I CAN'T Wait

Duncan had another appointment with the dentist this morning. Lady and Thomas have both started school now (more on that later- but it's going well) so it was just the two of us. The 1st time we were at that dentist it was a huge struggle to get him in the building. He stood outside crying for ages while I tried to reason with him. We made it into the waiting room where The Tweenies was playing on a tv, henceforth that room was known as "The Tweenies Room." Duncan utterly refused to leave the room so the dentist came to him and after Thomas modelled the procedure, Duncan consented to allow the dentist a brief glimpse inside his mouth right there. On the next visit he made it to the examination room but not onto the chair, though he did enjoy moving the stuffed dinosaur with the big teeth up and down on the chair. Then the dentist got another kick look but didn't see much. Today however Duncan was an absolute star. We entered the Tweenies Room and he dashed about a bit checking out the books and wall posters, seemed pleased that there was no smoking allowed, then got ready to leave again. An old woman and a younger man, probably her son, arrived. The man might well have been autistic himself. Duncan was restless and I said several times, "we will wait."
"I can't wait!"
"Look at the door, read the sign. This is a waiting room."
He read it and seemed a bit happier to do what the sign said, for a while at least. He got ready to move again and I said, "wait for a little while. The dentist will be ready soon."
Duncan replied softly, "I don't want to wait. Listen to me, pal!"

I just asked him about the book he had picked up. The woman most have had very acute hearing as she snorted a bit then said, "oh, that's a strange thing to say."
Now was thinking that her sticking her nose in was strange, but reasoned that she might not have known better and said, "it's a phrase he picked up from a video. He doesn't know what it means." (I regret saying that with him right beside me now.)
"Well one thing I will say, in my day we respected our parents."
"That's nice. He respects me and I respect him too."

We were called to the dentist then. I suppose I should be glad she only felt it was her right to comment on my son's words and wasn't tempted to stick a pen into his or my eye unlike the wish expressed by a "home-schooling" mother I read about on Liz's blog. This "christian" (I won't capitalise the word, this woman doesn't deserve it) clearly hasn't heard about "suffer the little children." It's hard to believe she could possibly be so ignorant about autism as she obviously is for unless she's living as part of an able-bodied people only cult, she surely knows of other non-school educated families with autistic children; there's loads of us out there!

But forget her, my boy did well today, Lady and Thomas are settling and happy in their new school, I'm off to Galway for the weekend. It's going to be just fine.