Caring and clever

Gordon is away overnight at another cancer research meeting, the children are all asleep and I’m having a lovely time reading blogs and newspapers and finishing the red wine left over from a chicken casserole I just put together in the slow cooker, so forgive the typos.

I really love my children (oops, she’s getting sentimental and all maudlin’). They bring colour and joy to my life. They bring snot and grime and dirty clothes too, but never mind! Every day I spend with them, they each make me laugh at something they do or say. I love that they enjoy playing with each other so much and they know each other so well. My beautiful boys and my strong, kind girl; what have I done to deserve such gifts?

Duncan spent most of today wearing a knight costume he’s recently received as a present. I couldn’t find the camera unfortunately. He looked the business in the tabard and cloth helmet, swishing his toy sword around. He pointed to himself (a recent trait) saying ‘Prince Charming, Shrek 2’ to let me know exactly who he was pretending to be. Then he badgered me into joining him in the garden to play chase. At one stage they went into the garage so I chased them out and locked the door. Duncan got distressed, saying ‘where is Lady, I want Lady’ because he thought I’d locked her in. See, these autistic children aren’t as lacking in thought for others as they’re meant to be!
(Listen to Radio 4’s Leading Edge article about Theory of Mind and autism, 15 minutes into the show).

You know what other myth is fast being demolished; that most autistic people have learning disabilities. Some Canadian scientists, among them an autistic woman who has over the years come in for a huge amount of disgraceful personal attack, presented data at a conference last week showing that the test usually used to measure IQ, is inappropriate for use with people with autism. A more appropriate scale, the Raven test, which measure abstract reasoning, consistently gives autistic people a higher score. There are more details in a Canadian newspaper and in a great blog post translating another article.
But that’s no big surprise for those of us who know one of these children well!