First Grade and Stuff

I let AJ stay up with me tonight until 10:30 while DH was off feeding my parent's dog while they are in England....then Israel. I also let her eat peanut butter which I thought made her foggy in the past but she asked for it and looked at my eyes and said, "please mommy." I couldn't say no so we put some on a rice cake with a bit of honey. I guess I let her have it because, well, she was hungry and we didn't have anything else in the house, and she has been foggy lately anyway, even though we are following the diet strictly.

Her teacher switched AJ's desk again...to the front of the classroom this time, right next to her teacher's desk. I thought it was a good place for AJ to be but I winced at the fact that she was moved again. I know the kids notice when a "problem" child is moved around the classroom a few times in an effort to make things work a bit better. As I hung up AJ's backpack this morning as AJ put her lunch in her cubby, the girl who used to sit next to AJ told me with with glee that AJ had been moved away from her and sat up front now. That annoyed and worried me. Whatever. I don't know.

I have these forms that the autism society sent out a link for. Here is the link. So I printed them out to show to her teacher and see if she likes any of them. AJ has this tic. She coughs and when she is stressed she coughs about every 10 seconds. This drives people nuts. It doesn't bother me though since I feel very sorry for her. But her teacher this morning asked if there were any tricks to distract AJ from coughing as it disturbed the library visit a few days ago and they were going to that classroom again today. I said that no, there was nothing and that it would probably go away in a few days. AJ told me tonight that she has a bad cough and maybe she shouldn't go back to school until it goes away. sigh.

So we are reading the Wizard of Oz. AJ's teacher is reading it to her class so I downloaded it on my iPhone and have been reading it to the kids while the lights are off and they are in their beds. I wanted to do the same book so that AJ would be able to answer questions better if she was getting a double dose of it. Also I am going to order them some Wizard of Oz Halloween costumes tomorrow. I already have a lion costume that I borrowed for Emmy.

Emmy, by the way is doing amazingly well. She just brings joy like a ray of sunshine that doesn't stop glowing all around the house. She was 6-months-old on Sunday and she is already starting to sit up and rock forward, she even managed to do a tiny tiny bit of crawling forwards today. I was so excited. She is super cute and sweet and smiley. We haven't done any vaccines yet but I might follow the Dr. Sears vaccine schedule and take her in next week for the first one. I'm not doing HepB though since I just read today that it is linked to Autism. I knew one of these vaccines would be eventually and it kind of makes sense that it is the one they give the babies at 3 days old. I knew that seemed crazy when I was a brand new mom with her, but I decided to trust the experts, HA! Turns out that the only expert on your kid is yourself. You know, I write that but, you know, taking Owen to the hospital when he couldn't breathe was super-important, and my doctor did save my life when I had appendicitis. So it is hard to criticize when modern medicine saved my life and perhaps even Owen's. But if I blindly trust, well, look what happens.

I'm tired, I'm going to bed.

Goodnight,

me.

What causes regressive autism, and my response to the St. Pete Times article about vaccines and atusim

Subject: My response to the St. Pete Times' front page article about vaccines, and how this relates (or not) to autism ...



Begin forwarded message:


Date: November 24, 2008 10:26:54 PM EST
To: greene@sptimes.com
Subject: In response to your article about vaccines...from an autism mom.

Hi Lisa,
I enjoyed your thorough and fair article about vaccines and as an autism mom I wanted to offer up an explanation of how vaccines truly figure into autism.

The most current view is that vaccines do not cause autism. I believe, after researching for the past 4 years, that autism is triggered by numerous environmental factors, in children who are genetically predisposed. Vaccines are a part of the trigger, not a single cause.

One example of how to explain how vaccines factor into austims is the, "Princess Diana Tragedy Example." It states that you can say, "If only she was wearing her seat belt, if only she weren't being chased by the media, if only the driver had not been drinking"....if only one of these factors had been different, her fate may have been different.

With autism I could say, "If only I had not eaten a can of tuna fish a week during my pregnancy, if only I had not let her have 5 vaccines in one day, if only I had declined the flu vaccine with thimerasol in it, if only I had not microwaved her formula in plastic bottles, then maybe the genetic predisposition would not have been triggered and she would not have had lost skills at age 2, then regressed more and more with every vaccine."

This theory is based on the fact that our kids who are genetically predisposed to autism are more sensitive to environmental progress/toxins. They can't rid the body of toxins like most of us can and it ends up building up in their system and turning off switches in their brain (that hopefully can be turned on again some day as research continues.)

You can say a similar thing for many diseases and disorders. For example, breast cancer is believed to be triggered by carcinogens in those genetically predisposed. I think that environmental toxins are out of hand and we just turn a blind eye to them because it is so terribly inconvenient to do otherwise. We like eating fast food packed with preservatives and we like microwaving our food in inexpensive plastic. We can't bother with being worried about BPA's or MSG or bothering with whatever the new "scare tactic" is. Not only is it inconvenient to change our lifestyle habits, but how do we decipher which "scare tactic" has merit and which is a passing media trend that has simply received over-exposure.

A part of being an autism mom is trying to decipher just this. We have to pull out what we learned in statistics class in college and from biology about studies and credibility. Suddenly instead of just mom's we have to be scientists, researchers, nurses, doctors for our kids and it is overwhelming. Then we deal with "professionals" not listening to what we have discovered and what we are saying because we don't have the medical degree to back it up. We are a new generation of Lorenzo's Oil parents, which I have to say, sucks.

But...my little girl with autism has improved so much that after a diagnosis of severe autism only two years ago, she is now in a typical kindergarten at a highly regarded private school, where she is one of the best students in her class. My studies and theories put into practice have worked on my child. Now I watch as it unfolds and hope that small treatments such as diet modifications; feeding her fresh organic veggies, fruit and meat, and also taking gluten, casein and soy out of her diet, eventually become recommended by pediatricians. We give my daughter vitamins, probiotics, baths in epsom salts and B12 shots. None of this stuff is proven or standard, but it has worked for her, especially the B12.

So to get back to vaccines...when my daughter's pediatrician told me that it is rare to have severe side effects from vaccines, that they don't cause autism, that there is not enough thimerasol in the flu vaccine to be of concern, I trusted him. I know that he was not knowingly giving me wrong information. But my child was showing some mild signs of autism at that point and I should have been advised to wait on the vaccines until her immune system was stronger and to stay away from thimerasol and any environmental toxins...from food preservatives to bug spray.


A Short Rant:
Unfortunately today it still is not standard for pediatricians to advise the treatment of keeping preservatives and toxins out of autism children's systems while working on detoxifying and strengthening their immune systems. This theory is often dismissed as "not proven." For example, many pediatricians and even specialists will not say to concerned parents, 'I don't know if it the GFCF diet works or not because I am not a parent or doctor who has tried it." Instead the doctor will say, "These treatments are not proven," which implies some sort of knowledge on their part, where there actually is none. Parents end up getting cheated out of precious early intervention treatment time until they finally look it up and find the information themselves on the internet or through networking with other autism parents.

As an autism mom, like many others out there, I do not believe that vaccines simply cause autism. I do believe that if a child is genetically predisposed to it, that vaccines contribute greatly to triggering or worsening autism symptoms in overloaded, under-protected little systems.