Shell Creek Publishing

Good Books for Rainy Days

As part of autism awareness, I would like to announce our upcoming book about our family and experiences with autism. The book has completed our editing process and I am in the process of pulling it together for publication. The plan is for a release in September 2017 and I will be posting more information during the next few months. Writing this book has not been easy for my husband or myself, but the feedback we’ve received has been positive. I hope that sharing our experience can help other families.

My family is interested in photography and I taking pictures when out on walks. On one of these walks, I saw two signs next to each other that caused me to pause at the odd message. The top sign read “CLOSED” while the lower sign displayed in large letters “JOIN US!”. They caught my eye because of the implied contradiction. I wondered about times when I have said something, then contradicted myself. I suspect it has happened at least once or twice. :-)

I continue to learn about autism and I found a new concept, autistic burnout. The term is not an official diagnosis but adults on the spectrum have reported on it. It occurs when an autistic person is spending their time and energy trying to appear normal without any break or rest.  Due to the stress of maintaining normalcy, the body and mind wear out and the person suffers from burnout. When this occurs, the person loses skills for social situations, and suffers from fatigue, depression, insomnia, increased illness, and anxiety.

In the last few years I’ve been reading articles by autistic adults. Many of these adults comment about parents how children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are treated.  One of the common issues in these articles is parents focus on curing autism instead of providing support. Autistic adults view this as an attack on them and a lack of empathy for their difficulties.

Late night thoughts, we made it through the stormy weather last weekend, with no damage. The flowers out front were flattened, but they have recovered. More importantly, all of our trees stayed up, including the big ones next to the power lines. The area is certainly green this year after all of this rain. And more rain forecast for this weekend! I'm starting to think about gardening but first we are going to have to come up with some rodent proofing for the beds. All of the critters have more than enough food this year, they don't need veggies from my garden.

There is something about rainy weather that inspires me to post. Another storm is moving in, the rain has just started in our area. There are predictions of high wind, I hope our home is protected from some of that, especially our trees. Amazing how much information I can get about this storm, I can see the radar images, with intense activity, read tweets from the local news station with pictures of fallen trees and the rain and get feedback from people in our neighborhood about rainfall and flooding.

Went walking with my son today, on a trail by the San Diego River. A few of the photos I took while we were out.

The start of our walk, looking back towards the hills around Lakeside