Teamwork

My husband and I have incredible teamwork when it comes to my autistic son. For example, yesterday Daegan was outside playing with his brothers. I poked my head out to check on them. He was 'painting' the play equipment. Now I won't go into detail about his choice of medium. I'll only say it's brown, smelly, and came from his own body. You'll just have to use your imagination.

It will tell you a lot about our family by each of our reactions to the situation. I said, "Oh dear." and, grabbing both of his wrists, took him directly into the bathtub to clean up. His two brother glanced up briefly then kept playing without saying anything. Terry, who had been changing in the other room, and upon hearing my comment, immediately walked outside to hose everything off. Delanie's friend, who was over at the time, ran to the door to see what was going on. She was appropriately horrified as she yelled "Daegan is smearing dog poo!" To which my daughter, who was sitting at the table doing homework simply said, "No, it's his poo." The disturbing part of this exchange is that Delanie never even looked up. She was just assuming.

I'll have to admit this has not been my favorite stage of Daegan's. But before you start feeling sorry for us you have to know that as I sat on the toilet scrubbing his body all I could think was how lucky we were that he was outside this time. After all, the hose doesn't quite reach inside so easily.