As a mother, I will never give up on my child. As a mother of a child who has autism, I will never give up hope.
I look into his eyes and I see all the potential that he has to offer to this beautiful world and I just know that one day the world can see what I see.

Follow my blog as I share my life and my experiences as a person who loves someone with autism.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

What’s black or white and used all over?

Guess what?! Bryce is getting an iPad 2! Ordered it online and we can’t wait to use it!

We’d like to thank everyone who donated to the Bubbles Make Him Smile Therapy Fund to help raise money for Bryce’s iPad.

iPad 2

He is getting the iPad 2 Wi-Fi 16GB in black.

We decided to get the iPad 2 over the first generation iPad for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was because no one is carrying the first generation iPad anymore, and if they are, that’s the last of the stock and the iPad 2 is taking over the shelves. Good enough reason right? hehe And who are we kidding, by the time you’ve done reading this sentence, iPad 3 will probably be out and iPad 4 in the making. Gotta love technology, eh?

Daniel went to a half a dozen stores trying to find one so we could give it to Bryce right away and I was calling stores from home that were a bit of a drive away, however, no one had any iPad 2 16GB Wi-Fi only. For like $130 bucks more we could of got Wi-Fi plus 3G but it’s not going to be leaving the house and for $100 bucks more we could of got double the GB’s, but we didn’t want to waste that kind of money just to get it now. So we ordered it online Apple’s website and it should arrive mid June.

We’re still debating if we’re going to give it to Bryce on his birthday (July 2) or give it the millisecond that the mail carrier drops it off. But we’re really excited about this and will be counting down the sleeps until it arrives!

We look forward to joining the bandwagon of parents with a child on the autism spectrum using the iPad and blogging about his experiences with it and sharing the apps we use, and all that good stuff so stay tuned for that!

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

Monday, May 23, 2011

Getting Down and Dirty (again)

It’s that time of year (again), one we dread and put off for days, sometimes months: Gardening!

It’s a long weekend for us and we didn’t have any plans, and when the weather report of rain all weekend long turned into sunshine out of no where, we took that as a sign to get some outside chores done. Neither of us have a green thumb, and when it comes to gardening, we usually let the pros take over. (Daniel’s dad is an avid gardener and helped us tremendously last year.) However, this year, he wasn’t available.

So Daniel and Bryce started to dig up our garden of weeds and see what survived the Vancouver winter and assess the situation. It turns out that the flowers we got last year were mostly perennials which means they have a short life span, so we headed to Walmart again and picked up a bunch of colourful annuals and a couple of rose bushes.

Bryce was in charge of adding top soil to all the new plants. It was the cleanest job we could give him as he’s not a big fan of getting dirty but we wanted to involve him as much as he could handle. He was very helpful and had a smile on the whole day.

We also wanted Bryce to have an area of our garden that would be all his and he could take care of it himself. When we were at Walmart we picked up a couple more flower pots and Bryce picked out his own flowers. It’s Bryce little garden.

Daniel can’t help but laugh at what our garden looked like before, and what it looks like now. It’s a huge improvement don’t you think?

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

Sunday, May 22, 2011

My little artist

It was 9:30pm and we decided we would go to Walmart and pick up some flowers and plants and do some gardening tomorrow morning because our little garden from last year is overgrowing with weeds. Apparently, the garden portion of the Walmart is closed at 8:00pm (while the rest of the store remains open till 11:00pm... go figure). Not wanting it to be a completely wasted trip, we decided to look around the seasonal section.

We walked past some flower pots and I thought it would be nice to add a couple of them to our garden and I guess Bryce felt the same way because he snatched up a couple right away. We decided to get some paint and let Bryce paint them and they’d be his little plants, so we headed to the crafts section to look for some paints. We found an Acrylic Mini Art Set that had everything we needed to paint some pots.

As soon as we got home we had a late night art session. Bryce was very excited to paint his flower pots. He painted one of them white and the other one blue, and had some touch up help from dad.

The Acrylic Mini Art Set came with a stretched canvas, so I drew a couple of flowers in flower pots on it and Bryce painted it.

One of them white and the other one blue. My little artist.

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

Friday, May 20, 2011

Vancouver Mom Blogger Celebration

VancouverMom.ca invited all of us Top 30 Fabulous Vancouver Mom Bloggers to a special event to thank us for what we do! The event was hosted at Bopomo Pictures in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on Thursday, May 19, 2011.

VancouverMom.ca went all out on us moms!

  • All the 2011 bloggers received a professional headshot for our blog, courtesy of Bopomo!
  • All the 2011 bloggers also received a goody bag full of thank you gifts! (We were so spoiled!)
  • All of the bloggers had a chance to win some pretty awesome door prizes! (I won the London Drugs Makeup prize pack! Thank you!)

It was so great to meet all the moms behind the blogs! If you want to read some seriously great blogs from some pretty amazing people I encourage you to check out all of the nominees blogs!

I won this amazing London Drugs door prize that came with great makeup, perfume, and skincare products packed in a GUESS makeup bag!! WOW! Thank you VancouverMom.ca! Plus I got free slim labels from Emily Press Labels!

All the 2011 bloggers took home this incredible gift bag by Raspberry Kids packed with goodies from local vendors! I don't even know where to begin for people to thank for all these goodies, so I’ll just list them, but THANK YOU!

Thank you to VancouverMom.ca for inviting me to be part of this celebration! Thanks to Bopomo Pictures for hosting it! I truly valued every minute of the event!

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

P.S. I’m sorry if I yapped your ear off about my herniated disc or locked eyes with you but never said hi! I’m not a social person at all, and when I’m nervous I tend to ramble and can be a little bit shy sometimes. Plus, the medication I’m on for my pain makes me extremely nauseous and that event was the first time I’ve been on my feet for a long period of time, let alone out and about. It didn’t help that I was wearing heels. Wow, whose dumb idea was that!?

Ok now that that’s all out of the way... I did have a great time!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Bryce, what’s your name?

So Bryce is about a quarter of the way done his 60 Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) sessions. Today we had an appointment with our naturopathic doctor, Dr. Tasreen Alibhai, to follow up and see how the treatment is going so far and if we have noticed any changes in behaviour.

I want to say Bryce is more vocal, but Daniel’s argument was that I notice he’s more vocal because Bryce is home all day now with me since he’s out of school. I guess that makes sense. It’s like, obviously I would like there to be progress, clearly it would be nice to see something out of all the time, energy, and money that has gone into this therapy, but on the other hand, we would have no regrets at all if this didn’t do anything to help his behaviour.

Anyways, we had to fill out a questionnaire called Hyperbaric Autism Rating Evaluation. I’m not particularly a huge fan of standardized tests or quizzes that give you results for anything autism-related because each autism diagnosis is completely different and as they say, when you meet one person with autism, well, you met one person with autism. I realize it’s good to have on file, but would be even better to have a personalized test for each child. Ask me questions that I want results and answers for, and we’ll see where we are down the road when we have a follow up. To me that just makes more sense.

Here’s how you answer the questions for the evaluation:

N - Not True At All (Zero Times Per Week)
S - Sometimes True (1-3 Times Per Week)
M - Moderately True (4-7 Times Per Week)
V - Very True (more than 8 Times Per Week)

The questions ask how many times can he/she do this or that, rather than if he/she can do this or that. That part I like a lot and it sort of gives you a sense of what has been mastered, and what needs to be worked on.

Question 1. Can say own name when questioned?

No idea! We’re not usually asking our own son what his name is, and when ‘strangers’ ask him, I’m usually up there real quick not even giving him a chance to answer and say, “This is Bryce.” (I’m such a mom sometimes.) So we decided to ask Bryce to find out if he could say his own name when questioned.

Mom: “What’s your name?”
Bryce: “What’s your name.”
I pause for a minute and ask again.
Mom: “What’s your name?”
Bryce: “Old MacDonald had a farm. Sing song mommy?”
Awww! I love it when he says ‘mommy’. Wait, no distraction, not gonna happen! Work with me here!
Mom: “Bryce pay attention! What’s your name?!”
I looked at Daniel and said, “Oops.”
Bryce covers his face like he’s hiding. He does this when he is overstimulated, confused, frustrated, just plain annoyed, or playing. You’d be surprised how hard it is to tell which one of those reasons he is doing it for.
Ok, one more time!
Mom: “Bryce, what’s your name??!”
Bryce: “Bryce!”
Mom: “That’s right. You’re Bryce! Good job! High five!”
Daniel: “I’d say S – Sometimes True (1-3 Times Per Week)

We laughed.

We will be documenting this whole HBOT experience and sharing pictures, videos, and reporting everything we can on our blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

If you have any questions for us, or just questions in general that we may be able to answer, please contact us.

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

To learn more about Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) to treat autism, please visit Vitalia Health Care.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Canucks Encore

Here is a little video we made in honour of autism awareness, Canucks Autism Network, and the Vancouver Canucks. Go Canucks Go!

Special thanks to our friend Sheldon W. for the vocals and huge thanks and shout out to Ben, Jordan, Ethan, Beauty, and Kurtis for being part of our video!

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Get your game face on!

So Bryce has been out of school for a couple weeks now. With my herniated disc and Daniel’s work schedule, we weren’t able to take Bryce to school, and the school district, though in the beginning, very supportive and worked out transportation for Bryce for several weeks, soon changed there attitude when they realized that herniated discs don’t go away overnight and that this was going to be permanent for the remainder of the school year (give or take, at the time, 40 days). There was a taxi service program available, but I don’t know anyone that would put there child in a car with a stranger, and everyone I said that to agreed, even the school staff member that recommended it... comforting, I know.

So when we turned down that option, we started to get the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ type speech and hear things like ‘how lucky we should be that the school was able to do it as long as they did’ and ‘how much of an inconvenience it is now to the staff’. Meanwhile the whole time telling us how much they love Bryce being there and miss him when he’s not in school. It was like night and day. A school we’ve been with for 5 years, turning into complete strangers. An inconvenience? I’m sorry, no one calls my child an inconvenience. He’s brilliant! It just made me very mad, and it was a huge disappointment. Next year we’ll probably be going to a new school because of it. We are really sad. We really liked that school, the staff, and our SEA. Will truly be missed.

But anyways, with more home time, comes... more game time? Apparently. Bryce has been playing a lot of computer and video games for his Wii and Nintendo DS. He loves running around in Final Fantasy XIV for PC, an online version of the Final Fantasy series, listening to the different sounds and music, and pointing out things he sees in the game. On his Wii he still loves playing New Super Mario Bros. and will even play all four characters at the same time. Lately, he’s been into playing Wii Sports Boxing game, and asks for help watching Wii Boxing videos on YouTube, which somehow turns into watching real life boxing with the ‘watch related videos’ option, but that’s another story. For Nintendo DS he enjoys the LEGO series and has Batman, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter Years 1-4, and ever since he saw an advertisement for it in his LEGO magazine, the Pirates of the Caribbean.

This doesn't come as a complete shock to me or Daniel. In fact, we even encourage it. We both are ‘gamers’ as well. A lot of the games that we play, Bryce does play for the music, the pictures, or the sounds. For example, Unreal Tournament, a blood and guts first person shooter game, rated Mature 17+, not recommended for children for sure, but Bryce loves watching the main menu screen that just has grey and black shadow-like images floating in the background. With Wii Boxing he likes the soundtrack that plays after your fight is over and will listen to that forever. Some of the games he plays to play, and some of them he plays for the sights or sounds that are in the game.

Now, keep in mind that this child has little communication, and unable to read a line from a book, but when he does play the games to play, he is able to navigate and explore for hours without a problem, without reading instructions, storylines, or quests. He just figures it out. It just blows my mind how well he is at comprehending them, the controls even, and just mastering them, with little to no help.

Like I said, he’s brilliant!

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Top 30 Fabulous Vancouver Mom Bloggers

It’s Mother’s Day and the winner of VancouverMom.ca’s 2011’s 30 Fabulous Vancouver Mom Bloggers was announced. Congratulations to Karen Brackett of Adventures of the Sunshine Brigade. Despite not being titled the winner, I can’t help but feel that we all won this anyways. We’re moms!

vancouvermomtop30

I’d like to dedicate this blog to the 30 nominees who I was honoured to be amoungst. It introduced us to some really amazing women and we made new friends. Wishing all the fabulous Vancouver Mom Bloggers a Happy Mother’s Day!

And Happy Mother’s Day to all the mother’s out there!

Happy Mothers Day

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Giving Back to Autism: Ten year old Fights for Acceptance

Please read an article we wrote that was featured on 365give.

Giving Back to Autism: Ten year old Fights for Acceptance

Day 217 Great Moms that Give Part 3: Bubbles Make Him Smile

365give

365give. Changing the world one day at a time.

365give launched on a simple premise: One person wanted to create positive change in a world; one person wanted to leave a legacy of giving; one person wanted to create a movement that would mobilize people to give back every day of their lives. 365give is an online diary of one woman’s actions and impact in changing the world every day for 365days. 365give has the potential to create a movement of giving and a community of committed “givers” that can educate and inspire future generations.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Getting back on track.

Since Daniel and Bryce aren’t sick anymore, we started back up on Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) yesterday. The slightest runny nose prevents you from being able to dive. I think it has something to do with the pressurizing of the ears as you dive. Anyways, we’re back on track with that and had session number 4 yesterday of 60 consecutive sessions, 5 days a week.

I wanted to address some questions people may have, but may not want to ask. It’s a couple of those hard ball questions that I know I would have if I heard about any type of treatment for autism, especially if it’s out of the norm for therapies.

I’d like to start out by saying that there is no known cure for autism at this time, but there are ways to treat autism. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) is just another one of those therapies out there that families hope will help there child in some small way, even if it’s minor and no one but them notices the change.

This brings me to my next point. We’re not trying to change Bryce. Autism doesn’t define who he is, and I know a lot of people could argue there heart off with that. Even if this treatment gets rid of all the autism symptoms, he’s still going to be Bryce. Maybe he’ll have a bit more of a wardrobe selection rather than always wanting to wear the same t-shirt every single day, but he’ll still be himself. We’re hoping this will reduce some of his symptoms. Like his, come-out-of-no-where-hit-the-deck-run-for-your-life tantrums, for example, which I’m sure I’m not the only parent, autism or not, alone on that one.

This isn’t even about making his life easier, or even making our lives easier as parents. This is about making Bryce’s life better.

Being able to communicate with his peers, or even interact with them in a way that he struggles to be able to do now, or just that social interaction and connection, that would be amazing. Just pure raw communication in general would be great. He is able to tell me something, and in most circumstances, a bit of details, but not always in a degree that everyone can fully understand. I’m not even joking when I say I don’t understand everything Bryce says, and I’m his mother! That in itself scares me. Imagine your child has something to say, something to tell you, and the words were just not there, or what they said didn’t make any sense to you and they were never understood. That thought alone, it just destroys me.

If this HBOT doesn’t do anything, and it doesn’t end up showing any results, despite all the time and money invested, we will have no regrets. As a parent you always want what is best for your child. You want the world to acknowledge them, accept them, and appreciate them. You can’t put a value on that. There should be nothing you wouldn’t do for your child.

Acknowledge. Accept. Appreciate. Autism.

We will be documenting this whole HBOT experience and sharing pictures, videos, and reporting everything we can on our blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

If you have any questions for us, or just questions in general that we may be able to answer, please contact us.

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya

To learn more about Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) to treat autism, please visit Vitalia Health Care.

Monday, May 2, 2011

2011’s Fabulous Vancouver Mom Blogger - Vote for us!

Like our blogs? BubblesMakeHimSmile.com needs your vote!

Please take a second and vote for Tanaya of Bubbles Make Him Smile as your favourite 2011’s Fabulous Vancouver Mom Blogger! Voting starts May 2nd, 2011 and ends May 6th, 2011 and the winner is fittingly announced on May 8th, 2011, Mother’s Day.

Vote for us @ VancouverMom.ca

Click here to vote for Tanaya of Bubbles Make Him Smile

We hope we have your vote!

Thanks so much for your support,
Bryce, Tanaya, and Daniel

Bubbles Make Him Smile

BubblesMakeHimSmile.com was created to Help Bryce Defeat Autism Now by raising autism awareness, acceptance, and understanding.

Follow our blogs as we share our lives with you and our experiences as people who love someone with autism.