Welcome to My Autism Insights. My name is Andrea, and I am a wife, writer, yoga teacher, gamer, and oh yeah, mom. I have two awesome children. MM is six; Gus is eight. Gus has Asperger’s Syndrome with a touch of ADHD tossed in just for kicks. We also have a kitten, who I will probably just refer to as Kitty.
I started researching and blogging about autism a couple of years ago as a way to connect to other parents. I try to keep the tone of my blog positive and accessible. There are autism blogs that focus on science and research, those who are strongly convinced that autism is reversible, those who quest for a cause so that autism can be eradicated, those who believe that autism is simply a way of being and strongly advocate for acceptance. My Autism Insights is pretty middle-of-the-road. I’m more interested in helping others deal with day-to-day issues. I’m not a scientist, but occasionally I will chime in about something newsworthy. I lean more toward the belief that autism is a way of being, and I’m not very focused on ‘fixing’ my son – he’s not broken. He does, however, have to cope with a world that he has a hard time understanding, one that has an equally hard time understanding him. So sometimes we’ll try something that might make his life a little easier. I don’t see that as contradictory to my personal stance.
Autism is challenging, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Gus could have been much, much worse off than he is. We may have had to revisit our own story of what our life, our son, should be like, but we do have a good life, and we have the most amazing son. And he is autistic. That’s just part of the package.
At some point my intention is to write a book about what I’ve learned from Gus over the past 8 years. In the meantime, I hope you’ll follow along on our journey and share your own insights as well.
Thanks for reading!
