A large part of this stems from Gavin’s desire to be independent in ways that surpass his capacity to safely do so. I’m not sure how else to put that.

There are times that he takes too much initiative and it gets him in trouble. The other day, he ate raw sausage because he didn’t cook it long enough and when we discovered it, he was denying it had happened, even though he’d already clearly eaten half of it.

We need to put some guardrails up for him, as safety precautions in the event he goes off the road a bit. I think of it as bumper bowling. He can still play the game but we need to help keep him out of the gutter, so to speak.

One of the things we’re going to start doing or rather revamping because we already do it, is visual prompts..

He wants to make his own lunch, so we can post instructions for him to reference. We can even require him to review them before he does anything. He doesn’t like that idea because it makes him feel stupid but I told him today that most people who cook, refer back to the recipe to make sure they did things correctly. Essentially, that’s all we’d be doing. We just needed to frame the idea a little better for him.

One of the blessing and a curse things about Gavin is that he starts each day with a clean slate. He doesn’t usually harbor negative feelings and often goes into each day with no memory of what upset him the previous day. That also means he needs a ton of reminders but as I said, blessing and a curse.

At the end of the day, I’m really proud of him because he was able to express how he was feeling, even though he was extremely emotional and quite upset.

I always try to reinforce all the reasons I’m proud of him, especially when he’s struggling because while he might be struggling, I don’t want him to define himself based on those darker times.

Anyway, that was sorta my day in a nutshell. It wasn’t super eventful but it was throughly exhausting and very typical of us.. ☺ 💙