Can You Turn on the Water Please?

Ok, normally the whole "turn the water on" line comes with the general thought of someone going "tee-tee" and needing the water on to go right? Nope. Not for us. I'll admit that all things autism have taken a backseat on my roller coaster the last two weeks. First, my grandmother passed away on Thursday, February 7th. She was 98 and god love her, she had one long and awesome life. Exactly a week later on Thursday, February 14th her sister passed away. (Happy Valentine's Day, huh?) Check please! That's enough of the family passing away for a while if you ask me. Speaking of Valentine's day, I hope everyone had an enjoyable Valentine's day this year. I'll post my cute idea that I made for teachers gifts this year when I get to it. (I need to add that to my to-do list or it will be Christmas before I post it, ha) What did we do for Valentine's Day? Absolutely NOTHING! We literally went to bed and slept and that was perfectly O.K. for this exhausted Momma. And there you have it... the recap of my last two weeks in about 6 sentences.  

Back to the point of this post. I have been a little M.I.A from the blog world the last few weeks, but cut me some slack, it's been hectic! I kind of feel like things are getting back to normal though. John's out of town for work until Friday (weird that's what I consider normal isn't it?) and the kids and I are back to my drill sergeant ways of having things on a list and checking them off so we can survive til' the weekend. Sooooo I got back to researching autism and looking for new reading material and resources, not to mention making my lists for the city schools application for therapies they offer to private school children with disabilities (who knew right?) but that's another post (dang make that two things to add to the to-do list). Tonight I was researching autism and sleep- or lack thereof. Jackson often times has a hard time falling asleep and will sometimes lay in bed awake for hours, yes hours before he finally conks out. 

He then wakes up the next day with bags under his eyes and super lethargic to get moving in the morning. Sure doesn't speed up the process in getting ready for school either. So I wanted to see if there was anything out there to help with the whole "sleeplessness" that he seems to struggle with besides a dose of melatonin every night. Meds are not my first choice in helping him so I am always looking for other ways to achieve the same thing the meds do, well.....minus the meds. 

I came across several home remedies, do this, tried that's of things parents, doctors and anyone remotely internet savvy has posted about on the subject of autism and sleep and the reality is well, kids with autism just have a hard time sleeping sometimes! From weighted blankets to back rubs to black-out curtains, there were lots of suggested aids. I did find that some people recommend noise machines, sounds, etc. So I thought, what the heck. I got on my spotify account and started searching "nature" for any noise-making-theraputic-nature-sounding-ish (that's the technical term there :) uhhh music that I could find. And I found this waterfall earth track that's about 4 minutes so I added to a playlist for Jackson, put that sucker on repeat and told him to lay there in his bed and just listen to the water. 

Once he is asleep, he sleeps like a ROCK (no idea who he gets that from - Dad), but until he falls asleep he hears every creak and crack and gets distracted by even the heat cutting on in the house. It really sounded like a huge faucet on full blast with the volume so loud. But he seemed to lay there and listen and so I left him in his room with faux Niagara Falls, HA! I came back 10 minutes later to find... A SLEEPING BOY! Whoo hoo! Wish I had thought of this about 3 years ago to help him get to sleep faster! Who knew the simplest thing would work for him. 

I am hoping this will be one of those little victories we can check off the list of "things that help with autism" for Jackson, so we'll see if it has the same affect tomorrow or if he gets bored with the whole pretend waterfall. Since I've recently been surrounded by all things "life" that are sad and hard to deal with lately, I thought I'd post on a small victory of a happiness. A sleeping boy and a happy Mommy.  

Fingers crossed for continued running water and a sleeping boy. 

~EM