DOES CUPID HAVE ASPERGER'S? OR, DOES HE JUST GET IT?

Once again, it's been an interesting week.  Here it is Wednesday, and already, Jacob's had his best and worst days of the entire school year.  But if I asked you to guess what day was the worst so far, I bet most would say something about Valentine's Day.  After all, it's a day full of heightened emotions, it's a day full of gift giving and it's a day full of chocolate/junk/sugar.   So why wouldn't a child with Asperger's have an emotionally rocky day?  But one thing that Asperger's has taught us is to expect the unexpected.

Monday was great at school.  Jacob had no homework and his afternoon EA said that she wished every afternoon was as good as that one.  We were so relieved.  Jacob was talking about Valentines day on the weekend, so we thought Jacob might have issues focusing in class.  Again we were wrong, and Jacob did focus in class.  On Monday before dinner, we were talking about the Valentine's day activities the school was having.  There was as assembly in the morning, a cake draw and then Valentine's exchange in the afternoon.  Now we all know how important planning ahead is when it comes to helping a child with Asperger's right?.  On Monday, around dinner time, we realised that we had made a huge miscalculation.  We hadn't got any Valentine's Day cards for Jacob.  We began to panic and immediately walked for 20 minutes to Shopper's Drug Mart for Valentine's Day cards.  Luckily, they had 1 set of Star Wars cards left.  Again, mega relief.  Then, Shannon has school on Monday nights so was in charge of supervising Jacob, while he filled out the cards.  And by the time he filled out almost 30 of them, Jacob had just about had it.  Again, he was able to complete the task without too much fuss and another crisis was diverted.

Now it's Tuesday.  And Valentine's Day is here.  Now I don't know about your kids schools when it comes to Valentines day, but at my son's school, it looks like a pot luck candy festival.  Kids were bringing in cakes and pies, cupcakes, brownies and all sorts of chocolate and candy.  And it was only 8:30 AM.  Now we know, that as parents, we could ask them to not give Jacob too much candy, but what fun would that be?  Jacob won't eat hard or soft candy anyway, but he loves chocolate.  We were surprised that he even ate lunch.

Now it's home time and Jacob had probably eaten around 2 pounds of sugar, but to our surprise, he had a great session again and with no homework.  When Jacob got home he showed us a giant bag of Valentine's Day cards that he'd received.  There's only 25 students in his class, but he must have had 30 Valentines or more.  We're so lucky that Jacob's classmates and school support and understand his condition.  There were cards from teachers that have never had Jacob as a student.  It's hard to believe that Jacob had such a great day, especially when you factor in this key equation:

JACOB + HEAVY EMOTIONS + SUGAR = POTENTIAL FOR DISASTER

Then this morning came and it was out of routine to start.  I had to work 4 hours this morning so I wasn't there when Jacob woke up.  Jacob is used to me taking him to school, but it wasn't as big of a change as a huge Valentine's celebration.  Or so Shannon thought.  When I met up with Jacob and Shannon at school, I asked about his day.  Jacob said "You'd better talk to mom about it."  I knew it was rough.  Shannon told me that it started good, but ended downhill.  Jacob got upset about something and cleared his desk onto the floor.  At least he went back happy, so we retain hope that he'll pull things together and have a good afternoon.

Now, don't we all love the roller coaster that is Asperger's?  We never know what to expect.  Of course we expected Jacob to go down a certain path, and instead he went down a different one.  I think I could have helped Jacob this morning, by explaining yesterday that I had to work today.  That way he wouldn't have woken up this morning to find me not there without a prior explanation.  That just proves to us that progression with Asperger's is a constant lesson in planning.  And it seems that the learning curve for such planning changes as often as Jacob's emotions.  I'm going to end this post on a positive note.  While we were reading the Valentines that Jacob got at school, we read a few cool ways to spell Jacob.  And we wanted to share those with you.  So here's a list of variations of the spelling of the name Jacob.  There's Jacod, Jaycub, Jaycod, Jaycud, Jakud and my favourite Jackup.  LOL.  I love kids when they spell. 



Where's that Jacob?