Blue-Light Special: I've definitely been reading too much give and take this month about Autism Awareness vs. Autism Acceptance, blue lights as awareness-raising vs. blue lights as a small ridiculous gesture, because when I saw the Disability Scoop headline Neighbors Clash Over Blue Light Supporting Autism this morning, I automatically thought it was an ideological clash between two families of children with autism who approached advocacy differently. But no, it was just a nitpicky neighbor thinking a blue light on the garage looked tacky. Maybe I need to lay off with the special-needs-news reading for a while.

Parenting Fail: Having one of those depressed days where I'm unsure whether I'm making the right choices for one of my kids, and wishing that the line between pushing too hard and not pushing hard enough was painted in neon and had flashing lights and arrows so you could find the dang thing. Especially for kids with FASD, it's just so hard to know whether apparent potential is real, and a worthwhile goal, or just a mirage to pursue at everyone's peril. Sigh. Tomorrow is another day, and fall is another semester.

You Almost Have to Admire the Creativity: Earlier this week I wrote about spam on the Readers Respond forms on my About.com site, which appeared to be responses stolen from other spots on the Web and spam-botted around to new destinations. I'm getting a lot of spam blog comments, too, but those are different -- where the Readers Respond spam tries to sneak in looking like a legitimate entry, comment spam goes with flat-out flattery. Sad that the some of the nicest feedback I get on my work in a given week are these "Wow you are so brilliant why isn't everybody coming here and reading this" comments that just sort of sneak in the link for weight loss or Gucci bags or Viagra as if it was a small price to pay for such extravagant praise. Does this really work? Do bloggers not notice that that ten comments in a row on what a nice layout they have are bogus? Do they take at face value the requests to chat about how to combat spam by comments that are spam? Are they just so happy to get comments that aren't mean and nasty and fight-picking that they go ahead and let the false flattery stand? It's tempting.

The Benefit of the Doubt: Walking around my kids' college campus, it occurs to me that one seldom-praised advantage of modern technology for young people with developmental differences is the ability to talk on the phone through a low-profile earpiece. Not because kids like my son are doing that, but because now, if you walk around public places talking to yourself or your invisible friends in an animated fashion, there's at least a chance that you're having a legitimate chat with someone through a device not easily visible. That's a comfort to a parent, you know?

Thank You for Sharing: I've been getting an extraordinary amount of spam these days on the Readers Respond pages on my About.com site. These always appear to be entries legitimately made somewhere else and then picked up by a spam bot and tossed into other spaces just to see what sticks. It's kind of a weird sort of plagiarism -- apparently, any comment you leave anywhere might turn up anywhere else that no one's monitoring for spam. Sometimes they sort of fit the topic, more often they don't, always they have some telltale collection of alphabet letters in the "name" box so it's clearly not submitted by an actual human this time around, and generally I can plug the responses into Google and find those exact words in multiple spots on the Web. I kind of like spam better when it's a list of handbags of something that makes its intentions plain. Either way, though, it gets cut.

Too Close to the Tree: It's always interesting to see the nature and nurture of things with adopted kids, which aspects of their personalities you would swear were by genetic connection to yourself if you didn't know better. My daughter has "inherited" the same anxiety and obsessive worry that I got by blood from my own mother, and my son has clearly picked up the procrastination strain from my DNA even though he has none of the stuff. I'm in a position of telling her "don't worry" and telling him "just do it!" when my own personal ears are deaf to those words. Hypocritical much? Do as I say, youngsters.

(Speaking of distance from the tree: I requested a review copy of the interesting-sounding Far from the Tree, which looks at families of children with special needs and how they deal with their differences, to write about for my About.com site, and ... OMG, it's 976 pages and three pounds of book. If your book is going to be that big, you better be Stanley Greenspan telling me how to work with my child in very concrete and life-saving ways. Otherwise, for goodness sake, edit! I have this tome looming me over my workspace now, and I can't even imagine the kind of opening up of time that would need to occur for me to be able to sit down and give it a serious read. Maybe when my kids are out of college.)

Mama Bear Is Happy: Update on my question from yesterday -- Mama Bear did indeed blow her top around midafternoon, precipitating an e-mail to the professor, who replied this morning with the most excellent news that my son passed his test and class. I'll be leading Mama Bear back into her cave now and encouraging her to hibernate again. She's pretty excitable, though.

College Self-Advocacy Etiquette Question: My son was given the opportunity to retake a final exam, in the college testing center, to try to pass it and with it the class. He did so last Thursday, a week ago today. His professor, to whom we are grateful for this chance, said he'd grade it and let him know by Tuesday how he did. Two days ago. No word. How soon is it okay to write a polite e-mail reminding/nagging the professor that this student is waiting to know his fate? Too soon, and I'd worry about ticking the prof off before he's graded the thing. Too late, and I'd worry he forgot all about it and the chance to pass the class would drift by. On the one hand, things will certainly resolve, and there's probably no real harm in waiting, and no basis to my worries. On the other hand, the suspense is freakin' killing us. What would you advise? I'm holding the Mama Bear aggressive advocacy impulses down for now, but pretty soon she's gonna blow.

Did Mama Bear roar? Read the follow-up post.

Might Be Handy for IEP Meetings, Though: Last night, a link on the top of my gmail -- one of those advertising links that I usually ignore, but this time, could it really be what I think it is? -- led me to a website selling, God help us, bulletproof backpacks for kids. The idea, as explained in the sell copy, was that when your child starts hearing gunfire at school, he can grab the backpack and use it as a shield as he flees the building. Now, how that's supposed to work when most schools make kids keep their packs in their cubbies or lockers is not explained. I guess if you're going to send your child to school with an armor-plated bookbag, you'd get a dispensation from the administration to keep it near his desk at all times, so he can provide cover for his classmates as well. The backpack sells for $300, and it made me wonder how much it would cost to get, say, a child-sized bulletproof vest. You'd get a weighted vest for your child's proprioceptive needs and the illusion of protection, all in one.

Does It Come With a Free Professor to Explain It All?: It's time at our house for the semi-annual Buying of College Textbooks and Whining About the Cost. On the one hand, I kind of love the idea of getting our own copies of books without having to fight a school district for them, but at the same time, why on earth do they have to cost so much? One of my daughter's books, as I tweeted in amazement last night, was $223 for a new paperback. A hefty paperback, to be sure, with many valuable doorstop-like qualities, but a paperback nonetheless. In my day, boys and girls, overpriced college textbooks were hardcover! They'd break your back there in your bookbag, but you knew you were getting your money's worth! And even then, I don't think they were $223. Of course, I was in college so long ago that humans were still using shiny rocks for money, so who knows.

Fortunately, there are many options now for textbooks that in some ways reduce the cost. For the $223 tome, we also had a choice of buying used, renting new, or renting used. We went with the last, cheapest option, and will pay ninety-some dollars for the privilege of giving a dog-eared scribbled-on copy a home for four months. I still wonder, though, at the high prices. Is it just what the market will bear? Is there some extraordinary expense involved in creating textbooks? Do college bookstores mark them up hugely to pay the salary of the person who stands at the front door and makes you leave your purse in a cubbyhole? I know I could order from Amazon or other cheaper online sellers, but most of my kids' books have some sort of specific content for the college, so clearly they're onto that ploy. I just feel like we should get some sort of premium with our purchase -- an iPod, or a tutor.

The Lines We Draw: It's human nature, I think, to draw distinctions that keep us on the safe side of a situation. We look desperately for things that the unfortunate did differently so we can feel assured that their fate won't befall us. We try to keep our families safe by separating them from those we deem unsafe. We judge others to avoid having to judge ourselves.

Parents of kids with special needs sure know the feeling of being on the wrong sides of other people's lines. You can see that imagined boundary every time someone denies your child inclusion, every time judging eyes fall on you in church or the library or a restaurant, even those times when someone tells you what a superlative specimen of parenting you are or how worthy you are of blessings. In all these scenarios, it is clear that there is an us and a them, and you are not the us. And even if you consider the us-es a bunch of stuck-up entitled losers, it hurts to be a them.

You'd think we'd find some solidarity with other special-needs parents, our partners in them-ness. And yet ... human nature, it is hard to overcome. Because even within our fellowship of outcasts, we still draw lines. I see the lines forming every time someone whose child has issues takes pains to point out that this kid is bright (not, you know, like those kid with intellectual disabilities, God bless them).  I saw the line running through my son's first-grade self-contained special-education class when one mother huffed at me that her son didn't belong in a classroom with my son. There was an us there, but my boy and I were not on that side of the line. I saw the line running through the posts of the e-mail support group for parents of kids adopted from Russia that I belonged to in my early days of raising my kids -- between the parents of kids with medical problems and the parents of kids with mental-health problems, or the parents of kids with mild behavioral problems and the parents of kids with severe behavioral problems. The judgment was quick and the claiming of malicious intent was quicker. Even within a special-needs community, we get out our pieces of chalk and draw our lines between those who understand and those who will not get it, or those who have real problems and those who only think they do, or those who know how to parent and those who are creating their children's problems -- every line empowering to some and alienating to others.

I thought about this line-drawing again when reading the responses from members of the autism community regarding allegations that the Sandy Hook shooter had Asperger syndrome. On the one hand, the response was an eloquent refutation of society's tendency to draw lines -- well, he had Asperger syndrome, he's not like us, all those people with autism are dangerous. On the other hand, it struck me how many of those responses took pains to point out that "autism is not a mental illness." Which is ... drawing a line, no? Saying, if unintentionally, "Don't group us with them." Surely it's no more okay to group all people with mental illness into a "might shoot you, they're crazy!" pile, but many of those who wrote about this issue were careful to make it specifically about autism, because that's their side of the line. Can you really blame people for drawing lines when you're busily drawing your own?

Perhaps a resolution to consider for 2013 is to pick a disability issue on the other side of a line from you to champion. Rebut nasty comments about kids with food allergies even if that's not your child's thing. Tell people to stop using the R-word even if your child doesn't have an intellectual disability. Advocate for inclusion for kids with different special needs than yours. If we can't blur those lines between us, we're never going to be able to get the folks who see us as one big them to do it.

Doing My Bit to Conserve Paper: Christmas is rapidly approaching, and once again it looks like we're going to be slackers on the Christmas card thing. If it was just a matter of sending out cards, we could probably hack it -- but I have enough far-away, out-of-touch friends and family members that I feel a need to write a Christmas letter, and because I'm a writer I feel a need to write a creative and memorable Christmas letter, and so it gets put off and put off and put off until it's March. We actually have some big news to share this year -- my son graduated high school and started college, and those are both fantastic and celebration-worthy accomplishments. We had a great party for his graduation, and a nice family vacation at the Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont, a place I've been wanting to get into with a timeshare trade for years. There was also some not-so-fun news, like my son's hospitalization in March for a ruptured ulcer. There's the stuff of a pretty rockin' end-of-year letter, to be sure, but first I have four or five manuscripts to edit, articles to write, winter clothes to take out of storage, shopping to finish up, college grades to obsessively refresh a website until they turn up ... Maybe I can just send cards with a link to this post?

Do Not Like: It used to be that I was eager for the election season to end so that the campaign commercials would stop. Now that I do most of my TV watching on DVR, those ads don't plague me. Instead, I can't wait for the election season to end so I can watch my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ feeds without being under constant assault. I've always believed that it's impolite to discuss politics unless you're sure that everyone in the conversation is of the same mind, and I'm rarely pulled into conversations or lectured to by friends and acquaintances in the face-to-face world, but online, oh my, anything goes, with people posting outspoken messages and graphics in favor of their candidate and hurling sarcasm and invective against the opponent. Do folks think that their Facebook friends all share the same beliefs, so it's okay to be nasty and sarcastic and in-your-face about it? To post rude things and then blast people with different opinions for doing the same? Geez, people, I don't want to see any of it. It makes my stomach hurt, and no "hide post" button or scroll through works fast enough. I'll be so relieved when everybody gets back to just posting cute pictures of cats.

Just Chillin': My aging laptop has started taking periodic mini-vacations throughout the day. It doesn't freeze solid; I've learned that if I wait a bit, three to five minutes, it pulls itself together and gets back to business. It's annoying as heck, a real roadblock to my productivity ... and also, on some level, probably good for me, a forced pause in my screen-staring, a reminder to blink, take a breath, walk around, read a book. It occurs to me that this is the kind of thing some clever life-coach type might package and sell, something that pauses your machine at set intervals to make you meditate or some such. It's not something I'd go for -- I'm so stuck on multitasking I'm writing this blog post on my phone while I wait the beach ball out -- but I can see a certain appeal.

The Correct Answer Is WTF: I've been trying not to help my son so much with his college math homework, and today he did almost all the problems in his computerized lesson independently. But there was one that, hoo boy, has just about been the death of us all. It was a three-part story problem -- and right there, I want to just weep -- but my guy went through all the trouble of converting mixed numbers to fractions and multiplying and reducing and converting and LCMing and subtracting, every step right, except the computer says the answer's wrong. He does it again, I do it again, we do it again, my husband comes home from work and does it a couple times, and there's a different wrong answer each time. At this point, the kid's hysterical and the grown-ups can't let it go -- it's personal now, you know? One wrong answer's not gonna scuttle his grade, but this is a remedial class for kids who scored lowest on the entrance exam and need extra support. Is it helpful to have them do a problem that brings a whole family to its knees? Have mercy!

Leaving Some Learners Out: Some kids aren't creative. Is it okay to say that? When we're thinking about all kinds of minds and all kinds of learning and varieties of educational approaches, is it possible to acknowledge that for some kids, rote learning works? I've got kids for whom plain old flash-card drills worked like a charm, for whom computer programs that do simple reinforcement are successful and computer programs that are fancy as all get-out with cool stuff atop cool stuff do not. If my kids need to read a manual to figure out how to use the educational software or app or process, if they need to listen to a lengthy demonstration, if it's not obvious immediately, they ain't gettin' it. This is how their brains work; aren't we supposed to be celebrating the way each individual's brain works? I feel the pendulum swinging away from traditional techniques and so far into creative ones that we're still not serving a chunk of kids.

Permanent Alcohol-Induced Brain Damage? Hi-larious!: I should know better than to read round-ups of lines from celebrity roasts. But I made the mistake of following a link from the blog A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago to an article on Grub Street NY that claims to list "The 22 Best Lines From Last Night’s Roast of Anthony Bourdain." The lines were pretty rough and nasty, as is apparently expected for roasts, but then I came up on this one from alleged comedian Bonnie McFarlane:

"I didn’t wanna be mean tonight, but this is like a roundup of people with fetal alcohol syndrome." 

This was a preface to a riff on how ugly the men in attendance were, which also included a har-de-har-har about people deformed by "Japan's nuclear explosion."

And this is funny ... how?

It wasn't that long ago that Wayne Brady used Down syndrome as a way to insult the appearance of a roastee. He's since apologized, but ... sheesh, is this really the best that people who supposedly get paid to be funny can do? Use individuals with disabilities as a reference point for insults? They don't even have the cover of those who claim they use the R-word in a way that has nothing to do with people with intellectual disabilities. These cracks are clearly and purposefully insulting someone by comparing them to an individual with fetal alcohol syndrome or Down syndrome. There's no gray area here. And that's no laughing matter.

Look, if you want to roast someone and insult them in the grossest, most profane, most obscene way you can think of, fine, apparently there's an audience for that, go get 'em. The people who attend these things know they're going to get it, and can afford to be good sports. But leave my kid out of it. There's nothing at all funny about fetal alcohol syndrome. It's not a joke.

And for what it's worth, my kid is friggin' adorable. The guys in that room should be so lucky as to look like him.

Do You Really Want to See Everything That Goes On in Your Kid's Classroom?: A post on Disability Scoop this morning announces that "Special Education Parents Want Cameras In Classrooms," and certainly some special-education parents would like that, and some other special-education parents would like that some of the time, and some might want that for reasons different than other parents might want it (like to prove that their kid is too smart/well-behaved/mature/spectacular to be stuck in a class with those kind of special-education kids, if you know what I mean, and if you look at this video you certainly will). Cameras in the classroom might protect kids from abuse, and they might protect teachers from accusations of abuse, and they might create just miles and miles of boring videotape that we will feel obligated to watch, and they might give us a window into things our kids do that really, we need to know about so we can correct the behaviors, but it's been kinda comforting not to have to deal with. Ignorance can be dangerous, but it can also be bliss, or at least a welcome bit of respite.

My son started college last week, and one of his accommodations is that he can tape record classes. That's something plenty of parents of kids in elementary school and middle school and high school would love to be able to do, to listen in to what really goes on ... but he doesn't want to request it, and I don't have the nerve to force him. If the tape recorder could be programmed to just record the part where the teacher says important things he needs to know, I'd push him to ask, but that's not going to happen. It's going to record awkward contacts with his peers, it's going to record him giving an answer that reflects lack of understanding of age-appropriate norms, it's going to record things that are going to break my heart. Or at least, I imagine it will. That's what I imagine happening with cameras in classrooms, too -- they're not going to just record abusive situations, they're going to put your child's every embarrassing action up to the scrutiny of everybody else's mom. Worthwhile to prevent abuse, I guess, but there's collateral damage to be considered.

For now, I'm going to let my son skip the recording, and call it promoting his independence.

The Kindness of Strangers: Parents of kids with special needs often talk about that look, the one that strangers give that makes it clear they know there's something different about your kid. Sometimes that look raises our hackles, when we're feeling all inclusive and hey my kid is just a kid like any kid what are YOU looking at. And sometimes, oh my goodness, we count on that look to buy us a little leeway; maybe we even prod our child to act just a little weirder so we can say, can't you tell this is a kid with a disability? Have a heart, whydon'tcha. The indignation in the first case is righteous, and maybe that makes us hypocrites for playing on differences in the second, I don't know.

But I do know how grateful I was when, at the community college my son will be attending, a passing custodian took in my boy's jumping and flapping and grunting and shirt-chewing and over-involved mother, sized up the situation, and reached out in the kindest way, introducing himself and his partner, getting my son's name, assuring him he would do great at school, and encouraging him to stop and say hi or ask questions whenever they saw each other. Maybe this thoughtful gentleman would have done the same for any random neurotypical, but I doubt it. It seemed clear to me that this was a specific outreach he does to the obviously odd. And I thanked him profusely for it. There are plenty of times we must revile the coldness of strangers. But it's such a relief when they're cool.

We Are the UMCCDSP. Appease Us!: Just read an article that mentioned "uncommitted middle-class cul-de-sac people" as sort of a midpoint between the Tea Party and the Occupy-ers. I don't know about that, but since I am all of those things, I'm going to adopt "uncommitted middle-class cul-de-sac people" as my personal political affiliation, and look forward to being pandered to by candidates big and small. Come and get us! Just off the top of my head, I think the major issues for UMCCDSP would include:

• Big trucks that try to turn around in cul de sacs, and somehow make it, but cause us to be very nervous about our cars parked on the street
• Cars that turn around in cul de sacs, and either drive too fast or drive so slowly they make it hard for us to get out of our own street
• People who park in front of our driveway when they're picking their kids up at the high school. Really, people? Really?
• Ditto people who park at the stop sign. Who does that?
• Drivers on the main road who won't let us turn out of our little cul de sacs. They don't even slow down. Hey, UMCCDSP have places to go too, y'know? And no other way out!

I look forward to hearing these pressing issues debated in campaign ads and speeches. UMCCDSP, unite!