Special Needs Ryan Gosling - Week 2

It's Friday! Yay!

Today I'm linking up again with Adventures in Extreme Parenthood with my very own Special Needs Ryan Gosling meme. Every Friday a group of parents, most who have children on the autism spectrum, but not necessarily, link up with their own creative SNRG memes. Anyone can link up, whether you have a child with autism, a child with another disability or no child at all, but you think Ryan is hot or you're the creative type and just want to do a meme.

Here's my SN Ryan Gosling contribution for the week.

Because sometimes even NT's could use a little social skills training.

Head on over to Extreme Parenthood for more extremely clever Ryan Gosling memes created by the best autism warrior parents ever!

Special Needs Ryan Gosling - Week 1

Once again Sunday Stillwell from Extreme Parenthood has started another round of Special Needs Ryan Gosling memes.

I decided to play along this week even though I'm not feeling very creative. Actually, most of my memes really, really sucked last go around, but it's fun to link up with other special needs parents who are just about as mentally exhausted as I am on any given day. I was even more exhausted when the Boy was younger and have it much easier these days. Ha!

So here goes...

That's all I have for this week and I hope I spelled everything correctly. It's 50/50 at this point. Maybe next week I'll be more creative and spell check better.

Don't forget to head over to Sunday's blog to view more of these memes from some very creative, talented, extraordinary and incredibly hot autism parents.

Oh yeah, then there's Ryan.

Looks Like Lance Is Going Down! Good Thing We've Got Ryan!

I'm sure all of you have heard by now about Lance Armstrong's doping accusation.  Here is the letter that was supposedly sent to him by USADA.

Looks like Lance is going down!  Good thing we have Ryan Gosling on our side!

Thanks, of course to Sunday Stillwell at Adventures in Extreme Parenthood! 

It's Friday! Know What That Means?

I don't know where the week went, but Friday is here and that only means one thing, time for Special Needs Ryan Gosling.  The Murph is "Hey girling" me already as he sees me writing this post.  I can't tell you what else he's saying!  It's kind of personal.

The Special Needs Ryan Gosling meme was started several months ago by Sunday Stillwell over at Adventures in Extreme Parenthood.  Go on over to her blog to check out more of these.

I did this one because the Boy's been home from college less than a month and I can only say his room is covered in filth!  He seems oblivious and refuses to do anything about it.  We are about to lay down the law, baby!!

And this one because if you haven't already seen this blog post here, thanks to me, all our cats have fleas.

And this one because just in case you didn't see my blog post where I was sulking and being a REALLY sore loser for not getting in the semi finals for the Kona Inspired contest and I blamed it all on the fact that all I have to deal with is autism not cancer or some other ailment and nobody cares about autism as much as those "other" ailments.  And I didn't have very long to PROVE just how "popular" I really am because I didn't get my entry in as soon as some of those "others"... And YES, I'm still a little sore about it, but I've got my big girl panties on now so I'm dealing...

I'm showing my "Southerness" in that last one -"ain't got nothin".  Not that I use double negatives in sentences on purpose or anything like that and we all know "ain't" ain't a word.  Even those of us here in the South.

On another note, The Boy still hasn't found a summer job and is driving me crazy.  Luckily, we are only awake at the same time for approximately one hour in the morning and sometimes for one hour before I go to bed, since he has his days and nights mixed up.

He wants me to go with him to look for jobs.  I told him that it doesn't look good to have your mother tagging along if really want a job.  I went to a local grocery store with him to fill out an application the other day.  They never called him.  They probably flagged him when we left the store for having his mother do most of the filling out.

I told him it just doesn't look good to have your mom calling for you.  I really shouldn't be anywhere in the near vicinity.  He's 20 years old!  It looks better to have almost ANYBODY with you except your mom.  It's just not good!

I couldn't get him to call the grocery store and he kept begging me to call.  He wasn't calling and he needs a job, so I broke down and called them and told them that my son was REALLY interested in a job at their store.  One of first things the store lady said to me was "Well, if he's so interested then why is his MOTHER calling?  He needs to call!".

I started babbling something about Asperger's but he's a great worker, very hard working and punctual, he just needs help with the initial call, blah blah blah.

I felt like I was in first grade again getting in trouble with the teacher.

Guess grocery store work isn't in the Boy's near future!!!

Good thing I didn't tell her his name! Wonder if they have caller id?

For more memes, go here!

This Was A Tough One - Special Needs Ryan Gosling

It's Friday and that means it's time for Special Needs Ryan Gosling started by Sunday Stillwell over at Extreme Adventures in Parenthood.  Head over to her blog at Extreme Parenthood to check out more.

For some reason I had a really, really tough time coming up with a meme to match this week's picture.  I was thinking maybe something about visual sensory issues and since I don't know any that The Boy has or had during childhood, I was sitting at my computer analyzing the picture with one eye closed trying to imagine something, anything, relating to "visual" and "sensory".  

The Murph walks in and takes one look at me and then down at the Ryan Gosling picture pulled up on my computer and says "He looks stoned!"  Then he added "I'm stoned!  Let's go get burgers!  Let's go get Sliders!"  Then laughs and "Hey Girl's" me the rest of the night.

This picture apparently brought back memories of The Murph's youth and since I couldn't think of anything else at the time, I did this one.

I hope Sunday doesn't kick me off her site after this one.  I decided I better come up with a decent, family rated, special needs meme if I have any hope left of not being booted, so eventually I came up with this one.

The Murph has been "Hey Girl" ing me all week long so I did a meme of him, only now I can't find it.  It's lost somewhere on my computer.  Maybe it didn't save.  Who knows.  Maybe I will find it one day....

Special Needs Ryan Gosling Friday!

It's Friday and time for Special needs Ryan Gosling.  Yea!  TGIF!  You can find more of these memes on Sunday Stillwell's blog over at Adventures in Extreme Parenthood.  

And wondering if he's doing this in preschool, what's high school going to be like?

I actually did get a call from the preschool once when The Boy was 4 years old.  He had locked horns with his new preschool teacher, who he didn't like much and was sent to the director's office.  The preschool director called me and told me I needed to come get him.  He was giving everybody trouble and had threatened to kick the door down.  

So thankful for Skype since The Boy is in college now!

This was so not like him.  It didn't take long to figure out that he was having trouble adjusting to the new teacher.  His original teacher left mid-year to become a missionary.   That wasn't a good year for The Boy.

This hasn't been a good week for me.  I had a feeling it wasn't going to be and tried to prepare myself mentally for it, but no matter how prepared you think you are, it's never easy when it happens.  Hope next week is better.

It's Friday- Time for Special Needs Ryan Gosling

Once again it's Friday and I am participating in the Special needs Ryan Gosling meme started by Sunday Stillwell at http://www.extremeparenthood.com/ -Adventures in Extreme Parenthood.  You can find more of these on her blog.

It's so great to not have to go through those IEP meetings anymore.  I was clueless during most of the IEP years because The Boy wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's until almost high school.   During the beginning years I was just grateful for ANYTHING the school offered him, including speech therapy before he even started kindergarten.

Mrs. F, The Boy's speech therapist in elementary school was a blessing to us.  The Boy started speech therapy with her when he was just 3 years old, after his preschool teachers were concerned about his speech.

These first teachers actually thought he had a hearing problem which we quickly ruled out through testing.  They also were the ones who told me to contact the school because he might be eligible for free speech therapy even though he was two years away from going to kindergarten.

We were so lucky to get him in with Mrs. F, the speech therapist.  By the time he started kindergarten he was already familiar with the elementary school (after going there 2 or 3 time a week for two years) and he was in speech with Mrs. F from age 3 until third grade.

During the elementary school years,  she recommended the teachers she thought would work best with The Boy and so every year I didn't worry.   He was always placed with teachers that he liked and worked well with.  That didn't always happen during middle and high schools when he had to change classes and had a different teacher for every subject.

It wasn't necessarily the IEP meetings that were the worst.  I actually only remember two IEP meetings when I didn't agree with what the school.  One was his Junior year when they were going to take away one of his accommodations which let him turn work in late.

 He was going to loose this accommodation starting his Senior year, which they said would help "prepare" him for college.  I sucked it up and decided not to try to fight it and in the end, The Boy didn't need it anyway.  He was pretty motivated his Senior year to get out of that place.

The worst meetings were the parent/teacher meetings that I had to schedule when one or more of the teachers weren't following the IEP or were just clueless about The Boy's differences.  It seemed like EVERY year during middle school that there was at least one teacher who was completely inflexible and was just going to stay that way no matter what.

Most of the other teachers were very accommodating and almost all of his special ed teachers were extremely helpful, but limited on what they could do since during middle school he was just diagnosed with ADD, which basically didn't get you much back then.  Having an Asperger's diagnosis changed everything for The Boy when he made it to high school.

However, during 6th grade I had at least twelve of these parent/teacher meetings throughout the year and The Boy ended up having to go to summer school anyway.  The Boy actually liked summer school and did well there.  He had to attend summer school after his Freshman and Sophomore years too.

Having less classes to focus on was very beneficial to him during the summer.  During a normal semester of school, he struggled trying to keep up with 5 or 6 classes.  I always thought he would have done better if the semesters were shorter with 3 or 4 during a normal school year instead of 2 and each semester having only 2 or 3 classes at a time.

Who knows.  I'm just glad he's out of high school.  He is too!

Special Needs Ryan Gosling Week 14

Once again I am participating in the Special Needs Ryan Gosling meme started by Sunday Stillwell over at Adventures in Extreme Parenthood.  I've managed to do 2 of the 14 weeks.  Check out more of these on her blog.

The Boy is obviously home from college to help his technologically challenged mom!