Skip to main content

Extraordinary Talents

When I heard Dominic singing the ABC's the other day, it sounded unusual. I realized after he said them a few times, that he was singing them from Z-A, not A-Z!


It totally blew my mind when he did it, so that's why I grabbed my camera and recorded him!  My brother and his family gave Dominic a 500-piece puzzle for his birthday. While that may sound like too many pieces for the average 10-year old to do by himself, Dominic has been doing puzzles with 500 pieces or more for several years.  He will sit sometimes for an hour or more while working on a puzzle, which given Dominic also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), astounds me.


Yesterday, I finally put a picture from his First Holy Communion into the awesome frame his godmother gave him and put it up on our mantelpiece.  He went over, looked at it and said, "First Holy Communion, May 3, St. John's Church, had bread, had pizza!" No where on the picture did it say the date or the location of the church.  The bread he was talking about was the communion wafer he received for the first time.  We had pizza that night to celebrate. Good grief, he was 100% right. To test him later on in the day, I asked him, "what day did we take Lauren to college?"  He responded back, "20!" Yep, that was right. I thought since the August calendar was on the wall, maybe he saw it. So, to test him further, I said, "what day are you going to school next week?" He said, "2." Yep, he goes back, September 2nd! In the afternoon, I gave him a puzzle word search for teenagers, he finished it within minutes. When I asked him to solve single digit math problems, like 8 + 6, he could tell me the right answer verbally within a few seconds, without the aid of a piece of paper and pencil. When I saw him looking at the i-Pad last night, I asked him what he was doing. He said, "Google Earth." I looked down and and saw our house on the screen.  Back last winter, Dominic got a hold of some screwdrivers, went down to the basement and started taking apart some of his toys. He would take the screws out and then put them back in again. We started calling that room his "workshop." When he started unscrewing the switch plates off the light switches, we had to "shut down" his workshop for a while!! Like any mom, I think about Dominic's future. Will he go to college? Will he get a job? Will he be self-sufficient? When you are a parent of a special needs child, those types of questions are not easily answered.  I don't think Dominic is a "savant," but he does have some "extraordinary" talents. This morning, I asked him, "what day did we take Lauren to college?" He was nowhere near the calendar and said, "20, it was a Wednesday!"   

Comments

  1. Amazing! Our kids have some spectacular talents! Yours seems pretty awesome. I sometimes (ok, often) question what my son's role in the world will be- where his talents will take him, how his deficits will impact him, what his life will look like...but I have little doubt that he will find his little niche in the world. God gave us these wonderful little kiddos some amazing skills!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Those "Steps" to Independence Can Be Hard

We are heading towards 600 orders for Dominic's business. Since our long-term goal for Baked Goods By Dominic is having a "brick-and-mortar" and hire those with disabilities, it is essential and imperative that I continue to teach him all parts of the business. Since I prompted Dominic for so many years for speech, he has become "prompt dependent." What that essentially means is that he will look at me for a prompt, like, "what do you do next?" I do that one a lot. Dominic has been going to a private speech therapist for over ten years and she reminds me often that Dominic usually will know the answer, if I am patient and wait for him. That has been a very hard habit to break! Dominic has an incredible memory, so I put it to the test this morning. I didn't write out the steps, I wanted to see how much he could do completely on his own. We have a customer picking up his order today, but the only thing that had been done is putting the cookies into t...

Why We Pursued Guardianship of our Son with Autism

Last Thursday morning, my husband, Dominic and I went to our county's Probate Court and had Dominic's Guardianship Hearing. My husband and I are Co-Guardians, and we were granted "Partial Guardianship," which means Dominic can make some of his own decisions (future educational and vocational placement options, what to wear and how he wants to spend his free time), but my husband and I will make his medical, health care, legal, contractual and major financial decisions. The subject of Guardianship in the disability "world" has been and continues to be a controversial and divisive topic.  I was a panelist for an Autism Conference this past summer and presented on what it's like to have a child with Autism. Towards the end of my presentation, I mentioned that Dominic had just turned 18 and that we were going through the Guardianship process. When the attendees could ask questions, the first person that went up to the microphone started telling me that I was...

Presume Competence

Since we have traveled outside of the United States since Dominic was very small, we have had to get him a Children's Passport every five years. Since his current one expires in February of 2024 and he is now 19, we had to apply for an Adult Passport. I don't know why my husband and I picked Dominic's first day of school and Michigan State University moving in their students, but the appointment was yesterady at 3 p.m. We had gathered all of the documents needed and then went into a special room in the East Lansing Post Office just for Passports. The three of us sat down and the clerk asked Dominic his age. He said, "19." Since we were also getting his picture taken for the Passport, he went into a separate room, where she took a picture of him and then let him look at it to make sure he liked it (it will be his picture for the next 10 years)!  He said he did, so he sat back down with us. The clerk filled out a bit more of the paperwork and then she let Dominic s...