Today's the SITS Back2Blogging Challenge has asked us to re-publish a blog post with a title we really like. And then we can explain its significance.

I started to post "Life is a spectrum," because I liked that one so much I changed the whole blog to that title. But I posted that so recently that it might be as irritating as when they keep re-running the same episode of Seinfeld once a week. I swear I've seen that episode about the close talker 100 times.

So instead, I picked the post below. It happened this summer, so it hasn't been that long ago. But it was a milestone day. It was the first time I caught Billy making up a game of his own. Since that red letter day, we've had lots and lots of imaginative play. Some of it has been re-enactments of his favorite books or TV shows, but some of his games are recognizable -- and understandable -- only to him. There's one that involves Batman, Noah's ark and the planet Saturn, which I still haven't figured out. But it all started with the day ...

"So a pig, an astronaut and a tractor got into a race"

originally posted 07/06/2010 08:17 pm

Today Billy staged a race between a small plastic pig from his toy farm and a tractor. It went on for quite some time. During this race, which went around and around the dining room table, he hummed the "William Tell Overture" (the Lone Ranger song). The pig won -- which might have had something to do with the fact that the tractor was pulling a trailer carrying an astronaut and Linny from the Wonder Pets -- but that's not the point of the story.

Billy is really starting to explore his imagination. He's starting to make up his own games and tell stories with new endings -- in his own way.

Many of you have been on this journey with us since I started this blog -- and some before that. You know already that we're practicing Floortime therapy, which encourages us to follow the joy of our child. Imaginary play is highly encouraged by this philosophy of autism therapy, because it encourages not only communication, but also problem-solving and thinking more abstractly.

Billy is getting it. He's making progress.

He's still a pretty concrete thinker. He can memorize anything – and I mean anything – that has a name or a number or a specific concrete label. He's not yet four and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of road machinery.

So tell me how a kid who can identify a “steel wheel soil compacter” at 50 yards is incapable of knowing when he needs the bathroom. He's messing with me. I'm telling you that he could use the potty if he wanted to, if it didn't amuse him so much to see me unravel at the seams.

But I guess knowing when he needs to go to the potty – or telling you what color a carrot is, if there's not a carrot in front of him – is still hard. Telling you what he did earlier in the day or yesterday, understanding those vague concepts of time, is next to impossible ... for now.

It's like he lives absolutely in the moment, completely immersed in whatever or whoever he's with. He's not worried about what's going to happen tomorrow, and he's not bothered by what happened yesterday. He is totally with that pig as he crosses the finish line.

I could learn a lot from him.

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This week has been a wonderful walk down memory lane. Thanks to SITS Girls, Standards of Excellence, Westar Kitchen and Bath, and Florida Builder Appliances for sponsoring this opportunity to re-share some of my favorite memories.

Albert Einstein – who many believe was on the autism spectrum himself – once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge ...”

Most children don't have to be taught to imagine; play is as natural to them as breathing. They push a car – or a block that they imagine is a car -- along the floor and say "vrroom, vroom" as soon as they can utter a sound. They cuddle baby dolls or pretend to eat or drink from toy cups and saucers. As they play at these things and imagine, they communicate, they connect with people, and they practice life skills.

Imaginative play is typically a challenge for kids on the autism spectrum. When most kids were starting to pretend, Billy was putting together the wooden track on his train table or linking up the trains and driving them along the track. When he played with blocks, his favorite game was "dominoes," in which he lined the blocks up one after another and knocked them down.

Before we knew better, we'd try to force him to act out stories with us. We bought herds of plastic Little People, toy soldiers, Disney characters, astronauts, Thomas trains and ark-loads of plastic animals. We have two doll houses, three barns, an entire plastic amusement park, a medieval fort, a Mars rover, a space shuttle, an elaborate toy kitchen, two play houses, and yes, a Noah's ark.

The lesson we learned: You cannot buy a child's imagination. At least, not Billy's.

The second lesson we learned: We can buy Willow's imagination. She jumps on any new toy like a duck on a June bug.

Following the Floortime model of “following his joy,” we invested, instead, many hours lining up both trains and blocks. Slowly – and I mean slooooooowly – things started to change.

At first, we were able to add a few minor “playful obstructions,” little challenges that complicate the game: Something is blocking the train track; the dominoes travel over and under objects, etc.

Billy still does a good bit of echolalia, repeating lines from books and TV shows. The next development step he made in imaginative play was to act out, in small ways, lines from books or TV shows. One day, several characters had a “jumping contest.” On another, an astronaut had a race with a pig. I couldn't have been happier if he'd composed a symphony.

So this summer I've made a point to spend a certain amount of time each day “practicing” imaginative play. Scheduling it might seem to defeat the purpose of following his joy, but there's method in my madness.

In the morning, I'll listen to whatever lines he's repeating. Then while he's napping, I'll try to set up the scene of that book or TV show with his toys.

For instance, one morning, he was stuck on “Where the Wild Things Are,” understandable since we'd read that as a bedtime story the night before.

While he was napping, I rounded up the characters from the story – or the closest I could approximate in our menagerie of plastic pets – and laid them out on the dining room table. Note: I moved this activity out of his play room so that he wouldn't be distracted by other toys while we were busy with our imagining.

I found one of his Little People to be Max and a taller female doll to be the mom. I found a dinosaur, a Shrek and a couple of other “wild things” and lined them up as well. I stole the bed from the dollhouse and dug out the toilet-paper-roll-boat we'd made in craft time the day before. Then I got a plate from the toy kitchen and put a plastic chicken leg on it, because as every parent knows, the story begins and ends with Max's dinner.

Billy surveyed all this with a suspicious eye. He suspected there was a lesson in it somewhere. “No circle time,” he informed me -- “circle time” is the way he describes any particularly boring lesson-like activity.

“No circle time,” I agreed. “This is about Max going to see the Wild Things.”

His eyes lit up. “Wild things!”

So I proceeded to tell the story with the characters I had laid out. I stopped to let him fill in some of he lines. His favorites: When the mother calls Max “wild thing!” and when Max threatens, “I'll eat you up!”

When we got to the part where “a forest grew” in Max's room, I felt a bump down at my thigh. Willow was holding a small house plant. I cannot say for certain that she was suggesting we use it for the forest, but I'm so used to things coming so easily to her (see her "Jurassic BooBoo" video for a masterpiece of imaginative play), that I didn't even blink at a 15-month-old making this leap. “Good idea,” I simply told her, and added it to the scene.

After a couple of rounds of Wild Things, Billy was getting a bit bored. At the next pause in my recitation, to my surprise, he changed the story.

“We have to find Saturn!” he told me and flew Max around the table.

“Saturn?” Then I realized that he was switching to his favorite episode of Little Einsteins. “No, Billy,” I corrected him, “This is Where the Wild Things Are.”

I tried to get him to bring Max back so that he could get in the little boat and sail to the window sill where Shrek and the plastic alligator were waiting. Completely forgetting that the point was for him to imagine something NEW, I was slightly irritated that my carefully laid out world wasn't getting used.

He sighed and came back to the table. We walked Max through his paces, sailing him back home to where his dinner was waiting for him. “And ...?” I prompted Billy.

He picked up the plastic chicken leg and bonked the mother on the head with it. The doll fell over. “She's dead,” he informed me, and hopped on his scooter and pushed off. I tried not to take this plot twist too personally.

Willow picked up the Mama doll, gave her a little kiss -- “Mmwah!” -- and put her in the bed. “Seepy (sleepy),” she said, pulling up the covers. She certainly is.

I learned an important lesson: Let Billy do the reciting. If he takes one look at the Wild Things set-up and wants to act out the Little Einsteins with Shrek and the dinosaur driving the Rocket, that's great.

I've gotten a little better at play time over the weeks. We used the toy barn and animals to act out the story Click, Clack, Moo. We used his Thomas trains and Little People to pretend The Little Engine That Could. And we've acted out Noah's ark ... with Batman.

And we made a Little Einsteins “golden pyramid” out of cardboard that Billy loved as much as any store-bought toy. He immediately swam all his Finding Nemo characters in and around it.

In fact, we find ourselves in a new development stage. While not inventing completely new stories yet, Billy is mixing and matching his favorites joyfully. A cow might say, “I think I can, I think I can” and a train might travel to the land of the Wild Things. Batman moves in an out of diverse roles with the ease of a plastic Lawrence Olivier.

On Monday we're going to make totem poles out of cardboard tubes, inspired by another favorite Einsteins episode. I wonder what Batman will make of those...

I sat in the corner of the speech therapy room yesterday, holding my breath. Billy was cradling a baby doll. He carefully dipped a washcloth into a tub of water and then dabbed it on the "baby's" head. A small trickle of water ran into its eyes. "She needs a towel!" Billy informed us. "Wipe her eyes!"

And he did. Then he laid the baby down, covered it with the towel, and began to recite Good Night, Beach, one of his favorite bedtime stories. He reached for the toy bottle and gave it to the baby. Then he reached for the toy juice bottle and mimed pouring it on the baby's head. We all laughed, including Billy. So he did it again.

I couldn't believe it. My child was engaging in normal, imaginative play. When offered three choices -- a toy farm, Playdough, and the baby doll -- he chose the baby doll and acted out routines with which he was familiar: bath, story time, bedtime, feeding.

This is huge for us. It was only a few months ago, when we started Floortime therapy, that the most interactive play I could really get with Billy was opening and closing doors with him. We did a lot of opening and closing doors.

He liked his toy fort. And he liked his toy barn. But mostly what he did with them was open and close the doors. If I tried to introduce some of the toy figures and engage him in interactive play, he would just turn his back on me and move on to something else.

When I questioned my fellow Floortimers -- a Yahoo! user group composed of parents, caregivers, therapists and others who are engaged in Floortime therapy -- about it, they advised me, rightfully so, that he simply wasn't ready for this level of play yet. Take it back down a step, they advised, follow his lead, and then work your way back up.

So we opened and closed doors. And Dave created a game called, "Open the latch, Daddy!" He placed his hand on the door, making it impossible for Billy to open until he asked for it. We opened and closed doors on the fort. And eventually, we had the Mickey Mouse character demand, "Open the latch, Billy!"

Slowly, Billy started allowing us to introduce the toy figures into the fort game. Then one day, I caught him acting out, word-for-word, an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, using the fort and the toy figures. When I tried to join in, he backed away. But after a week, he'd let me play too, to assume one of the characters, as long as I didn't change the story. There are not words to describe how much I came to hate the episode, "Mickey's Color Adventure." I dreamed about it.

But then one day, something clicked and Mickey was forgotten. Instead, all his figures had a jumping contest. Uniqua from the Backyardigans won almost every time, for some reason. "Yay! She did the highest jump!" he told me. And Batman was universally crap at jumping. Puff the Magic Dragon won a couple of times, but he had wings, so he was kind of cheating. Day after day, we had jumping contests on the fort.

He began to call the figures by name: Mickey Mouse, Uniqua, "the dragon," and for some reason, known only to Billy, one of the plastic Little People, a blonde girl wearing a hat, introduced herself to the others as, "Hi, I'm Uncle Wes," in a deep, gruff voice. I have no idea why he decided this character was his Uncle Wes, who is actually tall, dark-haired and bears absolutely no resemblance to a blonde little girl, but nonetheless, in our house, Uncle Wes she is.

And for the first time in the past two months, he developed an attachment to a stuffed animal, a stage most children go through at a much younger age. Tah-Tah is named after the teddy bear in the cartoon "Ira Sleeps Over," and Tah-Tah sleeps with Billy every night and travels with Billy to Nan's house whenever he "sleeps over." In the last couple of weeks, Tah-Tah has been joined by Eggbert, a large colorful catepillar; Too-Too, Tah-Tah's little brother; and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Each has a place on Billy's bed, and both Mama and Daddy have to kiss them all goodnight each night. I can hear him talking to them over the baby monitor sometimes, telling them stories and singing them songs. Sometimes, he tells them, "Too-too! Quiet! It's night-night!"

I know all this probably sounds like mundane childhood play to the parents of normally developing children, but to put things in perspective, a year ago, Billy was running over the baby doll with his Big Wheel, and he rarely said anything that wasn't repetition of a book or TV show.

In addition to practicing Floortime at home, both Billy's speech and occupational therapists at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital take a developmental approach; both are Floortime-trained. So his therapy sessions look a lot like play -- in fact, they are play -- where we try to create the desire to communicate, rather than teach him specific phrases to parrot without understanding their meaning.

We are so excited about Billy's growing interest in imaginative play that we keep adding things to his strange little town that includes a medieval fort, a carnival, an airport, two farms and a train station. It's kind of like a soap opera town. And now he also has a little play house with a Mama, Daddy and baby that allow us to act out routines and social situations and practice things like saying, "Hello" and "goodbye."

When I was looking for a doll house online, I found tons of sites where parents were demanding to know whether playing with a doll would turn their son gay. Seriously. When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was a Easy-bake Oven, and I certainly hope my son has a stronger interest in babies when he grows up than I now have in cooking.

But after Billy had bathed and fed the baby and put it to bed, he had the baby jump back up and announce, "Baby wants to play barn!" So we took out the barn, and the cow, horse, sheep and chicken had a jumping contest. The cow won.