How Gabe sees it...

We see a screen door. Gabe is more amazed at how it feels. Running his fingers across the screen feels so neat. We see a TV that's turned off. Gabe see's a wonderful opertunity to paint it with his tongue. We see a match box car. Gabe see's every tiny detail right down to the little number 3 on the door or the flames on the hood. Water coming out of a sprinkler looks awesome if you bend down to just the right level. A cupcake should never be cut in half. And spinning in a circle on Grandma's office chair is amazing as the different colors zoom by.

What's so wrong with running your fingers across the screen door? Or spinning around in a chair for 20min at a time? I don't know. But some people find that weird. Me, I am amazed by how much Gabe see's that we don't. Every feather on a bird, the detail in a painting, the perfect shadown on the wall, the way you can line up toy cars in just the right way to make a square.

Gabe is one neat kid. I am so proud to call him my son. He has been so great the past two days. I almost forgot he was autistic until tonight. We went to my dad's for dinner and there were more people there then I knew were coming. If there are going to be a lot of people I usually tell Gabe. Today I didn't know. He burried his head so far into my leg I thought we were going to need the jaws of life to get him out. He refused to stay on the deck with these strange people. He spent most of the evening on the grass. Finally he came up on the deck with us but he spent a lot of his time in his little world. My dad would talk to him but there was no responce. He just sat and blew the pinwheel my step mom gave him. Of course there were fleeting moments of coherent Gabe but they were quickly lost. I could see the look on my dad's neighbors face when she tried to give Gabe sunglasses. He turned completly away from her with a blank look on his face. And in that split second I read her mind and it said, "wonder what's wrong with him?". And my heart broke.

Autism isn't like cerbral palsy. No one can see it. Gabe is the little boy that doesn't talk well, is bad, doesn't listen, can't sit still, and even worse dumb. The sad thing is he can talk in his head. He knows what he wants to say. But he can't say it. He does listen but he doesn't always hear everything that we are saying. Sitting still isn't easy when the world if full of exciting and wonderful things. And he is definatly not a dumb child. Sometimes I feel like yelling to the world...please be patient...Gabe has autism...but would the world really listen?....

This is a long road...but Gabe is going to do great things...I just know it...