Christmas 2013

Our Christmas' past have been, well... educational. Like all parents, we live and learn... as parents of kiddos ASD* we are in a constant state of re-learning. Our boys are globally delayed, and at different "levels" on the spectrum, so every Christmas (so far) is a little like the first one. They remember more every year, but there isn't a lot of excitement on Christmas morning. At least not right from the start.

This year we got the boys involved in almost every aspect we could with the celebration of Christmas. By that I mean, for the first time they were actually in a place where they wanted to be involved. Anthony even wanted to make sure daddy realized he was doing good - not the picture where he "patted" dad's head and actually said "good job".

Last year they wanted to pull off the ornaments, so this year we only put the tree up (there are already lights on it which helps a lot). We also let them "touch" the tree this year, which actually seemed to work better than telling them to leave it alone every five minutes.

Christmas morning went well. We haven't reached the "rip the paper off as fast as possible" yet, but we get a little faster each year. This year it only took about 3-1/2 hours (and not because they got so many gifts) - because after unwrapping a couple of presents, they'd rather play with them or jump or do something else for a while.

Since the boys really aren't aware of what Christmas means (in terms of anticipating getting presents), they will sleep like it was any other night. I usually have the Christmas "jitters" for them. Daniel was the first out of the bedroom, and he noticed the presents right away, but wasn't really sure if he cared or not...

The boys got to open a present from my sister's family the night before, it was a Disney's Planes play tent...

which looks more like this now...

Anthony went right for a "piece" of the plane on his way to the tree...

After their morning routine... breakfast, jumping on the trampoline and climbing the jungle gym. They finally agreed to check out the presents. It took some encouraging - lots and lots of encouraging - but they finally started to get more and more interested unwrapping. Last year we learned that we couldn't have too many different types of paper and couldn't be overly enthusiastic. This year we learned that we can't wrap everything in the same paper either.

It's actually taken me a little over a week to be able to do this blog... as you can probably tell. So at this point - since it's the New Year now, we only have 355 days until this, next Christmas.

From a mother's heart - I hope you all had a wonderful Merry Christmas! If you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. May you be blessed in 2014.



*ASD (autism spectrum disorder)