Surviving the Holidays

Given that Thanksgiving was this past weekend, and Penny’s birthday, Halloween, and Christmas activities are on their way, I thought I’d talk about surviving special events.

Special events and activities are awesome and I love them, but they can be really hard for the kids. My kids thrive with routine – if there’s changes to that in any way, it’s hard, but when you add in the increased socialisation and really just different expectations of them, my kids often struggle.

As a family, we could just skip things altogether, but I’m not quite ready to do that for everything yet. So, we try to adapt activities and events to their needs but still participate. Like, we always do Quiet Santa at the Autism Society – no lines, no forced sitting in laps, and beautiful pictures with Santa. When we can, we try to host events at our house so the kids can roam around as they please – this tends to be a bit more relaxing for me and Shamus, because we know our house is generally safe (and locked up like Fort Knox). If the kids get upset when we’re out somewhere and we think they might be heading for a meltdown, we’ll go home or do something else – we always have an escape plan in case things go awry.

I feel the most important thing I have to force myself to remember, is that I need to have low or non-existent expectations for what I think the kids will do or enjoy. That sounds a bit depressing, but it’s true. We carved pumpkins this evening and I had hoped that the kids would like, sit in our company but that did not happen. Penny curled into a ball on my lap at one point holding her ears and yelling, “nope!”. She ran away and when she ran back into the kitchen to ask me for her tabby, I turned around with my hands still gooey and she let out a panicked “noooooooo!”.  When we showed Rory the inside of the pumpkins, he just laughed hysterically and ran away.

I don’t actually force my kids to participate in anything, because if I do, everyone is screaming and no one is enjoying themselves. It’s not that they don’t want to be included, it’s just sometimes they don’t know how, or they’re on sensory overload. I do try to create the opportunity for them to join in if they feel inclined though. Like, buy them a pumpkin and see what happens. Take them up a plate of turkey dinner and see if they’ll try it. Buy presents for Christmas and let them come back and forth to open them. (I thought they’d be excited on Christmas morning last year, but I have a hilarious video that proves otherwise). I’ve given up on big birthday parties for Penny, but I can’t actually bring myself to give up on the family party (we’re having one again this year and she’s likely going to hide away until the cupcakes are brought out). I actually am going to try a full-fledged birthday party for Rory this year though and see how he likes it – that child really does love attention.

Here’s to the next couple of months of incredible fun and chaos! Which, really, is just life in general, I suppose.