"Weird" Days

Sick day over here.  Bart was sick for a couple days last week, and Dave and I caught it within 12 hours of each other.  What is it?  I have no clue.  I accurately named it virus cocktail last night.  It seems like everything all at once....Dave even had a weird rash that popped up all over his body on Saturday...and THEN started acting sick.  Usually it's the other way around--rash after you're better, right?

I don't know.

Anyway, I've been sitting here all day.  It is a disaster zone and I'm pretty much past caring.  I don't like that breakfast dishes are still laying around with four hour old milk and dirty laundry on the floor and basically an explosion of toys everywhere, but I like the thought of dragging myself to do anything even less.  It's rough when everyone's basically sick at the same time.  I really just want to crawl into bed.  So I'm doing the next best thing--sitting in my comfy blue chair and playing ridiculous amounts of games, spending too much time on facebook, and now blogging. 

I played a while with Dave this morning before I started feeling really crummy again.  He's having a strange day.  He has these every once in a while.  I get excited when he has them, because I know I'm going to see him do something I didn't know he could do.

One of the more noticeable abnormal things Dave does has been "echolalia", which is basically just meaningless repetition of speech.  It can be spit right back after you say something to him, or it can be from something he's seen before, like a movie, etc.  This used to be his only way of communicating, for example,

Me: "Did you go to the park today?"
Dave: "Did go park day?"
Me: "You did, huh."
Dave: "Did, huh."

Now within the last month or two, he only repeats back in a few instances (yay!)--he's very tired, doesn't understand what you're saying, is very upset, on bad days, or on "weird" days.  He still does enormous amounts of repeating and reenacting movies/events from the day, etc, but conversationally, it doesn't happen as often.

So today is a weird day--so that's one side of the weird day.  The other side is that he will all the sudden say something that sounds like something a normally developing child would say, in the way a normally developing child would say it.

Example, this morning playing with Dave, all the sudden he stands up from the floor. And tells me
"Stay RIGHT there, I'll be right back, okay?"

All the words there, emphasis in the right places, regular speed, etc.

I'm pretty sure I didn't hide my surprise.  I laughed and said "Okay."

He's said a few surprising things like that today.  I think I can almost physically see the change in him, since I'm sick and just sort of watching him play independently today.  All the sudden it's like brain overload, and he'll pretend like he's at school and repeat an entire conversation that happened a week ago, or he'll read the same book 10 times in a row, repeating the same thing over and over, or act out a scene from a movie.  And then something clicks, and it's like his brain is all working, and he understands things or will say things the normally he wouldn't.  I wish I understood more.  I didn't even know there was a name (echolalia) to the repeating thing until recently.  I am grateful for friends that have gone before me with autistic, PDD-NOS or autistic-like children to help me know I'm not alone and to find a new "normal".

Anyway, He has days like this now and then, and I feel like he retains some of the learned information--so I like days like this.

Kids are so confusing......I'm sure I'll look back on this at some point and it will make perfect sense to me, but for right now, we just roll with it.  He really is an amazing child. I am continually trying to figure him out.  We have our share of rough, frustrating behavioral days, but they are frequently balanced out by days of wonderful behavior.  He can be so compassionate.  I was feeling especially crummy this morning, and he could tell.  He came up on the couch and sat above my head, and just laid his hand on my neck, to comfort me, and held my hand with his other hand. All by himself.  Something so simple helped me feel a little better.

I feel like as a mom of a child with a global developmental delay with an unknown diagnosis, I just want to Dave to be the best Dave--and that it's my job to help him become that.  But on many days, I think he's the one that's teaching me.

It's unfortunate that we're home sick today, but I'm glad I got to see this.