A Little Light Reading...

I tend to get a bit obsessed with a subject when it's close to my heart--it's the researcher in me, I suppose. Anyway, Moon and I are researching the idea of starting a special needs ministry in our church. (It's my secret strategy to return to church--start the ministry myself!!--because I think it's the only way I'm ever going to get to church again!) Seriously, though, we've discovered that 95% of families with special needs children are unchurched. And that 80% of couples with autistic children will divorce. In other words, the church--which (according to Jesus) should be at the forefront in caring and supporting "the least of these"--isn't doing the job it should reaching these desperately needy, desperately isolated and struggling families.

In our research, we've picked up the following books:

The Special Needs Ministry Handbook
Special Needs, Special Ministry
Autism and Your Church 
Let All the Children Come to Me

and, since I was already on an Amazon.com ordering kick, I picked up a couple books that had been recommended for my personal reading:

Not My Boy! by Rodney Peete
Dancing with Max: A Mother and Son Who Broke Free by Emily Colson

The last book was one I sat down with last week and read in one sitting. Emily Colson, the daughter of Chuck Colson, has a severely autistic son, Max, who she has raised pretty much singlehandedly for most of his 19 years. Her descriptions of struggling with the school system to get him an adequate education were infuriating at best, terrifying at their worst (at one point she seriously considers fleeing the state with him in order to avoid his forced, state-placed attendance at a nearby military-style boarding school for autistic children). Her son was diagnosed in the early 1990s, when the advances in therapy for autism were at their earliest stages. Much of the recommendations made to her by "experts" were ridiculous (lock him in a closet when having a meltdown??!! Seriously!)

As a result, I found it most telling and very interesting when she writes:

...I did anything to make Max laugh. I ran around the house and made the sound of someone falling in a manhole, pretended to trip and fall on the floor, piled up the living room pillows and dived into them like a swimming pool. Max would pretend to fill me up with air just to watch me shoot around the room like a deflating balloon. And I made up crazy songs to help him move through his day. Initially, I worried that the neighbors were watching, but I quickly realized there were trying their best NOT to look. I was, after all, working for a captive audience, a focused, connected, interactive audience of one. It was as if laughter and humor bore their way right through the wall of autism. If he was laughing, he was learning. [emphasis mine]

As I read this, I exclaimed out loud, "she was doing Floortime with him and didn't know it!" And, as it turned out, this was her most effective therapy with Max.

I have discovered, too, that laughter and learning are inextricably linked for Rosie. I feel quite often like I'm channeling Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in our play together--the higher the slapstick, the better the pratfall, the more she and I are connected, having a conversation through laughter. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to upload some video of Rosie doing a couple of her favorite plays--mommy pretending to be Elvis Presley reincarnated as a group of farm animals  who have lost their legs, and tickling her funny bone by making this creepy, growly noise in my throat that she finds hilarious.