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I am posting more desserts today because I want to share my Easter treats with you before Easter gets here! I loves me some Cabury's Easter chocolate, and think it makes the most simple, but lovely Easter desserts. These 2 treats are simple to make, and a pleasure to eat! So, I'm sharing 2 recipes, both gluten-free, and both simple, no bake and yummers!  Rice Krispie Mini-Egg Squares
Method:
 Mini Egg Macaroon Nests
Method:
* If you would rather have fewer, but bigger nests, just use a 2 tablespoon scoop (either in large muffin cups, or on a counter or table), and put 2 or 3 eggs in each. Do whatever floats your boat!  Some of the darling little nests not in muffin wrappers O.k, so even though I did want to eat all of these treats, I did put some into bags to give to other families. My simple wrapping was to put the nests into plastic zip-top style bags, and wrap the squares in plastic wrap, then put them into a plain ol' paper bag with an Easter sticker on them.  I hope you get a chance to make some wonderful little treats for the weekend. They are fun to do, the kids can help with it, and they are so simple.
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In the 9 houses we've lived in over the last 10 years we've had no linen closet, an open closet in our bathroom, a big ol' plastic bin stuffed with linens, we've pretty much had it all! So, in this house we actually have a real linen closet, but our first year with it, it was a crazy-town disaster! Anywho, that was not cool with me, so a real fix-up was needed! I started by really clearing out what we had. We had a lot of bits and pieces of sheet sets, a ridiculous amount of towels (um, possibly from years of working at camps and inheriting lost and found towels....?), and a lack of good shelf space.  All our sheet sets folded and happy in their own pillowcase. :) I used an Ikea shelf we already had (that was just collecting dust in our basement) and brought it into the closet. The linen closet had some shelves, but they were very deep, and not well made, so I didn't want our sheets on it. So, tip #1: Sheets stored in their own pillowcases! With this method, you just grab what is a whole sheet set with no guess work, and git on your way! :) Extra bonus-if your household gets the barfies (aka-flu), it makes it super easy to grab a clean set of sheets in the middles of the night after someone has gotten sick! Also, with this idea, it made it easier to clean out the random linens I had because if they didn't have a set to be folded and stuffed with, they got the boot! Another tip about sheets sets, however it's possible with whatever shelving space you have, keep each bed size separate somehow. This system is only truly helpful if anyone (read: spouse!) can reach in and pull out the right sheet set! The only extras I kept were 2 pillowcases in case a sleepover friend came over for the kids or something, and I just needed a pillow case for them, and not a whole set of sheets.  "Andrea Style" folding so you only see one folded side of each towel or blanket. These are the shelves that were already in the closet. Because they are so deep and I didn't want to have to reach past the front piles of towels and blankets, I decided that only the front part of the shelves would be used. Tip #2: Folding "Andrea Style".
It's funny because I thought I was being smart and organized by folding our things so that you only saw the one folded side of a towel or blanket, but one my my sisters informed me that our eldest sister (Andrea) does it. So, I clearly (subconsciously) took her idea and just thought I was so smart. Turns out I wasn't. She was. Dang. A word about towels.....you don't need 50 of them! If you own a washing machine, or have weekly access to a washing machine, you don't need a lot of towels! If you have the shelf space for 50 towels, it still doesn't mean you need that many. O.k., maybe if you have 25 people living in your house you need 50, but I'm gonna guess you don't have 25 people living in your house? Thought so. I'm just being a bit bossy, but I just wanna share my deep thoughts on towels. :) So, these simple changes start while you're folding the laundry. If you're folding it anyway, why not fold it so that it will make life easier later when you go looking for this stuff!? Years ago one of sisters made these mini pavlovas for an Easter Feaster dessert. What? Does no one else call it that? Well, anyway, I loved them, and have been making them ever since. They are (relatively) simple, are gluten free, and are honestly always a crowd pleaser. Even people who don't generally like dessert will eat one of these. And like it. And eat a second one. 
Mini Meringue Nests (Pavlova) Ingredients: For the Meringues:
For the filling:
Method:
Meringues can be made ahead and stored in airtight container in dry, cool place up to 2 weeks or frozen in airtight container up to 3 months. 
There you have it. Lovely little nests that you could make tonight to have ready for Easter weekend (if you need a dessert for any gathering you are having or going to). Just sayin'.
I hope everyone had a great weekend. Saturday was the kind of spring day that begged for the windows to be opened and for a spring cleaning to be done. And I done 'er. We spent time with some friends on Sunday which was really nice (thanks friend!). Our basement stopped flooding (hazaa!), and our Hydro stayed on during a beautiful (noisy!) storm last night (double hazaa!). I did wake up literally screaming out loud though last night. I swore something smashed downstairs, but I was too chicken to see if it was for real, or if I had been having a bad dream. Well, it was for real!...I found my beautiful little shelf with my lovely tiny bottles and other nice things on the floor, bottles smashed everywhere, the tea cup broken, and there is a strange flapping/struggling sound coming from behind my fridge that I am not crazy excited about investigating. Oh boy....here's to Monday! I spent many years working at a summer camp when I was a teenager and young adult. Then, when I got married, my husband and I worked (and lived) at a bunch of different camps together. All this to say, I have a deep, won't ever get rid of it hate for pudding made from a powdered mix (and made in mass quantities!). But then a few years ago I saw a recipe, and the filling was homemade pudding. I had honestly not thought of home-made pudding before! Duh! Anywhooo, I made it, and tasted a bite of it while it was still hot in the pot, and ooohhhh man!!! Homemade pudding is NOT the same thing as powdered pudding, or the pudding packs for kids lunches! I am a believer in pudding! Even if you do like powdered pudding mix or pudding cups, try this. You will love it. Pinky swear. 
Homemade Chocolate Pudding (from The Food Network) Ingredients:
Method:
My youngest daughter loved her pudding! I topped it with some fruit to make me feel like less of a bad parent for giving my daughter chocolate pudding at 10:30 in the morning! :) 
The process to make this is really very easy, and golly-gee, homemade pudding is just the bees-knees! Why the heck am I talking like this???
Have a great weekend! Last night our Hydro was out for about 6 hours, our basement has been flooding, and some other third thing to complain about (I don't have a third thing, but it always seems like these types of things should come in threes), but I am still looking forward to the weekend, and I hope (no matter what kind of week you had), you can look forward to the weekend too. It seemed fitting that for Autism Awareness Month, I introduce you to the first person ever diagnosed with autism. This is not my story, but one from The Atlantic, and was published in August of 2010. I have only included parts about "Autism's First Child", Donald, but the whole article gives a bigger picture of autism in general, and autism in adulthood (something rarely talked about or looked at). I haven't changed the wording at all, the only thing I have done here is to condense the story. The full story can be read here. Meet Donald Gray Triplett, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism.  Donald as a child In 1951, A Hungarian-born psychologist, mind reader, and hypnotist named Franz Polgar was booked for a single night’s performance in a town called Forest, Mississippi. Polgar was lodged at the home of one of Forest’s wealthiest and best-educated couples, who treated the esteemed mentalist as their personal guest. Polgar’s all-knowing, all-seeing act had been mesmerizing audiences in American towns large and small for several years. But that night it was his turn to be dazzled, when he met the couple’s older son, Donald, who was then 18. Oddly distant, uninterested in conversation, and awkward in his movements, Donald nevertheless possessed a few advanced faculties of his own, including a flawless ability to name musical notes as they were played on a piano and a genius for multiplying numbers in his head. Polgar tossed out “87 times 23,” and Donald, with his eyes closed and not a hint of hesitation, correctly answered “2,001.” Indeed, Donald was something of a local legend. Even people in neighboring towns had heard of the Forest teenager who’d calculated the number of bricks in the facade of the high school—the very building in which Polgar would be performing—merely by glancing at it.  Donald as a young man According to family lore, Polgar put on his show and then, after taking his final bows, approached his hosts with a proposal: that they let him bring Donald with him on the road, as part of his act. The offer was politely, but firmly declined. What the all-knowing mentalist didn’t know, however, was that Donald, the boy who missed the chance to share his limelight, already owned a place in history. His unusual gifts and deficits had been noted outside Mississippi, and an account of them had been published—one that was destined to be translated and reprinted all over the world, making his name far better-known, in time, than Polgar’s His first name, anyway. Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article. His full name is Donald Gray Triplett. He’s 77 years old. And he’s still in Forest, Mississippi.  Donald Tripett, age 77 Donald was institutionalized when he was only 3 years old. Records in the archives at Johns Hopkins quote the family doctor in Mississippi suggesting that the Tripletts had “overstimulated the child.” Donald’s refusal as a toddler to feed himself, combined with other problem behaviors his parents could not handle, prompted the doctor’s recommendation for “a change of environment.” In August 1937, Donald entered a state-run facility 50 miles from his home, in a town then actually called Sanatorium, Mississippi. The place wasn’t designed or operated with a child like Donald in mind, and according to a medical evaluator, his response upon arrival was dramatic: he “faded away physically.” At the time, institutionalization was the default option for severe mental illness, which even his mother believed was at the root of Donald’s behavior: she described him in one despairing letter as her “hopelessly insane child.” Being in an institution, however, didn’t help. “It seems,” his Johns Hopkins evaluator later wrote, “he had there his worst phase.” With parental visits limited to twice a month, his predisposition to avoid contact with people broadened to everything else—toys, food, music, movement—to the point where daily he “sat motionless, paying no attention to anything.” He had not been diagnosed correctly, of course, because the correct diagnosis did not yet exist. Very likely he was not alone in that sense, and there were other children with autism, in other wards in other states, similarly misdiagnosed—perhaps as “feeble-minded,” in the medical parlance of the day, or more likely, because of the strong but isolated intelligence skills many could demonstrate, as having schizophrenia. Donald’s parents came for him in August of 1938. By then, at the end of a year of institutionalization, Donald was eating again, and his health had returned. Though he now “played among the other children,” his observers noted, he did so “without taking part in their occupations.” The facility’s director nonetheless told Donald’s parents that the boy was “getting along nicely,” and tried to talk them out of removing their son. He actually requested that they “let him alone.” But they held their ground, and took Donald home with them. Later, when they asked the director to provide them with a written assessment of Donald’s time there, he could scarcely be bothered. His remarks on Donald’s full year under his care covered less than half a page. The boy’s problem, he concluded, was probably “some glandular disease.” Donald, about to turn 5 years old, was back where he had started. Most likely Donald's name would never have entered the medical literature had his parents not had both the ambition to seek out the best help for him, and the resources to pay for it. Mary Triplett had been born into the McCravey family, financiers who had founded and still controlled the Bank of Forest. She married the former mayor’s son, an attorney named Oliver Triplett Jr. With a degree from Yale Law School and a private practice located directly opposite the county courthouse. Their first son, Donald, was born in September 1933. A brother came along nearly five years later, while Donald was in Sanatorium. Also named Oliver, the baby stayed behind with his grandparents in Forest when, in October 1938, the rest of the family boarded a Pullman car in Meridian, Mississippi, headed for Baltimore. Donald’s parents had secured him a consultation with the nation’s top child psychiatrist at the time, a Johns Hopkins professor named Dr. Leo Kanner. Kanner (pronounced “Connor”) had written the book, literally, on child psychiatry. Aptly titled Child Psychiatry, this definitive 1935 work immediately became the standard medical-school text, and was reprinted through 1972. Kanner would always seem slightly perplexed by the intensity of the letter he had received from Donald’s father in advance of their meeting. Before departing Mississippi, Oliver had retreated to his law office and dictated a detailed medical and psychological history covering the first five years of his elder son’s life. Typed up by his secretary and sent ahead to Kanner, it came to 33 pages. Many times over the years, Kanner would refer to the letter’s “obsessive detail.” Excerpts from Oliver’s letter—the outpourings of a layman, but also a parent—now hold a unique place in the canon of autism studies. Cited for decades and translated into several languages, Oliver’s observations were the first detailed listing of symptoms that are now instantly recognizable to anyone who knows autism. It is not too much to say that the agreed-upon diagnosis of autism—the one being applied today to define an epidemic—was modeled, at least in part, on Donald’s symptoms as described by his father. The surviving medical records of that initial visit contain a notation preceded by a question mark: schizophrenia. It was one of the few diagnoses that came even close to making sense, because it was clear that Donald was essentially an intelligent child, as a person exhibiting schizophrenia might easily be. But nothing in his behavior suggested that Donald experienced the hallucinations typical of schizophrenia. He wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there, even if he was ignoring the people who were. Kanner kept Donald under observation for two weeks, and then the Tripletts returned to Mississippi—without answers. Kanner simply had no idea how to diagnose the child. He would later write to Mary Triplett, who had begun sending frequent updates on Donald: “Nobody realizes more than I do myself that at no time have you or your husband been given a clear-cut and unequivocal diagnostic term.” It was dawning on him, he wrote, that he was seeing “for the first time a condition which has not hitherto been described by psychiatric or any other literature.” He wrote those lines to Mary in a letter dated September 1942, almost four years after he’d first seen Donald. Perhaps hoping to allay her frustration, Kanner added that he was beginning to see a picture emerge. “I have now accumulated,” he wrote, “a series of eight other cases which are very much like Don’s.” He hadn’t gone public with this, he noted, because he needed “time for longer observation.” He had, however, been working on a name for this new condition. Pulling together the distinctive symptoms exhibited by Donald and the eight other children—their lack of interest in people, their fascination with objects, their need for sameness, their keenness to be left alone—he wrote Mary: “If there is any name to be applied to the condition of Don and those other children, I have found it best to speak of it as ‘autistic disturbance of affective contact.’” Kanner did not coin the term autistic. It was already in use in psychiatry, not as the name of a syndrome but as an observational term describing the way some patients with schizophrenia withdrew from contact with those around them. Like the word feverish, it described a symptom, not an illness. But now Kanner was using it to pinpoint and label a complex set of behaviors that together constituted a single, never-before-recognized diagnosis: autism. (As it happens, another Austrian, Hans Asperger, was working at the same time in Vienna with children who shared some similar characteristics, and independently applied the identical word--autistic to the behaviors he was seeing; his paper on the subject would come out a year after Kanner’s, but remained largely unknown until it was translated into English in the early 1990s.)  Donald (left) and his brother Oliver Donald lives alone now in the house his parents raised him in. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Donald’s life is that he grew up to be an avid traveler. He has been to Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia—some 36 foreign countries and 28 U.S. states in all, including Egypt three times, Istanbul five times, and Hawaii 17. He’s notched one African safari, several cruises, and innumerable PGA tournaments. It’s not wanderlust exactly. Most times, he sets six days as his maximum time away, and maintains no contact afterward with people he meets along the way. He makes it a mission to get his own snapshots of places he’s already seen in pictures, and assembles them into albums when he gets home. He is, in all likelihood, the best-traveled man in Forest, Mississippi. This is the same man whose favorite pastimes, as a boy, were spinning objects, spinning himself, and rolling nonsense words around in his mouth. At the time, he seemed destined for a cramped, barren adulthood—possibly lived out behind the windows of a state institution. Instead, he learned to golf, to drive, and to circumnavigate the globe—skills he first developed at the respective ages of 23, 27, and 36. In adulthood, Donald continued to branch out.  For a time, Donald’s care was literally shifted out into the community. Kanner believed that finding him a living situation in a more rural setting would be conducive to his development. So in 1942, the year he turned 9, Donald went to live with the Lewises, a farming couple who lived about 10 miles from town. His parents saw him frequently in this four-year period, and Kanner himself once traveled to Mississippi to observe the arrangement. He later said he was “amazed at the wisdom of the couple who took care of him". The Lewises, who were childless, put Donald to work and made him useful. “They managed to give him suitable goals,” Kanner wrote in a later report, " They made him use his preoccupation with measurements by having him dig a well and report on its depth. When he kept counting rows of corn over and over, they had him count the rows while plowing them. On my visit, he plowed six long rows; it was remarkable how well he handled the horse and plow and turned the horse around". Kanner’s final observation on this visit speaks volumes about how Donald was perceived: “He attended a country school where his peculiarities were accepted and where he made good scholastic progress.” But he never could count bricks. This, it turns out, is a myth.
Donald explained how it had come about only after we’d been talking for some time. It had begun with a chance encounter more than 60 years ago outside his father’s law office, where some fellow high-school students, aware of his reputation as a math whiz, challenged him to count the bricks in the county courthouse across the street. Maybe they were picking on him a little; maybe they were just seeking entertainment. Regardless, Donald says he glanced quickly at the building and tossed out a large number at random. Apparently the other kids bought it on the spot, because the story would be told and retold over the years, with the setting eventually shifting from courthouse to school building—a captivating local legend never, apparently, fact-checked. A common presumption is that people with autism are not good at telling fibs or spinning yarns, that they are too literal-minded to invent facts that don’t align with established reality. On one level, the story of Donald and the bricks demonstrates again the risks inherent in such pigeonholing. But on another level, it reveals something unexpected about Donald in particular. At the time of that episode, he was a teenager, barely a decade removed from the near-total social disconnect that had defined his early childhood. By adolescence, however, it seems he’d already begun working at connecting with people, and had grasped that his math skills were something that others admired. We know that, because we finally asked him directly why he’d pulled that number out of the air all those years ago. He closed his eyes to answer, and then surprised us a final time. Speaking as abruptly as ever, and with the usual absence of detail, he said simply, and perhaps obviously, “I just wanted for those boys to think well of me". You know how certain seasons make you want to eat certain things? Well, as Spring creeps in, I want more salads. I eat these ridiculously large salads of romaine, spinach, peppers of all colours, cucumber, tomato, hot banana pepper rings, sometimes a chopped-up hard boiled egg, but I always enjoy having some leftover roasted chicken for my salad. This roast chicken is so good the day you make it, but it really makes fantastic, lemony chicken leftovers. :)  Ingredients
** If you want to round this meal out, cut up 4-5 medium sized potatoes, and 3-4 carrots (or a bag of mini carrots), and add them to the roasting pan after the bird. Method:
 Using fresh ingredients really does make a roast chicken taste better. I had lemons, but my regular grocery store didn't have any fresh rosemary. Bummer.  Lifting the skin, piercing it, and applying the butter or coconut oil and herb mixture right under the skin means the breast will have lots of flavour and moisture. And stuffing the cavity of the chicken with the lemon rinds and onion mean that every inch of that meat will have a wonderful flavour.  A roast chicken is really very easy to make, and can be so versatile. There are so many flavour combos you can do, but the basic principles are the same: A-lift the skin and prick the breasts, B-Put your 'something fatty' under the skin, and C-Put something with juice into the cavity!
I hope everyone is enjoying the spring that is slowly arriving (with all it's rain!). I've enjoyed waking up to a flooded basement 2 mornings in a row, even though we bought a new sump pump yesterday. Poopers. Aw well, such in life in a Canadian spring. You can't have such a long, icy, snowy winter without a flooded basement in the spring! A while ago I posted about The Rawleigh's Man (from a 1928 flyer). Well, a friend from the Theatre Guild, Sean Scally, knows I love to read old books, so he lent me "Dr. Chase's Third, Last & Complete Receipt Book & Household Physician" (I know, its got a ring to it...). This beauty is from 1893! In an act of pure irony (o.k., not real irony, more like Alanis Morissette's idea of irony), while reading this book, I would often be sitting with the iPad or laptop so I could look up the many (many!) things I wasn't sure about! Anywho, I just wanted to share some snippets I enjoyed from this amazing book! 
The book, and the inside cover with a picture of Dr. Chase. Gotta love the beard style!
People always say "back when things were more simple"-um, I bet if you lived back in the day with Dr. Chase you may argue that point! There is 3 whole pages alone about making butter, and problem solving, etc. That doesn't sound terribly simple! The book is divided into many parts, the first two are "Symptoms of Diseases", & "Treating Diseases". One title in treating diseases is "FAT PEOPLE-Food to Reduce Their Fleshiness". Yikes, that was harsh. Or how about the simple cure for "LIQUOR-A Cure for the Love of it". The advice is to eat an orange in the morning, half an hour before breakfast. As a patient told Dr. Chase, "I have done so regularly, and find that liquor has become repulsive. The taste of the orange is in the saliva of my tongue, and it would be as well to mix water and oil, as rum, with my taste". Wow, that was easy. Oh boy. 
For real, read that fantastic caption under the picture!
A third of the book is dedicated to "receipts" or recipes. Dr. Chase clarifies (because I know you were wondering) that a "recipe" is directions with proper spelling, but a "receipt" is written in "much the more common manner of speaking", and can often be found in a poem or a song. One of my favourite parts of the food section of the book is Dr. Chase's remarks on good flour: "The first requisite to good bread is good flour (and sifted to enliven it and make it mix more readily). If the very best seems too expensive, make up the difference in cost by eating less cake. With really delicious bread you will do this naturally, and almost unconsciously". Isn't that the best? I love it. Fun (disgusting...) fact: What we think of as "Minced Meat Pie", is really called a "Mock Minced Pie". As a child I never wanted to try "minced meat pies" because the name had meat in it, but it appeared disguised as a fruit pie! My Mom assured me it was just raisins, currants, etc., but I wasn't feeling good about it. Well, reading a section of this book confirmed what I thought to be true! Here is a snippet for a recipe for proper Minced Meat Pie: "Boil a fresh beef's tongue, remove the skin and roots (and any remains of the wind-pipe, blood vessels, etc.), and chop it very fine. When cold add one pound of chopped suet (my note: this is the hard, white fat from the kidney's or loin of cattle, sheep, and other animals); 2 pounds each stoned raisins; english currants; citron, cut in fine pieces; 6 cloves; 2 teaspoons-ful cinnamon;....(etc., etc.)". For real....FOR REAL!!! I knew Minced Meat Pies had meat in them! And it's worse than I thought because it's cow tongue! At least now I know I was right, and so was my Mom, who's pie would just be "Mock Minced". Phew. 
The caption under this photo reads: Patient Husband. "Well, our daughter must be taught how to cook if you were not".
I could go on all day about this book! From health, to cleaning, receipts and recipes, even animal care (including bee-keeping!)-Dr. Chase pretty much knows it all (maybe he's related to my family...?). Seriously though, it is quite the collection of knowledge all put together in one book. This bad boy is 816 pages, minus the glossary, medical index, and general index.
The "Publisher Notice" at the beginning of the book says, "We desire to place a copy of this work in the hands of every family, and if the neighbourhood has been canvassed and there is no agent through whom it can be purchased, we will send by mail, free of postage, single copies to any address on receipt of the regular subscription price". Apparently they felt strongly about how awesome this book was! I plan on attempting some of these recipes in the near future (even some of the hand written recipes that were tucked in between pages), so, you'll be hearing more about Dr. Chase! A while back, maybe in the summer, I was at a good friends house, and she was talking about mango salsa. I told her I loved mango, but I couldn't imagine anything more disgusting than mango salsa. She insisted I would like it, and made a batch for me to taste. Um......I felt like I had wasted a lot of years hating something that is so delicious it's crazy! I think when I heard "mango salsa" I imagined regular salsa with mangoes thrown into the mix. That would be yucky. But that is not what this is, no sir-ee.  Mango Salsa Ingredients
Method:
This salsa is fairly forgiving to each person's personal taste. I add a lot more cilantro than I mention above, and will often use 4-5 jalapeño peppers because I like the heat. I also used mini sweet peppers (cut into rings) for this batch. I also cut my mango pretty big, but I like to eat this on salad, so I wanted bigger pieces. In conclusion, add more of less of things you like and don't like!  To cut a mango, hold the fruit up so you can see the stem, and cut down & around the pit (the mango shape mimics the pit shape, so you know where the flat sides of the pit are). Then cut each half you've into strips, and each strip into chunks. Don't forget to peel the extra skin off the pit, and slice that fruit off too! That night at my friends house we ate the salsa with corn chips, but I will eat it on it's own, on salads, and even on meat. This mango salsa is crazy-town yummy!  Wait, random, but did anyone else know this was national grilled cheese month!?! I realize this has nothing to do with mango salsa, but how very exciting! :) I need to think up a few new ones for this month, I guess! In the meantime, my sandwich category has a few ya might like!
I started working on a new project with the Belleville Theatre Guild, choreographing for their spring musical "Into The Woods". As is my tradition, I bring baked goods to rehearsals because I love to bake, and love having people to bake for! I found out at my first rehearsal that a cast member has a peanut allergy (and I love making things with peanut butter), and there are also some people avoiding gluten, so, I took up the challenge and whipped up these crazy delicious, super chocolatey cookies! 
Flour-Free Brownie Cookies Makes 35 cookies Ingredients:
Method:
Hot out of the oven (and my little Keziah counting the chocolate chips I gave her) :)
The chocolate smell of these was so wonderful! After I had put them into a container, I kept opening the container to take a deep breath and smell the chocolate goodness! 
Well, Friday friends, I hope everyone has a good weekend!
I think it's normal when you have more than one child to hope that your kids will be friends at some point in their lives. As young siblings things like bickering, crying, and being mean to each other are (I think) sort of just normal things kids work through. But siblings also teach a child how to make friends; how to share, listen to others, help if they're crying, just generally think of someone besides themselves. 
Me and some of my sisters doing "The Andrew Sisters" at our family reunion a few years ago. I have NO PERMISSION to use this photo and embarrass my siblings, but that's too bad, this is my blog, and I'll embarrass whoever I want! :)
So when the eldest child in the family has autism it makes for a strange dynamic. Where usually the second and subsequent children would be learning from the eldest, that's not always the case when the older sibling has autism. They may only be learning that tantrums have to be big to mean anything (they see autism sized meltdowns and figure that's the standard!), they don't hear any (or much) language, and so can often be delayed themselves, and picky habits caused by autism oversensitivity can become issues for all your children (even if you feel pretty sure it's not bothering all of them, they just all see their older sibling making a fuss). 
When we had babies after Caleb, he liked to hold them, and sit close to them, and poke their eyes (what kid doesn't do that!?), but it was less affectionate, and more like observing this new tiny person in the house. Like getting a puppy, Caleb was fascinated by his little sisters being just like big people, only small! He also enjoyed that they got to play while lying down on the floor, and would lay down with them and take their toys! 
Caleb squishing baby Abigail's nose. He always thinks (and says) "babies nose are squishy and ugly".
Sometimes the siblings of a child with autism get ignored because the child with special needs requires more attention and care. So, the "normal" children can often grow up feeling less important. We were worried when we had more kids after Caleb, but now I can't imagine our lives, and Caleb's life, without the girls. But there are also stories of children with autism really hurting their siblings (unknowingly), and families having to make hard decisions about how to keep their other children safe. So, it can be a tricky road to travel. 
Caleb spending floor time with the girls
Something has been happening at our house lately though. Caleb is now 9, and is "coming into his own", as it were. He is learning to control his outbursts, learning to share and be kind, and learning (from us brain washing him!) that his sisters are his best friends. The girls are now 5 and 4 years old, and they look up to Caleb as much as ever. I know they don't understand why he is different, but we have talked to them about it. But, in some ways, kids don't care if someone (especially a sibling) is different. They just see someone older, and older is more cool, after all (well, when you're 4 and 5). 
Caleb and Abby waiting for the bus on the first day of school. Caleb was very excited that Abby was coming along.
I heard a story from someone at school that one day during recess, Abby (the 5 year old) sat at the edge of the soccer field to watch Caleb play soccer. No-one asked her to, she could have been playing on the playground, or with her friends, but she wanted to watch Caleb. And more recently she came home and told us that she was being picked on about being so small (she's got her own medical issues), and she told me, "first I sat on the bench and cried, then I wanted to find Caleb". I literally just started crying. I was sad she felt mis-treated, but more happy that she viewed Caleb as a safe place. Caleb (as you may know) has a hard-core obsession with Buzz Lightyear lately. He literally prattles on all day about, "Buzz Lightyear's utility belt, Buzz Lightyear's karate chop action, Buzz Lightyear's laser....". I (quite honestly) block him out a lot of the time (it's self preservation!). I have learned that if I say, "That's amazing!!!", he's happy, and will go harass someone else with his Buzz facts. The other day I am coming upstairs and hear Caleb in the girls room talking about Buzz Lightyear facts, and peek in to see if he is alone. But Keziah (4 year old) is listing to him so patiently. When he finally stops to take a breath, sweet Keziah says, "Yup...and he's green, and blue, and red....like a rainbow!". Caleb looked right at Keziah with a twinkle in his eye, some sort of excitement that his sister had thought of something else he could talk about! He rarely directly interacts with the girls with language (his interactions with them are generally just at meals, and doing games or puzzles, reading at night, or watching t.v. {and singing along|)-all of which he can get away with no real "conversation". So, to see what their version of a conversation was just melted my heart. A very simple interaction, but Keziah took Caleb going on and on as him wanting to talk with her and hang out. So she responded, and he reacted (very positively!) 
The kids sitting on a camel at the Peterborough Zoo.
Siblings can feel shut-off from their brother or sister with autism. After-all, autism is "mind-blindness", meaning they literally can't understand that you think or feel differently from them. Being a sibling, and a friend, requires understanding that different people feel different ways. We still have many struggles with Caleb, but I honestly believe that he would not be where he is today without his younger sisters helping him in their way. When they used to cry because his meltdowns would be so loud and alarming, once he had "come down" from the fit, he would cry and say, "Caleb is really scared the girls". He knew it was too much, he could't seem to stop the fit, but he was aware (because he is empathetic) that he was upsetting his "best friends".
He is learning that love can look like a lot of different things, and can mean putting yourself out of your usual comfort zone. Abby insists on holding Caleb's hand when they cross the road to get on the bus. He usually won't hold hands at all! Keziah always covers hear ears and says, "Caleb you're too loud!!!" (she usually says it very loud herself!), but he will take it down a notch to be kind. We were worried that we wouldn't be able to handle Caleb, and any other children, but those girls, his wonderful sisters, have become some of his best teachers, and his best friends. |
Hi, I'm Amy-Lyn! 
I am the lady behind this here blog! I live in the sticks with my animals, my super handsome husband, and my
3 amazing kids! Here you'll find things from recipes (gluten-free, paleo, and strait up junk food!), DIY ideas, thoughts on raising a son with autism, and whatever else pops into my brain! : ) Read more about me by clicking here! Want to Stay Connected?
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