Billy has developed his first celebrity crush. Well, it's his first if you don't count Lightning McQueen or Charlie Brown.

I'll bet when Annie Leibovitz was photographing her, Tina Fey never imagined the place of honor she would hold in our bathroom.

It's Tina Fey. There's an old, warped back issue of Vanity Fair in our bathroom, in which Fey appears on the cover in a sort of patriotic outfit. Inside, there's a photo spread of her in a skimpy outfit, dancing to Beyonce's “Crazy in Love,” according to the caption.

He is absolutely fascinated with this photo spread, studying it closely – and I mean closely, with his eyeballs practically touching the page. He imitates her dance poses with his arms, holds his head at the same angle as hers in the photos. He traces the limbs of her body with his chubby finger.

Before you get the wrong idea, this is how the scene plays out:

INT. MY BEDROOM – NIGHT.

I'm mindlessly surfing the Internet in bed when Billy comes barreling in a full tilt, shouting at the top of his lungs and running towards my bathroom.

BILLY: I NEED TO POO-POO! WHERE IS TINA FEY?!

I practically fall out of my bed in my efforts to assist him. I will do anything to make poo-pooing a success.

CUT TO:

INT. JUST OUTSIDE THE MASTER BATHROOM – A MOMENT LATER

Various magazines and catalogs come flying out.

ME (OFF-SCREEN): Can't you read Highlights?! How about the Toys R Us catalog?!

BILLY (OFF-SCREEN): Mamaaaaaaaaaa!! Need to poopoooooooooooooo!

Obviously, we MUST find Tina Fey then.

CUT TO:

INT. INSIDE THE MASTER BATHROOM – A MINUTE AFTER THAT

Billy is perched happily atop the toilet with his face close to an inappropriate part of Tina Fey's body. I am slumped against the wall, exhausted.

BILLY: Tiny Fey is very talented.
(He has heard me say this.)

Then ...

Billy stands up and claps.

BILLY (CONT.): Yay! That was a good poo-poo!
(He has also heard me say that.)

Thank you, Tina Fey. Wherever you are. Thank you.

This masterpiece is available as a T-shirt, wall clock or hand puppet for a small fee.

It's weird the things that stick out in your memory. I can remember one Thanksgiving while I was still in elementary school when the teacher had given us the assignment to take each letter in the word “Thanksgiving” and come up with one thing for which we were thankful starting with that letter.

I was going like gangbusters till I got to “V.” I couldn't think of a single thing. “V?!” What is there to be thankful for that starts with a “V?” I didn't care anything about the violin, was completely ambivalent about the state of Virginia and verbs.

I was so proud of myself when I finally came up with “vision” that I turned to the girl next to me to show off. Her “V” word was “Very Happy.”

That didn't even make sense. How could you be thankful for “very happy?” I can remember trying to explain to her how that didn't make sense ...

And 30-plus years later it's still bothering me, because I am THAT much of a nerd. A nerd who LOVES the holidays. I love getting turkey crafts sent home in the kids backpacks and going to parties where the kids wear slightly racist Indian headdresses and we celebrate the fact that we left England for a better life! (That last bit is a little in-joke between me and the hubby. He calls Thanksgiving “That time of year when you Yanks celebrate giving smallpox to the natives, right?”)

I have so much to be thankful for this week, this year, and I'm going to do it (literally) old school-style:

T is for toilet-training! We're 90 percent there! I can't get any more specific without spoiling your Thanksgiving dinner.

H is for hair cuts. My beautiful little man finally got one from the nicest, most patient beautician at a Supercuts. Her name was Mary. Now that we've started reading Christmas stories, every time the Nativity comes up, Billy points out “Baby Jesus and Joseph and Mary ... Mary cuts your hair.”

A is for autism. It's always there; a part of every holiday, for better or worse.

N is for Nan, as her grandkids call my mom. She has a close relationship with all her grandchildren, and particularly with Billy. There are so many times that she can get through to him when no one else can. He's made so many breakthroughs in her company. It just goes to show that sometimes love is the best therapy.

K is for Kindermusik! I discovered both Billy and Willow's love and talent for music in this special class, and we'll miss it after this semester when our wonderful Ms. Jaci moves on to other musical opportunities. So, Jaci, next semester we're cool to just drop them off at your house on Saturday mornings, right?

S is for Sisters: Mine is hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year! Thank goodness, because my house currently looks like we keep a herd of goats in the living room. “S” is also for Willow's favorite new way of describing herself: “I saucy!” she tells us regularly.

G is for gymnastics. Billy rules the school on the balance beam. This from the kid who literally falls out of his chair at the dinner table 16 times before he can finish a cheese sandwich.

I is for “I,” a pronoun that Billy has started occasionally using. It's still a rare occurrence, and you're still likely to hear him scream, “You don't need a poo-poo!” at the top of his lungs, much to the alarm of passersby.

V is for vegetables, which thanks to ABA therapy, we are occasionally managing to get our son to swallow. With great effort. And bribery. Um, I mean reinforcers.

I is for Immodium and Immodium for Kids, without which our family wouldn't have made it through the last week. (Am I oversharing again?)

N is for neurotypical. I may write more about Billy, because this is an autism blog. But I thank God every day for both my kids and the fact that the second one has been so easy ... which probably means, of course, that on her 16^th birthday she's going to get her eyelids pierced and elope with a motorcycle gang. Eh, it's still been worth it.

G is for gang. HA! Just kidding. Actually, I'll go with that – my gang. You know who you are. I'm related to some of you. Some of you I've adopted because you listen to me whine so regularly that you're entitled to be the beneficiary on something. Some of you I've never actually met, officially, face-to-face, but I talk about you to the rest of the gang so frequently that we've decided to give you a jacket and let you in on the secret handshake. To all of you: Thank you.

Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

I was burning up with fever a few nights ago and Billy put his face close to mine. “Dalmation ... BALmation!!” he screamed with laughter at the hilarity of his joke about the 101 Dalmations and nearly fell off my bed. Then, in case I wasn't aware of his intent (and to be honest, it's hard to tell sometimes), he pressed his nose close to mine and grinned widely as he informed me, “I making kidding ... IN YOUR FACE!”

Knock Knock! Who's there? And at that point, he usually wanders off ...

At some point over the last couple of weeks, Borat moved into my house.

It's glorious. For the first time, Billy is making spontaneous comments about the world around him. It's sometimes in the broken, kookily-constructed English of an enthusiastic new immigrant from ... I don't know, maybe another planet ... but it is English. And it's not scripts he learned from books or movies.

Usually, it's narration of the world around him, particularly on the way to or from school: “That girl is driving a scooter.” “We have 101 trees!” Or “That dog is having a poo-poo.” Yes, keep walking.

On a few rare occasions, we've gotten a glimpse into something we'd never have known if he hadn't been able to tell us. “I'm thinking about ... Ms. Thorp.” Mrs. Thorp was his pre-K teacher last year. We haven't seen her since June, but he loved her. Knowing he was thinking about her inspired me to pull out pictures from last year and look at them together, remembering his friends and teachers and aides.

And occasionally, we're totally confused. Like the morning he came up to me and said, “I'm sorry, Mama.”

“What's wrong, baby?” I asked him.

“I'm scared of kangaroos,” he told me and jumped up into my lap for a big hug.

We just sort of sat there like that for a minute, as I tried to come up with a response -- “Fear of kangaroos” is not covered in What to Expect in the Toddler Years, but then again, neither is most of our life. And I finally just explained to him that we luckily live in Florida where there are no kangaroos, but if one starts bothering him, to be sure and let me know.

He could be calling the neighbor's dog a “kangaroo.” Or it could be some uniquely Billy way of saying he needs the bathroom. Or he could actually mean he actually hates kangaroos. (When you think about it, with the pockets and the jumping – on some level, it just ain't right.) Without a trip to Planet Autism, we may never understand it.

Anyway, the inexplicable kangaroo phobia aside, it's been an amazing couple of weeks, watching his words emerge. He's had words, of course, for a couple of years now, but mostly of the scripted variety. Or commands along the lines of, “Juice!” or “Be happy!”

Now he can talk about his favorites: “I love this story,” about 101 Dalmations.

And things he hates: “I don't need bananas!” Anything he doesn't like is something he doesn't need.

But the greatest breakthrough of the last six months came a few nights ago. He was sitting on the toilet, where we hang out a lot these days, as we've also been making big strides in the potty training arena.

He was reading his “magazine,” what he calls the Toys R Us catalog that came in the mail. He likes to look at toy catalogs, not because he wants to acquire the goods, but because he likes to look at pictures of other kids playing with toys. He's not interested in pictures of merchandise. But show him a picture of a kid actually playing with Legos, and he'll study it for 15 minutes.

As we waited for the magic to happen, he carefully looked over each page of his catalog, and I perused the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog to see what useless products like Circulation Improving Leg Wraps and a genuine 7-foot Robby the Robot from Lost in Space are going for these days ($149.95 and $50,000, respectively). So that's the scene.

Billy: That boy is making some golf.

Me: (without looking up) That boy is playing golf.

Billy: That girl is having a haircut.

Me: Yeah! Good job. (Then I actually look at the page.) Wait. She's asleep. What makes you think she's having a hair cut?

But Billy is already studying another picture. He's concentrating really hard. I can see the wheels turning and know he wants to say something. Finally, he points at the picture and looks at me.

Billy: Mama! What ... are ... they ... doing?

I drop my catalog to the floor. Instantly, tears are streaming down my face. It's incredible how fast that happened and I'm laughing and hugging him and explaining that the kids are jumping on a blow-up trampoline.

He has no idea what has happened and kind of wriggles out of my grasp so he can turn the page.

But I'm frozen and still wiping tears and I want to go tell Dave but I'm afraid Billy might want to ask another question and --

He asked a question. A WHAT question. A question that showed curiosity. A question whose purpose was just to get more information.

Prior to that day, the only questions we'd ever heard him ask – outside of repeating scripts – were “Where?” questions: “Where is Mama?” “Where are the crayons?” And even those are rare.

I'll be here all week ...

We sat there for another half-hour, looking at the toy catalog together, talking about the pictures. He asked me, “What are they doing?” a couple more times, like an old pro. And I couldn't stop crying those tears of joy the whole time.

If you can ask questions and listen to the answers, you can learn just about anything. Without the curiosity to ask, though, without the passion to find out the answers to questions, learning is really difficult.

So we've made another step. A big step. Towards what ... we're still finding out. Right now, based on the subjects about which he shows the most curiosity and for which he has the most passion, Billy's headed for a career as either a professional bowler, Dalmation breeder or pumpkin salesman. Or the world's greatest autistic comedian.

Ok, maybe comedian is still a stretch.

I'm making kidding. In your face.

We're still big fans of our new iPad, the biggest drawback being the sheer volume of apps out there that we have yet to try, a lot of them completely FREE. I thought that as Billy finds his favorites, I'd spotlight them, in case you're looking for a great distraction, reward or skill-builder.

AutismXpress
FREE
A simple program that animates faces with different emotions. Choose “Happy” and a goofy cartoon laughs. Choose “Angry” and a red-faced blob bares his teeth, frowns and growls. I'm not sure how educational “Gassy” and “Burpy” are but Billy loves them.

Dr. Seuss books
$3.99 each
We have Oh the Places You Will Go, Green Eggs and Ham, and Dr. Seuss' ABCs, and each one has been played over and over by both kids. The great thing about these books is the interactivity. When you touch a picture anywhere on the page, you see and hear the word associated with it. You can choose “Read it myself” or “Read to me” options.

iGoPotty
FREE

From the geniuses who brought us Pull-ups. Billy LOVES LOVES LOVES this app. We have absolutely no problem about going to the potty now. When I click a button it sings, “I'm a big kid now!” and he stops whatever he's doing and starts dancing along to the music towards the potty. If he goes, he gets to click “I used the potty!” and gets an animated “sticker.” After nine stickers, the app reveals a new game, such as a drawing program or a matching game.

Kindergarten.com Apps
$0.99 each
ABA-based flashcard game designed to help kids categorize objects and people and develop more functional language skills. We've noticed a bit of echolalia/scripting after use of one set a few times, but luckily, there are more sets out there. I would recommend using this one as a jumping-off point for conversations, even if they get the answer “wrong.” For instance, if Billy is asked to “Choose the one you sit on,” and he points to the baby, we talk about what would happen if we sat on a baby.

Look In My Eyes
$2.99
Interesting practice for making eye contact; suggested for kids with high-functioning autism or Asperger's. Close-up photos of smiling kids appear and within a second or two, a number flashes in the center of the child's eyes. Billy's job is then to click the right number on a keypad. If he gets the number right, he earns “money,” which he can then spend to buy food in a cartoon fast-food restaurant or buy furniture – either way, he doesn't care anything about that part. I haven't noticed any definite increase in eye contact in the real world but stay tuned ...

Solar Walk
$2.99
Beautiful tour of the solar system with a 3-D option and groovy space music in the background. You can highlight each planet and its moons, drill into its core, read about its stats, check out pictures of the satellites that have orbited it, etc. You can drag the planets around and rotate them, so that you can look at their dark sides, light sides, orbits and relation to the rest of the solar system. Can't recommend this one highly enough! We use it as a post-bedtime story, lights out activity, and as a reward for successfully completing his nighttime routine.

First Words / First Words Christmas
FREE / $1.99 – 4.99
Drag and drop letters into the right position to form words. As soon as the words are in the right order, the picture of the object animates. There's a “lite” version that's free with a variety of words like “cat,” “train” and “cake.” You can also get sets of words with themes like “animals” or “around the house.” Billy liked the free version so much that we bought the deluxe set for $4.99 and then because we're all about Christmas in this house, the Christmas First Words for $1.99.

Ocean Blue
$9.99
A beautiful virtual ocean aquarium but not really worth the $10 price tag – unless you have an autistic child obsessed with fish who finds staring at it soothing. There are two different environments you can choose from for your fish and eight different animals, including a variety of fish, a shark and a sea turtle, that you can add to the environment. I'm a bit concerned at how much time he spends electrocuting the fish. But then again, WHY is electrocution of the fish an option? You can also feed the fish, take pictures of them or flush them. Yay. But it IS beautiful; the graphics are second-to-none.

Snowman 3D
$0.99
Mr. Potato Head in Snowman form. This cool little app lets you roll up three snowballs with your finger, stack them up, then choose from a variety of eyes, noses, hats, mouths, and bits of flair to add to your virtual Frosty. You can make a snowman that looks like a pirate or one that looks like a clown – or Billy's favorite, the pirate clown. This is a fun way to discuss body parts. And pirates.

Virtuoso
FREE
This is the kind of app that just blows my feeble mind. How does the same screen become a field of snow you can roll into snowballs in one application and in the next, it's a dueling piano? So so cool. I taught Billy to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on this piano, which keeps him busy long enough for us to manage to eat a meal in a restaurant. You can apparently upgrade to a “pro” version of this piano for $0.99 but I don't know how much more you'd want out of an iPad piano or how many pros are going to be bringing this along to gigs, but if you've upgraded, let us know if it's worth the 99 cents.

Two steps forward, one step back.

It happens. Sometimes it feels like one giant step back. Sometimes you wonder whose feet are being used to measure these steps. But rest assured, you will start moving forward again.

Let me explain: At the beginning of the summer, my son morphed into the Tazmanian Freakin' Devil for about three weeks or so. It wasn't his fault. He went through three or four different viruses, back-to-back and felt like crap for the better part of a month.

We had little-to-no schedule that month, since Billy's sleep patterns and energy level were affected by fevers, itchy hives and nausea. We were quarantined so that other kids wouldn't catch his highly contagious “cattle” virus, and we watched too much TV, ate too much sugar and got too little exercise and fresh air.

By the end of that month, he and his sister were both like a couple of feral children. And I was like that Golum character in Lord of the Rings, hiding from the light and fighting them for “my precious,” which was usually an ice cream sandwich or the remote.

As we approached the end of June and I was constantly complaining about raising a hobbit, I had a couple of experienced autism moms tell me, “Sometimes there's a period of bad behavior right before a big cognitive leap.”

And I thought, “Yeah, right. Then he's about to start doing calculus.”

So we actually started our summer around the end of June, and I did what I always do when I'm stressed and scared of the job of parenting: I started organizing. We had an obsessively structured schedule -- illustrated on a picture schedule -- field trips, craft projects, and group communication therapy on Thursday afternoons.

Occasionally, a giant happy face would show up on the picture schedule. That was Mama's “happy hour” (actually15 minutes) when I would lie on the coach, moan softly, pray and peel “Finding Nemo” stickers out of my hair.

I walked him and Willow almost daily to the campus of his new school, which was just around the corner (yay, Buck Lake!), introduced him to the playground and drew chalk graffiti on the basketball court. During our day, I tried to use language and activities that they used in school, so that he wouldn't forget the meaning of phrases like “circle time,” “table toys,” and “don't rifle through the teacher's purse.”

We had goals: potty training, improving handwriting (as in having some handwriting) and getting him out of his house bed.

The first week, I felt like I was trying to teach a wild badger to write his name. He protested almost everything almost all the time. When I brought out the Handwriting Without Tears sticks, he would scream, “Throw them in the garbage!” At first, I begged him to participate. Then I gave up and we played a game of throwing everything in the “garbage,” which was actually a big toy box.

To be honest, the next six weeks are kind of a blur. I have a vague recollection of breaking up fights, going bowling, visiting the museum and scaring the fish at Petsmart. And I have a few scars as reminders of incidents that resulted in some of my most interesting “Mom injuries.” At some point, he stopped using his HWOT sticks as weapons and learned to write pretty much every letter of the alphabet. And a week before school started, he was sleeping in a “big boy bed.” Occasionally, inside a net laundry basket, but he was in the bed.

We made some serious progress on potty training, but we're not totally there yet. He's still dealing with some communication barriers. Communicating the concept of something that's about to happen is a step he's yet to make – but he's getting there. I'm not stressing over this one.

Because we had breakthroughs that we never expected. We had a breakthrough bonanza this summer.

His imaginative play made huge strides forward. He uses more functional (non-repetitive) language than ever before, and he's telling us about things he did during the day, things he likes, emotions he feels. He's telling us in very simple sentences, but the sentences are his own – not Charlie Brown's or Nemo's or, the tow truck from the “Cars” movie.

He knows the alphabet, numbers to 20 and a few nursery rhymes in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Hebrew. I'm not exaggerating.

He can put on his own socks and manage his potty process almost completely independently. He started eating turkey. He can draw a person and a spider and a house and write his name and the word “Mom.” He knows all the words and motions to “The 12 Days of School” and can do a pretty hilarious Boston accent.

He used to completely melt down if anyone went anywhere near his head, but he now lets us wash his hair. And (HUGE MOMENT FOR US) he endured a salon haircut without a meltdown!

He enjoyed his birthday! And made friends. He got a scooter and can ride it so well that he's now cutting doughnuts in the living room floor. From there, he moved on to riding his tricycle – a process that frustrated and upset him as recently as this past May.

Most of this seemed to happen almost overnight. It really was like a breaking through process. Maybe there really is something to the theory that a cognitive leap is preceded by a period of bad behavior. Maybe the last two years of therapy prepared him to make this big jump. Maybe it's all down to what my dad calls “scooter therapy.” I really don't know. That's all part of the autism puzzle.

But I'm writing all this not just to brag about my super-awesome son. I want you to know that a change is gonna come. Usually, the changes are so gradual and steady that you might not notice them. You'll just suddenly find yourself looking back on a picture of a day a year ago and thinking to yourself, “Wow, this year he didn't kick any of the pumpkins from the pumpkin patch into moving traffic. Score!”

But sometimes, a plateau will come. Or maybe worse: You'll feel like you're taking a step backward. Behaviors you haven't seen in months pop back up and a couple of positive things seem to disappear.

Absolutely mention these things to your therapist(s) and teachers and other people on your team. They may have some thoughts about what's going on. And talk to other experienced parents and caregivers. Chances are, they'll tell you they've seen the same thing, and that it'll pass. They'll tell you what I'm telling you: Don't panic. Keep doing what you're doing.

And when it does pass, you might find yourself gifted with some new, glorious breakthrough.

Billy's had a great couple of weeks at school. He's also had some bumps on the road. The first couple of days of school, we heard all echolalia, all the time. I was suddenly living with Leo from The Little Einsteins – and he's not even my favorite Einstein. There were so many changes, Billy was stressed – both good and bad stress – and he didn't really know how to deal with it.

There was a time when I would have run screaming to the nearest snake oil salesman to try and devise some crazy rain dance to make the echolalia go away. And there are times, during the dark night of the soul, when I'm still tempted in that direction.

But by the end of his first week, Billy was napping at school, participating in activities, and climbing in my lap at the end of the day, wrapping his arms around me and whispering, “Love you, love you, love you...”

Hang in there. On the other side of this bump in the road, there may be something beautiful.

Billy has been walking around this week, reciting the same line from “It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” over and over.

It's the scene where Lucy tries to get Charlie Brown, once again, to kick the football she's holding. She promises him that she means it this time, that she won't pull the ball away at the last minute. In fact, she even has a contract to that effect, which she shows him.

Of course, at the last minute, she pulls the ball away and Charlie Brown goes flying. “Curious thing about this document,” Lucy says. “It was never notarized.” That's the line that, for some reason, Billy can't get out of his head.

This got me thinking about a couple of things. First of all, the kids in Charlie Brown cartoons are really mean and terrible role models.

Secondly, I thought, OK, Bucko, if you're interested in contracts, let's make one for the summer. We have nearly three months at home ahead of us, me and you and Willow, and we need to establish some ground rules. So here goes ...

My SUMMER CONTRACT WITH BILLY

The house rule “Please don't poke Mama in the eyes” still stands. But let's agree not to share it repeatedly with guests or people at church. I'll take my chances with them.

I promise to keep your baby sister away from your train table if you promise not to sit on her. For long.

If you will nap for two hours every afternoon, I will buy you a car.

If a thunderstorm scares you, you can crawl into my bed with me and we'll watch cartoons the rest of the day.

If you force me to watch “The Great Pumpkin” more than five times in a row, I am entitled to throw the television out the window. Upstairs.

In the event that it rains three consecutive days in a row and you are unable to go outside, I reserve the right to call in the babysitter, lock the door of the playroom from the outside and drink heavily in my bedroom. You may paint anything within arm's length, including the aforementioned babysitter, until the sun comes out.

I promise not to loudly ask, “Have you done a poo-poo?” in public any more – after all, you'll be four next month – if you promise not to loudly proclaim “Chugga-chugga POOOOO-POOOOO!” in the library. (For supporting documentation, refer to the book “The Potty Train.”)

On the day you poop in the potty, I will sign the house over to you.

If you stumble and fall, I will be there to pick you up every single time, kiss it better, and immdiately apply a “Bang-aid” if required. In return, you promise not to seal your sister's eyes shut with Bang-aids.

At 5:30 each and every weekday, I transfer power of attorney over to your father. Any and all requests for juice, fixing of broken toys or watching of the “Great Pumpkin” must go through him until such time as I emerge from a hot bath with my game face on again.

I will throw you the birthday party of your dreams this year and every year ... if you promise not to grow up too fast.

If you will hold my hand this summer and put up with me, I'll hold yours and find joy in each and every day we share together.

Please sign at the left if you agree.