Stories from a neurodiverse family

I'm spending the entire day alone with my kids. Their dad is staying at his parents', resting. While he naps 3-5 hours over the course of a day, he slowly becomes more and more exhausted over time. So as often as I can manage alone, I kick him out for a day or two so he can recharge his batteries. There's this calm over everything on days like this. I know I'm the only adult and I don't have someone else to tag in, but I also don't have someone else to be frustrated with. I usually end up getting a lot of stuff done. Last time, I fixed the tires on the kids' bikes. Both had had flat tires for weeks. (Fifteen minutes later, Arthur had blood spurting from his nose after kissing the ground, so yeah, way to go, Mom...) Today, I put up some shelves in the girl's room. By now, I've learned where all the tools hide.

It's been a few days since the doctors spent an hour explaining their findings over the past three months when testing and observing our youngest. We knew there'd be something. We expected him to be on the spectrum. Still, it was a shock to hear that he had infantile autism. We expected high functioning autism, or perhaps atypical autism. From our (stereotypical) point of view, infantile autists were those with little or no language, or at least late to learn to communicate verbally. (We know better now). Arthur was a very quick study and spoke sentences of five words at two-years-old. His vocabulary has been deemed extensive for his age at the pre-school. Not only did he speak at an early age, he was interested in letters and numbers. Six months ago, he probably could have counted to 100 if he had had the patience to stick with it. He started counting at random numbers and stopped when he found something better to do. He'd recognize most of the capital letters in...