Five things I liked this week ...
5. Martha Stewart Baby: Sleepytime
Most parents spend at least half of their waking hours obsessing about their kids' food, poop or sleep. If you have a child on the autism spectrum, you can double that time commitment -- at least. We've been on a sleep-obsessed phase over the last few months. I'm a firm believer in bedtime routines and using music as a wind-down cue. Music always works well as a cue for Billy: He has an "All done" song, a "time to go" song, a "taking turns" song, etc.
We've tried a variety of lullaby CDs to set the mood for bedtime. Most of them are just unbearable after a few hundred listenings. Too cutesy with drive-you-bananas-stick-in-your-head melodies is a common problem -- not what you want before bedtime.
My mother bought Sleepytime as part of a batch on eBay, and it has been our go-to bedtime music ever since. Beautiful modern soft folk-rock from the likes of Allison Krauss, Natalie Merchant and Barenaked Ladies, the songs can bear repeated listening without making you want to throw yourself into moving traffic. In fact, I ripped the CD on to my iPod and have actually listened to it by myself on several occasions.
Until I looked up the details for this review, I hadn't even realized that it was a part of the Martha Stewart Baby collection. This CD is so not what I associate with the woman who did an entire TV episode about ironing table napkins.
Favorite tracks are Krauss's "Baby Mine" and Tuck & Patti's "Takes my Breath Away" (chokes me up every time). You can actually sample the tracks here .
Theoretically, Billy shouldn't be watching any TV, right? Well, we do our best. We limit it to no more than an hour a day, and try to use it as a reward -- for good behavior, accomplishing tasks, etc.
At first, I thought we would be stuck with Thomas the Tank Engine and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, the educational value of which I find questionable (see my rant against Thomas). But it turns out, he really likes educational DVDs too.
Baby Bumblebee has a series of DVDs that teach vocabulary, question words, and concepts like opposites, numbers and colors. They use real children to teach the concepts -- and these are definitely not trained actors -- and include interactive games and lesson reviews on each DVD. A series of flashcards matches each DVD set, so if you're into flashcards, you can use these to reinforce the concepts. (Billy has about as much interest in being drilled on flashcards as he does in balancing my checkbook, but on that theoretical day when he does develop an interest, we're ready.)
I was overjoyed the day he started showing me "Up and down," demonstrating by standing up and squatting down, "fast and slow," which he shows me by alternately running and walking, "yes and no," nodding and shaking his head. Now if I can get him to stop saying "Visit us next time at baby-bumble-bee-dot-com!"
3. Audible.com
If you have an iPod and long car trips, this can be a lifesaver, particularly if you're trying to limit TV time. Dr. Stanley Greenspan, the creator of our Floortime therapy, strongly recommends audio recordings of stories, because it forces children to use their imaginations to create the pictures to accompany the words they hear.
Audible has a large collection of recorded children's books -- in addition to their volumes of adult bestsellers (I mean fiction and non-fiction for adults, not porn) -- ranging in price from a couple of bucks for a single book to more than $10 for a collection of stories. You can either buy the recordings singly at retail prices, or join their online club and get credits for a certain number of book per month.
Then you download them to your computer where you can either transfer to an iPod (or other mp3 player) or burn to a CD. The whole process was super-simple, and I'm a super-simpleton when it comes to electronics. We joined at the most basic rate ($7.95 per month) and started with a great recording of Dr. Seuss stories, featuring the voices of David Hyde-Pierce and Jason Alexander.
2. Dry rice and beans
This takes the old adage "the best toys don't have batteries" (Is that an old adage? Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe not.) to an extreme. Billy will play with a plastic bucket of rice and dried beans for as long as I will let him. Buried in the dry stuff are tiny toys like dinosaurs and trucks, and he digs them out, reburies them, drives the trucks around. This has -- can you believe?! -- become our substitute for TV when I need 15 minutes to load the dishwasher. Upsides: a lot cleaner than sifting dirt through this fingers; it's cheap; it doesn't make an annoying sound, and you never have to go searching through the house for trip-A batteries.
1. "Up in the Air"
Really liked this film (I got to go to an actual movie!), starring George Clooney as a guy whose job it is to relieve other people of their jobs. He's hired to fly around the country, delivering bad news to employees whose bosses are too scared to do it themselves. I heard Jason Reitman, the director, interviewed on NPR and he talked about how many of the "employees" in the film are real people who were actually recently fired from their jobs. He used their real stories and let them tell them. If I hadn't heard this, I wouldn't have known, because they were really good, really heartbreaking.
I didn't think this was a perfect film the way some reviewers had described it, but I did think it was a beautifully acted and subtly told story. My only big problem with it: The fact that the woman who was supposed to be George Clooney's love interest ever acted aloof -- instead of straddling his wheelie bag in the airport and refusing to let go.
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