often! This was a huge breakthrough because neither me or Mom remember him doing this before... maybe one time in the past but not like this.

These are the kind of events that our family celebrates. The simple activities explained above are probably typical of a 2 or 3-year-old. Our son is 8.

Let me get a little cheesy here; Forget the statistics about how many kids have autism. Our son is one in a million! And he comes with about a million challenges too! But it's all worth it.