Winter Hiatus

What a beautiful winter day!!  The temperature was 60 degrees (with no rain in sight) when I brought Bobby home from school today.  I brought him inside, dropped off his backpack, changed his shoes and coat and we were outside to get some much needed sunshine and vitamin D.   He ran around the yard once...

He finally ran to his favorite spot, sat down and stayed for about an hour...

He has a loose dirt patch in this spot that he has made for himself.  He gets two handfuls of dirt and packs it together...

He then takes one hand and wiggles his fingers up against the dirt until all of the dirt has fallen out to the ground...

For some unknown reason, this activity calms him tremendously.  This was the first time in a couple of weeks that he was totally relaxed and happy.  It gives him the same feeling that I would have if I went on a shopping spree with unlimited money or if Daddy went on a weekend golf trip with the fellas with unlimited beer and hot wings. 

There are two schools of thought on letting kids with autism "stim" (self-stimulating behavior, which can be flapping hands, spinning, or in this case shuffling dirt in his hands).  One school says not to let the kids retreat into their own world, but to keep them doing activities that are typical to all children (extreme overgeneralization of the concept!!), while the other school says that they need to be themselves too.   After seeing Bobby this happy, I am pretty sure that I could not banish him from this activity.

When got up and found a new spot and them immediately laid down for a while.  An hour of watching Bobby play in dirt was long enough for me, so I promised him some "bubbles".  Back to the house we went for one of his favorite activities...

Thanks to an extremely windy day, we went through three containers of bubbles.  I just had to hold the wand out and the wind did the rest.

When I took a break Bobby picked up the bubble wand and brought it to me.  MORE BUBBLES!!!

It is extremely hard to blow bubbles and take pictures at the same time, so I didn't get any really good ones of bubbles.  I did, however, get some of Bobby being happy. 

On a side note, I got all of the outdoor Christmas decorations down today since it was so nice!!!  Yeah me.

Here's a picture of Bobby before school yesterday.  He is dressed to celebrate the Orange Bowl win.  Way to go cousin Geno!!  We are all Smiths after all!!