A long overdue vacation...

The family vacation—one of the most needed and often one of the most forgotten aspects to life when raising a child with autism. Needed, because let’s face it, autism takes more than you have to give every single day. Forgotten, because let’s face it, there’s no more daunting task than traveling 1200 miles away from the safety of home sleeping in strange beds, eating strange foods, and seeing new places with a child who thrives in the tedium of a cloistered life. It’s easier not to take a vacation, then to need a vacation from your vacation. For 8 years I have avoided leaving the security of our routine so that neither Ewan nor I would be forced outside the comfort zone. Until now that is.

My sister recently moved to Florida thus forcing Ewan and I to cross a few boundaries and to find another part of ourselves—a part that loved the water, that soaked up the heat and the sun and sea salt, that enjoyed waking up in a new state—both physically and psychologically speaking.

Being that we live in Illinois and the trip was going to be an 18 hour marathon of wits and patience and the kind of quick thinking creativity that keeps the family from killing each other in the car—I knew that this was a trip that would require a host of gadgets that was second only to the Radio Shack inventory. Yet at the same time, I felt that after 8 years of therapy, 8 years of social stories, 8 years of planning every aspect of existence out that now was the time to stretch the abilities of Ewan’s frontal lobe. Now was the time to expect more out of him. So I winged it.

We talked about where we were going, how long it would take to get there, who we would see, and what we would do and we left it at that. And the only repetitive questioning came in the form of the prototypical backseat boredom of, “Are we there yet?” We had Gameboys, iPods, movies, books, coloring supplies, plush pillows and fleece blankets, we had favorite snacks and drinks galore, and we had 18 hours to use each and every single one of them. One of the best last minute sanity savers was a subscription to Audible on the iPod and the purchase of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.

However, we had the ‘Brother’ factor to contend with. The ‘Brother’ Factor goes something like this: 2 boys + 5 square feet of backseat space = Sibling Guerilla Warfare. The only thing that could cancel out this equation was the threat of not stopping at the Castillo de San Marcos--the site of a Ghost Adventures episode--one of Ewan's more interesting obsessions lately. Somehow though, we were able to make it 17 hours and 30 minutes before the hostilities began and fortunately my husband and I only needed to wait a mere 35 minutes before shoving them into their Aunt’s new pool.

Had Ewan been younger or at a different phase in his life we would have been armed with Social Stories and PECS, and I would have spent hours programming the Dynavox to have every imaginable way of saying ‘Are we there yet?” Had Ewan been less focused on seeing his favorite people on the planet, I would have scoured the internet for photos of every rest area and hotel in the Great Smoky Mountains and on the entire eastern seaboard. But sometimes you have to know when all the hours of therapy and all the hard won goals and benchmarks have paid off and you can just be with the child sitting before you. The child who can blithely walk into a new restaurant and say ‘No thank you, I’ve already had a Pop-Tart” to the waitress without batting an eyelash and without proceeding into full meltdown mode when they sell Sierra Mist instead of Sprite (something I have yet to master when it’s Diet Pepsi versus Diet Coke). The child who walks into his hotel room and immediately demands to know where the smoke detectors are because the ones at home are usually placed directly above the doorway. The child who says, ‘This is the life,’ as he props his feet up on a new bed, in a strange town, and in a slightly smelly hotel room.

Ewan has spent the early part of this vacation suspended in various forms of aquatic activity. We have had to pry him from the pool after 8 hours of swimming, floating, and splashing. We have heard him say, “Is it time to leave the ocean yet?” as he runs back in to catch ‘one more wave’. The boy has turned into the evolutionary missing link who has ended up spending more time in the water rather than out of it.

This long overdue vacation has taught me many things: one of which is to laminate a few maps for the kids and let them draw the route as we go. The other is that we CAN do this successfully and gracefully and with all our hair. We are already planning our next car trip out to Yellowstone because as Ewan so eloquently stated, “Florida has everything but volcanoes mom.”