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Brookfield Zoo makes summer camp inclusive and fun
by David Perry

On day one of Zoo Camp, Nico pet a baby goat. Although my son loves animals, he had been too fearful to get close to them, so this was a pretty big step. What he wouldn’t do, unfortunately, was sit with the other kids in his group for lunch.

When I dropped him off on day two, one of his counselors sprang toward me, smiling, with a new plan. Instead of trying to bring Nico to a crowded table, she’d ask him to sit down first and then bring the other children around him. It worked.  
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Echolalia Gets Me Pickles: Autistic Playing Ultimate
by Yes, That Too

I'm Autistic. I'm in college. I play on my college Ultimate Frisbee team. I don't pass for neurotypical, either. I'm not consistently capable of speech, and Ultimate is a sport where we're typically expected to be talking to our teammates. The team knows that I will do this if I am capable, but that this is a bit of an if. And that's OK. It took some time for them to figure out that I really do understand when I should say a thing and what I should say, I'm just not always capable of doing so (it took until I managed to explain this, which it doesn't occur to me to do except right after this happens- you know, while I'm probably still not able to speak? There's a bit of a catch-22 there, but I did manage to explain eventually, after I started bringing my iPad to tournaments.) But once I explained that? That was it.   
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Writing about autism science? 10 things    
by Emily Willingham, PhD

"Word on the street--well, really on a blog from a researcher - is that the writer of the autism/inflammation New York Times op-ed, Moises Velasquez-Manoff, is working on an "annotated" version of the article that will "back up" his claims. Some annotation would have been useful to begin with; as I noted in my analysis of that op-ed, in many instances, discerning the origin of his information was difficult or impossible. I understand that something that appears originally in print can't have hyperlinks to appropriate references, but the writer certainly could have beefed up in-text citations (author names, journal publications), at least avoiding the criticism that the piece was unsatisfactorily sourced."     READ MORE

Goodwill   
by A Diary of a Mom

"Over the weekend, I received an invitation from a Midwestern arm of Goodwill Industries to speak at their annual dinner. While I was honored by the invitation, I was unable to accept it. Given the nature of the reasons that I had to decline, I felt compelled to share my response here. -

I am so grateful for your kind words about the blog and very much appreciate your request to speak at the dinner. Sadly, I can’t accept the invitation.

In researching Goodwill, as I try to do before agreeing to speak or associate myself with any organization, but particularly one that purports to serve or advocate for the disabled, I came upon  justification  after  justification  for paying disabled workers as little as twenty-two cents an hour. A quick Google search yields the following:   READ MORE

RESPECT    
by Emma's Hope Book

I don’t know about you, but there are definitely days when I lose sight of long-term goals.  I become impatient.  I forget to respect the process… whether it’s my own, my husband’s, a friend’s or either of my children’s.  I just don’t.  I want things to happen on MY time frame.  I like when things happen in exactly the way I imagined they would, with the speed in which I hoped for.  I LOVE when things happen even faster or in a way I couldn’t have imagined and end up even better than I thought.  But when things meander along, taking their time, going at a pace far too slow for my liking I have trouble…  My father used to say to me, “You want what you want, when you want it.”  This was NOT meant as a compliment.   He was right.  I am impatient.  I prefer when things I want to happen, happened yesterday.   
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