adolescent aspie

my child continues to surprise me. she says and does things that are funny and interesting and often so different from me. i feel like i don't relate to a lot of things about brooke, but that kind of makes her even more intriguing and vaguely mysterious.

i just bought a book about asperger's syndrome in adolescence. it's for parents or teachers of kids between the ages of 10 and 18. everything i've read before was aimed at parents of younger kids, so it's good to be reading about the next phase.

the wiring in aspie brains is different than the wiring of a neuro-typical (NT) person and this becomes even more apparent during puberty. i realize that brooke isn't 10 yet, but she's certainly started puberty and she's already dealing with some of those difficult changes. reading this book is helping me to feel like some of her glitches  have legitimate reasons behind them and they aren't cause for frustration or correction, but rather compassion and calmness.

some things about her please me tremendously. like when she says things about her brain. she's always talked about her brain since she was about 4 and learned what a brain was. just now she told me that her brain is really interesting and it has a unique feature that allows her to play movies in her head of things that happened far back in her past and the movies aren't just from her own perspective, but also from the view of someone else who was watching her. she told me very clearly about something that happened when she was just a couple months past her second birthday. and she got the details right, so it had to be a real memory of her own because the parts she remembered weren't the things i would have recalled about that day.

yesterday she came running inside after playing out in the beautiful spring air for a while and said, "mommy, mommy! this day smells so awesome! it smells just like the library's porch!"

she says strange things to me and laughs openly at me. i'll admit that it's often what would be considered disrespectful to most parents, but i know she's not trying to be rude, she's just calling it how she sees it and she doesn't comprehend that honesty sometimes isn't the best policy. you should see her double over in cackling laughter when i do a workout video. i've been working out with a few "hip hop abs" videos (i know, so dorky, but they make my muscles ache afterwards, so they're clearly working for me) and for her, it's like a great comedy show. i think if i let her, she'd pop a bag of popcorn to munch while watching the hilarious flailing of mommy, sweating and moaning while i stomp, jump and crunch around the room.

aspies are often known for their lack of voice intonation and sometimes sound monotone when they speak. they often don't have very expressive faces, but brooke doesn't have those problems. she's so expressive and has recently mastered voices and accents. for a long time, reading was a really challenging thing for her, but this year, it finally clicked and now she's reading chapter books comfortably. she just read me a couple pages out of a silly book she's been reading called Hank the Cowdog and the Case of the Booby-trapped Pickup. she used different voices for different characters and pronounced all the words so well that i made a little video. it makes my heart happy to see her so fully overcome the reading challenge and actually come to a place where she's obviously enjoying reading.