October 27, 2008 @ 22:35

Last week, Puppy went on his first field trip to a pumpkin farm.  It was a week filled with anxiety.  For him.  And regret for me.  For not figuring out earlier what was going on in his little head.  On Monday, they did a practice run with the bus and all the kindergartners.  There are about a hundred of them at Puppy’s school.  Now imagine them all crowded onto two big yellow school busses.  Fun?  Yeah, for about a minute.  And for Puppy, not even for that long.  The noise and the rowdiness was overwhelming.  He had what I suppose you might call a little boy version of a panic attack.  He curled up into the fetal position and began to rock with his hands over his ears and cried.  He had to be carried off the bus.  When I picked him up that day his teacher took me aside and told me what had happened.  We agreed that the bus was not an okay place for him.  Not for now, anyway.  I would take the day off and we would go to the farm with his class, but we would follow the busses in our own car.  No problem.  Except for one thing.  It didn’t occur to me to explain this to Puppy.  For the most of the remainder of the week, he seemed to be just fine.  I didn’t talk to him about the trip.  I had made the decision with his teacher, problem sovled.  Right?  But what I hadn’t thought of was that for the rest of the week in his class they would be talking about the trip.  Building it up, getting excited.  Wednesday afternoon a meeting ran late at my office.  I normally pick him up at his class so that he doesn’t have to wait in the crowded cafeteria with the K through 4th graders.  As you can imagine, it’s not good for him.  But I was too late for the early pick up.  When I arrived he had been in the cafeteria for 15 minutes.  He was sitting against a wall by himself away from the other children crying softly and had worried a tear into the leg of his jeans from knee to ankle.  Lately he’s been fidgeting with tags and strings and any little thing that is “off” with his clothes.  Those little side tags inside t-shirts actually comfort him.  He holds the tag between his thumb and first finger and continuously rubs a tiny circle.  It makes me think of Linus with his blanket.  But this tear was a self soothing moment gone on too long.  A boy having to work too hard to hang in there.  Still I didn’t make the connection.  Thursday night, at around eleven, he woke up terrified.  He has frequent nightmares, so I wasn’t surprised, until in an uncharacteristic moment of clarity and in words that are usually beyond his ability, he began to talk to me.  He gripped my shirt collar into his two little fists and with his head tucked under my chin he told me what was wrong . . . 

“Mommy, they won’t be quiet and leave me alone.  And my feet won’t stay on the ground.  The world is spinning and I can’t find it with my feet.  It won’t stop spinning!  Please make it stop, Mommy!  I don’t want to go to the field trip.  I don’t want to ride on the school bus!” 

Suddenly I got it.  There it was.  In words that perfectly (and not a little bit frighteningly) described his panic moment on the bus on Monday.  It hit me like a train what he’d been fearing all week.  I quickly explained to him that we didn’t have to go on the school bus.  That I would take him to the pumpkin farm in our car.  His reaction was immediate.  The tension ran out of his little body.  He tentatively asked me a couple of questions.  As we talked I realized that all that week, in his mind the tension had been mounting.  As the field trip day was getting nearer he was growing more and more afraid.  And all I had to do to make it better was just to talk to him.  He began to get excited about the trip.  And by the time we were sitting in line behind the busses on Friday morning, safely buckled into our car, he was beyond happy to be going.  So we were able to go and enjoy a hayride, a nature hike, a visit to the one room school house and the 1908 cabin, a class taught by Tahwilla about our Native American heritage, farm animals (including a very stinky goat and some beautiful gooses), a treasure dig for dinasaur eggs, water pump duck races, panning for gold and of course, the pumpkin patch.  This was a really cool field trip.  Lesson learned by Mommy, fun had by boy. 

Do these things ever get old?  I think not. Just a hole cut in a painted piece of plywood.  Awesome! 

Mr. Donkey 

Tahwilla 

The water pump, for which we almost managed to wait our turn patiently. 

And of course, the punkin loot. 

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Autism?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.