I'm dad. Hello, hello. It is James Guttman, the dad behind HiPod I'm Dad, behind Hiblogom Dad.com. Thank you for coming back this week. I talked earlier this week about a subject that was going on right now, which a lot of the blogs come from. Something will happen in my life, something with Lucas, and I'll suddenly think, oh, that's something I should address. And a lot of times I take time after I've written it, I think back about it, I think about more parts of it. This past week I wrote about Lucas kind of going through puberty, but it wasn't entirely about that. The idea was that when my son, he's nonverbal, severe autism, so a lot of the things that he has to know how to do are things that I don't know, he might not know how to do. They might be harder to grasp, whether it's being able to maneuver his hands and being able to, you know, imitate motion, or whether it's even the understanding of it. And when Lucas was about six, seven, eight, right around that age, very little, they were teaching him at school how to put on deodorant. And it seemed ridiculous. It seemed so silly. It was this little, this little boy, and it was like, we play with it. And I think at one time I think they even said you don't have to even take the cap off, just teach him the motion of it. So he's just rub in his armpit. It was funny. And now he's 14, gonna be 15 very soon, and it is just not funny anymore. Now it's a necessity. He's a man, he's got stubble on his face, he's got body order at times. Um, sometimes when he makes his like happy, you know, noises that he makes around the house, it sounds more like a man making. I'm like, where did this man come from? Because in my head, he's a baby, right? And I can say that about both my kids. And I've written about this before five and three forever, where in my head I see her at five, I can see him at three. That's around the ages they were together. But with Lucas, it's a little harder because my daughter is neurotypical. She is graduating from high school, she's, you know, applying to all these colleges, she's getting into all these colleges. She's a genius, blows me away, this kid, what she's able to do. So I'm able to see the growth from kid to young adult. It's right in front of me. The things that we do now, she didn't do then. She doesn't play Roblox anymore. We don't watch Doro. We don't watch Cookie Squirrel C on YouTube. No more. Oh God, no more la la loopsies or LOL surprises. My son, on the other hand, still does a lot of the things that we did when he was a toddler. And I say that to people, and it sounds like I'm saying a sad thing, but it's kind of just what we're used to. And I love it. It's familiar. He gets it, I get it. The same books, Frog and Friends, or Moo, or, you know, dogs or cats, these books, these kind of board books where you move the pages around and the eyes open and closed. He loves all that stuff. Same songs, Rafi, Wiggles. We sing them together. He lets me, he doesn't let me. Same shows, Sesame Street, kids' favorite songs, Wiggles, Color Crew. Since he was a baby, because he doesn't watch it. And I'm learning this about him. I study a lot about why my son does the things he does. When I say study, I mean I watch him. I'm just like, why is he doing this? A lot of the things that he watches and he does, he likes aspects of it, whether it's a particular song or a sound. Lucas gets very stimulated by different things and he watches them differently than I think a lot of us watch TV shows. So he's been cool with this stuff for like a decade. Still cool with all that stuff. And when that happens, you sometimes lose sight of the fact that he's not that age anymore. Sure, he's getting bigger, but it's like any time your kid is getting bigger, it's not until you see an old picture of them that you're like, oh my God, I remember he was like that. Now he's like this. My son's, he weighs more than me. He's still shorter than me, still shorter than me. I can still take him. But um, he's a man, he's a little man. And I think to myself, thank God we taught him how to put on this deodorant. And some of the other things that we've worked on too, have all of them taken? No, he works on a lot of stuff. He's not, he'll never, he'll never live on his own. I get that. I understand that. But I want him to have as much independence as possible. It's important. And it's important for me as his dad, and it's important for him. So I try to do whatever I can. And if he doesn't understand any of it, at least we're trying. If he does understand it, great, we'll do it. But I'm happy. And one of the reasons why I bring this up for a lot of parents listening to this is because there was a time where, sure, I let the deodorant thing go. But when he was younger than that, and Lucas was first being diagnosed with autism, and it was starting to come to light that he might be nonverbal. Our house was on fire, right? Like it was the number one priority. Everybody that came to our house, what do you want us to work on with him? Can he talk? Can you make him talk? It was all about language. And they would ask us for other things. Well, well, we're gonna work on that, but what else do you want to do? You want to learn how to like put away his plates and what? Like it was like shocking to me that they would propose anything but that. What? Put away his plates? My house is on fire, and you want me to do the dishes? How is that a thing? We need to fix this, and that was all we thought about. But then all of a sudden you realize there's a lot in life. Language is great, speaking is great. Would it make things easier for him? Absolutely, right? He has a communication device, we've developed hand signals, there's intuition, he can point, he can bring you to things. He has receptive language where you can tell him to put on your shirt and he knows, put on my shirt. I know what that means. He can't say it, but he can understand it. That's all important. And if we spent all that time laser focused on just getting words out of his mouth, little things like eating with a knife and fork, or um, it doesn't give us a knife, yeah, with a fork, um, you know, putting on his clothes, things like that would have never happened because the focus would have been this one thing that I gotta be honest with you, the amount of time we've put in with him, the level that he's at when it comes to speaking is probably his full potential. Nobody tries harder than my son. It blows my mind. I watch him and I watch when something clicks, and I watch when he tries to do something, and I watch when he can't do something. And as his dad, I see that. And that don't get me wrong, we still work on it. I've I develop new ideas all the time to get this kid to say hi. That's my word. If I can get him to go hi, we're great. He waves, he does all that, that's great. There have been times where he's almost said it. He does that hard H like that, like he's breathing hot on you. And we've worked on it, trying to get that last hi, you know, right out at the end. And now, even now, like I started the new one where I go right up to his ear, I go, hey, Lucas, hi. And I do it where it's like really hot on his ear, and he thinks it's the funniest thing. I go, now you do it. And I'll try to imitate it, nothing comes out. I might work on this with him forever. This might be something we just always do. Am I expecting him to do it? Honestly, no, I don't. That's not why I'm doing it. It sounds weird to say that, right? One of the best things about having a boy like mine, as he taught me when he was younger, that there's certain things that are out of my control, and there's certain things that he might not be able to do, and that's fine. You know, I've brought up this idea before about going back in time. If I had a time machine and I could go back to 2013 and answer questions for myself. What's Lucas like? The answers that I gave were all at the time what I thought was the worst case scenario. He doesn't speak. He goes to a different school, the mainstream school. He has all these deficits here and there that he doesn't know how to manage certain things in his life. It sounds terrible, but it's not. Is it work? Yeah. Does it make me worry about him? Yeah. Is he the kind of person that the more you love him, the more difficult it is to make these decisions? Yeah. But is he worth it? Absolutely. I worry all the time I'll let him down. That's my main thing. I want my son to be happy. And I've tried to go out of my way to figure out the best ways to do that. It's not about making me happy. I don't need him to do anything. I've let go of that. There's no reason for either one of my kids. Like, my daughter is going to go to college and do all these things. But she decided, and I told her this, I said, if you decide not to go to college and to join the circus, I'm like, I might try to be like, dude, do you really want to do this? I'm like, but if you really believed in it and you really loved it and you really wanted to do it, I'm like, I would be the biggest fan of the circus. I would buy circus merchandise and go to your shows and throw peanuts at the elephants. That's what you're supposed to do as a parent. That's it. And my son is no different than any other child. As long as he tries his best, as long as he's a good person, as long as he's kind and sweet and he's all those things, I'm so lucky to have him. And by realizing that, it allowed me to kind of look ahead. Because even now, I talk about him being an adult and living on his own. He's he's gonna be 15. We still have years to go, right? But I know that that time is gonna come, just like I knew the puberty was gonna come when he was seven. The future comes, whether you're ready for it or not. So why not be ready for it? Why not work as hard as you can to do the best you can for the people that you love? And that requires a few things. It requires putting ego aside and your own wants. At the time, all I wanted was language from him. I might not want it as much now. I really don't want it as much now because I don't know what it would even look like in terms of his overall form of communication. I think he's he communicates well. I think at a certain point it's going to be a matter of working on the device and things like that even more. It'd be great. We get some words out of him, say hi, I'd be cute. But it's not needed. We've built his life because we accepted who he was when he was young and we worked within whatever those limitations might be while at the same time pushing those limitations to their limit. And I don't know, I'm so proud of him, and I'm happy with the way we were able to do this. So that was the idea. That's why I wrote it. Because I wanted people to understand if you have a kid, your kid is younger, um, and you're already facing certain things where you're putting up to OT and speech and PT. I know all that stuff. And I know what that's like. If you're going through that, it doesn't hurt to start early on things that are going to be needed down the line. And that's what we did. And because of that, there's certain things that just he's good at now. And I'm I'm happy about that. Now's the time. He's the man. Uh he's the man. He is. Guys, thank you uh for listening. I'll see you next Friday. I'll be back on Monday with a brand new blog. Till then, James Gutman. Be well. Bye bye.