I Expect Booga To Do His Best...

I expect Booga, to do his best to make people understand him and I know sometimes that is really hard for him, I mean imagine- you have all these things you want to express through words but don't quite know how to do it. I ask him to do his best and sometimes that requires that he stop in mid sentence and try to pronounce a word that I can't quite make out.
I say, "Boog, I don't understand you."
And you can see the frustration in his eyes. Then he either tries several times to pronounce it again or finds something to show me that means the word or the word itself from some source.
I've been doing this since they wanted to teach him sign language and I told them, "Well, that's great if you’re deaf, however, he can hear and I know he is able to speak."
From there on out if he pointed at something I made him tell me what it was and if he couldn't tell me I told him to look in my eyes and I would turn his head and make him look in my eyes and I would point to eyes to make sure he knew I wanted him to look in my eyes and I would even say, “Look at me!” And then I pointed at the object and said what it was, and repeated the name of the object until he repeated it to me. Then he was rewarded with it.
After awhile, he understood, and I would work on words with him; finding ways for him to understand how the word sounded until he could come up with that word and in a fashion get the idea across.
This took years.
Booga speaks in sentences now. He conveys thoughts. He is far more than his diagnosis. And far farther than the child that they told me at five would probably never talk, be potty trained, or have any kind of meaningful life.
Boog can communicate, he is functional. But he is still intellectually impaired. He is in high school with the mentality of a twelve year old. However, he's not impossible to live with. Does he stim? Yeah. Does it get annoying? Yeah. The screaming gets annoying. But we say, "Hey, knock it off!" And if he doesn't knock it off he goes in his room.
“Go to your room and do that.”
And if that doesn't work he gets things taken away. And he hates that so he goes in his room and tries to avoid breaking anything. Because he gets “paid” for chores (it’s not an allowance, we all live here and have to do things to live in the house, carrying a laundry basket upstairs is not a huge ordeal ) and anything he breaks or throws away, comes out of his money.
A lot of the stimming I can live with and for the most part the more annoying stims have decreased mainly because he can communicate with us in some form. But when he is frustrated by something they are still there.
The biggest problem we have with behaviors is that there are no filters on him and so we get all the internal dialogue going on his brain. So nothing is hidden about how he feels about anything and nothing is kept under wraps and sometimes it can be embarrassing and painful.
It’s difficult to hear him refer to me as “Mrs. Angry Man Frustrated Jameson” which for the longest time I didn’t figure out was his name for me but apparently this is what he calls me when he is thinking about me (even though he does call us by “Dad” and “Mom” and his brothers and sisters by their names).
So learning to communicate with your autistic child and helping them to communicate meaningfully is a long journey down a winding road indeed. I wouldn't go back there and have to go through that again for all the tea in China.