Joy's Autism Blog

Not what would you spend it on.

What would you do?

Would you jump up and down?

Would you wave your hands wildly?

Would you yelp out some strange noise or scream?

As I have watched my Adrian all of these years, I have seen him get excited about things. Sometimes I know what he’s excited about and sometimes I don’t. I can tell that he has all this pent up energy inside of him bursting out through jumping up and down, squealing loudly, and flapping his hands.

I’ve also seen him trying to control these motions. Sometimes when he first meets new people I see him trying to control himself. When we are in public I’ve seen him try to control himself. At home when I am needing quiet and have been hushing him all day I see him try to control it.

For the most part, I would say he can’t control it or it’s extremely difficult for him to control it.

One example I could think of would be, if you won a million dollars. You would be excited right? What if it wasn’t acceptable for you to react. To remain calm. Would it be hard? Undoubtedly.

I don’t know if anyone else ever felt this way on the last day of school for your summer break. You are walking down the hall towards the door to the freedom of summer. I always had this energy like I wanted to run right out those doors. It was hard to calmly walk down the corridor to my freedom.

I can only imagine the kind of energy that Adrian must be feeling. The kind of energy that needs to come out of his body in squeals, flaps, moans, yelling, and jumping. I can only imagine it. It must be uncomfortable to feel that way all the time. So when I’m frustrated with Adrian I try to remember how hard it must be for him to control some of the things he needs to do.

Adrian has been stimming like crazy since he got home. He had a pretty good day at school today. No timeouts except what she described as a “5 minute rest at his desk” two times today when he wouldn’t work. That did the trick I suppose though because all around it was a good day. I thought it was really funny when she said that they used “edible reinforcements” to get him to come in from recess. I guess that sounds better then “we bribed him with food” LOL

I took a little video of Adrian stimming. You’ll notice how sweaty he is, it’s cool in the house but he’s been running and jumping up and down a lot. The grunting is very common lately. This is somewhat mild compared to some of the other stuff he’s been doing in the hour and a half since he’s been home from school. Oh a positive note, when he asks me for paper today he’s been saying “May I have paper please?” Love that but wasn’t able to capture a video of that one yet. This stimming is a little loud so watch the volume on your speakers:

I also wanted to share with you, I am a fan of Autism Speaks on facebook and they posted today that you can get a free 2011 membership to Mighty Book Jr. by entering “autism speaks” in the coupon code box. I did it and it worked. I haven’t looked around the website too much yet but it looks like it reads story books on your computer. It looks pretty cool!

Another cool video I saw the other day was I love someone with autism 2011 It has autism facts and shows several photos of people with autism, I enjoyed watching it so I wanted to share.

I wanted to explain a little bit about what stimming is, how it affects our family, and what it may look like for other families before I share this video. Stimming or Stereotypy makes itself evident in different ways for each family.

I’m just going to list out common ways that people stim, excessive blinking or staring, holding objects or fingers close to the eye and gazing at them, lining or stacking objects, humming, grunting, yelling, tapping, clicking tongue or other random noises. It can also be exhibited through licking or tasting things that aren’t food or sniffing objects or people. Spinning, rocking, jumping around, pacing, toe walking, hand flapping, hair twirling, teeth grinding, picking at themselves or others, pinching, or squeezing.

Socially acceptable forms of stimming that are common for almost anyone may be tapping your foot, shaking your leg, twirling you hair, licking or biting your lips, nibbling on your nails, and all those little things that most of us do when we’re bored or nervous.

Adrian stims almost continuously when he’s at home. When we’re out in public he does it quite a bit less but still enough that it’s hard to be in a place that’s meant to be “quiet” for any length of time unless we don’t mind attracting some attention. I think he stims more at home just because he’s comfortable. Adrian stims more when he is happy, if he’s watching a show he likes, playing with a toy that he likes, or playing a computer game that he likes he gets very loud excited as shown in the video below.

When Adrian is stimming he can’t help it and there is not a lot we can say or do to get him to stop doing it although sometimes I try because it’s hard to be patient with that noise all the time. I know that he can’t control it though and that’s not his fault. It is hard for our family. His siblings get tired and stressed out from it and I’ve heard them on many occasions to ask him to stop screaming. It has scared other children many times and I do my best to explain to the children or parents that we encounter why Adrian does this.

Adrian’s most common ways of stimming are hand-flapping, stinking his tongue out and/or running his tongue over his front teeth, yelling, squeezing/pinching people, humming, and jumping. He’s also more recently taken up excessive blinking and hard blinking.

Sanura has also had some incidences of stimming although not nearly as severe or uncontrollable as Adrian’s. She has always made some weird breathy sort of noises that are kind of hard to explain, she’s been meowing and hissing and I think she’s having trouble controlling that, her teacher said she’s been rocking a lot at school and I’ve noticed while she’s playing video games sometimes she gets to rocking quite a bit.

Stimming was our first indication that something was “up” with Adrian so it’s important to pay attention to it and know what it looks like. So with all that said this video shows Adrian flapping and moaning/yelling and it also shows me saying his name and him not responding-another classic autism symptom.

Click below to watch the video: