James Guttman: 0:14

hi pod, I am dad. He's not just hi dad, he's my Ja mes Guttman, - folks, James Guttman. Hi Pod, I'm Dad . Welcome back to another edition of the podcast. Thank you for closing out your february with me. Thank you for finding me on any streaming service, anywhere they put podcasts. That's where you find this podcast HiPodImDad. com - we we have all the archives. Yada, yada, yada. I appreciate it. I love getting a chance to come on here talk to you.

James Guttman: 0:45

Talk to you a little bit about the blogs that I write about my son, tell you about my son Lucas. He's nonverbal, he's 13. He's just about, just about to be 14 years old, which is mind-blowingly insane. So I'm excited about it. Just still can't kind of put that in my head a little bit. You know, and I wrote. It's funny because this week I wrote two blogs. I write blogs every week, you guys know - Monday, Wednesday - HiBlogImDad. com

James Guttman: 1:16

. I write about autism appreciation. I write about some of the best points of my son's personality that come along because of autism, not to spite it. And although I didn't write about this subject specifically, a lot of what I write is about this subject, which is forgetting just how much my son has grown up, whether it's his age, his physical age, 13, 14 years old. He doesn't look in my head like he's 13,. But just like I have a neurotypical daughter, she's 16 I don't see a 16 year old in my head. I see this, this four-year-old that I used to, you know, play games with and do all these fun things with, and now she's grown up and it's. It doesn't register in your, in your head. But when you have a neurotypical kid who's going to be 17 years old and you treat them like they're five, they look at you and they go, hey, cut it out. You go sorry, I didn't mean to do that, but when you have a boy like mine, I could treat Lucas like a baby and he will. Let me treat him like a baby. Lucas hugs me and Lucas sits on my lap and that's kind of some wonderful stuff to that. So I love getting to still baby my boy, even as he gets bigger.

James Guttman: 2:24

But one of the problems with that is that you have to remember when it comes time to do grown-up stuff. He's able to do that and I forget sometimes and I wrote about that on Monday the small victories that prepare me, excuse me, the small victories that prepare my son for a life without me. That was the name of the blog. It, I don't know hits you kind of viscerally. You know you don't like to write about something like, well, I'm not here anymore, why am I writing about that?

James Guttman: 2:53

But what happens with Lucas? My instinct and it has been for years since he was little is that if I have to do something, I do it around my time with Lucas. I do it around Lucas's needs and his wants. So if I have to go to the supermarket, I go while he's at school. If I have to go to the store, I do it when he's got his iPad for the first time after being away for a while. When he's distracted, when he's able to do something else mentally, I'm always prepared for things to go spectacularly poor right Every single time. And why do I do this? I do this because the very first time I remember doing something with him, solo me, him and my daughter when God this was we're going back must've been four or five years old.

James Guttman: 3:37

Lucas was a runner, right. He liked to run. Everywhere we went he had to run. He doesn't run much now, but he ran everywhere. I used to bring him him and I would go out in his wagon and I would bring him to the um kind of the field, the schoolyard near my house, and I would just let him. I go run, take off his shoes, let him run barefoot. He loved it. It was the greatest thing, loved it, loved to run. So we went.

James Guttman: 3:59

My daughter was in the Girl Scouts. I think I've told this story before. This is the story that I think we all have, a story like this, something that happened that affected you so much moving forward, and this is one of those stories. My daughter was in Girl Scouts and she had to do a Christmas tree ball hanging right At town hall. So we went there. I brought her and I brought my son. At the time she was you time, if he was four, she was six, seven, and we go there. And I thought, all right, lucas will sit with me, even with his iPad, he'll have fun, he'll be okay. But when Lucas was little, the iPad didn't have the same magnetic pull that it has today. I mean, trust me, it had a pull. But when the rhythm hit his feet, man, it was okay. There was no stopping him, he was happy feet and Lucas wanted to run.

James Guttman: 4:52

Now we're in Town Hall. It is packed with Girl Scouts and moms from Long Island. Just all kids are going up, they're putting the ornaments and they're not going up all together Like you would think. Now you hear an ornament hanging at Town Hall. All the kids just run up and put their ball in the tree, no One at a time. They're held up, a little step stool and it's just a whole thing. Lucas just wanted to run, so when my daughter wasn't doing it, I kind of let him run. I was like I didn't know what was happening. Still keep in mind now.

James Guttman: 5:25

Um, I say four, it might have been a little bit less than four, but this was early on in our autism journey, as we say, and it was that stage where I kind of you let him do what he wants to do, because I don't know what he's doing. And that was always a thing I remember when Lucas was really little and he would clap a lot or he would try to do something that wasn't appropriate try to hold his hand, stop, stop clapping your hand, stop bouncing that, stop touching that thing. But for the most part sometimes he would do stuff that was like so over the top. So you just sit there and you stare like I don't know what's happening right now, like he would bang into the uh, he was sitting in a high chair. He would bang into the high chair right the the tray in the high chair. He's kind of watching like what are you? You're right, you're right. This is one of those moments when he would run. I would just be like where are we going? Is he have something to do?

James Guttman: 6:09

He're sort of running all over the thing and I'm chasing him through the hall right and the hall is not packed, but there's people in the hallway. I'm trying to avoid people and I'm doing, I gotta tell you, for a dad by himself watching my daughter too. My daughter was little and inside the other girl scout moms are helping her up the, the step ladder and everything I'm doing pretty good, I think. And and Lucas is running and as he's running I grab him right to stop him and I kind of jostle back a little bit. When I say jostle back, like I moved back a step and there was another mom from my town who I don't know today, doesn't know me, doesn't know that. I know her, I think I know you lady, and I stepped within her space right, like I didn't bump into her but like close, you know what I mean Like you go whoa. I turned around and I was like oh sorry, and this woman goes Jesus. And I was like I'm going to remember you lady and I did remember her. But I also remembered that moment because from that moment on it affected a lot of how I saw us going out and how I saw the probability of something bad happening, something I had to deal with. So consciously, subconsciously, I planned a lot of stuff around him. But now today, as I said before, lucas isn't four anymore. Lucas doesn't run.

James Guttman: 7:35

All the things that Lucas has done through the years have kind of I don't know if they dissipated. He still does a lot of the things that I've written about. Stealing food was a big thing. That was like a major issue that I spent a long time one-on-one with him, teaching him you don't steal food, you don't do that. That now he never steals food when he's with me, but he did for a long time. So mentally you go through that too. So today, to go to a supermarket I still have that voice in my head. That's like he's gonna freak out. He's not gonna want to go to the supermarket. He's gonna sit on the floor right. That was always a problem. He would just sit down, didn't want to move anymore. He's done. You gotta pick him up off the floor in the supermarket, people stepping out over him I've had that. I've been in stores with him where people have to step over him when he was little. So I'm worried about that. I'm worried about him grabbing food, tearing it open, wanting to eat it, not understanding that he can't eat all the food in the supermarket. Does he get it? Does he understand this? These are all questions that a few years ago, were valid.

James Guttman: 8:31

What about crying for no reason, going down certain aisles in the supermarket? That was always a big one. I never got that. We'd go to the supermarket and we would start getting stuff and he's being great and he's like. You know, here's the five, six years old. I'm like my kid is fantastic, this is insane. He's being so good. And then I go down, like the coffee aisle right or some aisle, some random aisle, and he would lose it. He wouldn't go down the aisle, he'd cry. It was like I'm throwing him into hell and I'm like, oh my God, all right, stop. So I'd have to go home from the supermarket, having not gotten like 50% of the stuff on the list. All that's in my head Today.

James Guttman: 9:08

He's 13. He's not that kid anymore, right, he's, he's a little man dude. So me, him, lauren, my girlfriend, her son, christian, who is also like Lucas, same classes, minimally verbal, but Christian has so much experience going out into the world, he goes out and he does a lot of stuff in the community experience going out into the world, he goes out and he does a lot of stuff in the community. And I know that if I bring my son out there, not only is Lucas now more mature, able to do these things even though he doesn't do them as often still, because I'm kind of used to getting stuff done but also he gets to watch Christian, he gets to see how he acts out there. And because of that we went to the supermarket and Lucas was great. I mean don't want to say great, don't want to gas it up too much Lucas was good.

James Guttman: 10:07

We had moments. Sometimes he didn't want to walk, right, he does that. Sometimes he gets tired of walking or he wants to go somewhere else, and what he does is he just he plants right into the ground, just plants his feet hand in hand, looks you in the eye like, are you going to move me? I always move him. He doesn't like that. I'll just hold his hand and keep walking and he kind of like stumbles along like holy cow. Only had to do that once he got to pick out a snack. I let him do that every time we go to the store, we go to Target, we go to. This was Stu Leonard's. I go pick out what do you want? He always picks out cookies. It's really cute. We go home he eats the cookies. Did that? I was so proud of him I had to remind myself.

James Guttman: 10:47

I'm like, hey, he's not a baby anymore, he's not five, he's not six, he's growing up. Both your kids are growing up. You're growing up. Years pass by. I've said this before on here and it holds true for everything in the world, especially when it comes to kids, whether they're on the spectrum, off the spectrum especially, we always talk about watching kids grow up. And before you have kids and somebody says you know, oh, the kids, they grow up so fast. You think that they're talking about like 20, 30, 40 years ago. Oh, they're saying that 30 years go by on a heart. No, your kids growing up is really like six, seven years to go from like little to like, practically. You know, at a high school age it's not that long.

James Guttman: 11:33

Now, when it comes to a boy like mine, who's perpetually sweet and who has the same likes and the same things, that he still TV shows, that he watches music, that he loves, the stuff remains the same for him. That sometimes for me, as his dad is, I forget. This is a little man and he was a little man. Man, he was the king of Stu Leonard's this week. So I was proud of him. I was proud of Christian too. Man that was. I kept saying if there was somebody else, if he was there with another kid who maybe wasn't enjoying it, or a kid who wasn't well-behaving, he was seeing that and observing that he might not have done it. We're all like that. You know. If you're around somebody who's setting a bad example, you follow that bad example. This was a good example and he watched his friends and I don't know I was proud of. I was proud of everybody. So we all did a really good job. So, in the words of Mike Brady, wherever you go, there you are. So that does it for me.

James Guttman: 12:24

Guys, do me a favor, come back next Friday right here. Hi Pod, I'm Dad. Brand new podcast. Join me on HiBlogImDadcom. Every Monday, every Wednesday, new blogs going out there, tons of news on the way. Do me a favor, stick around on social media, hi, James Guttman H I James Guttman. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. Hi Blog, I'm Dad is also on Facebook. You could follow along and get all the updates we have. We got some big updates coming very soon, very soon, I promise you on that. Until next time, James Guttman saying be well, bye, pod, I'm done, I'll see you next time.