August 8, 2010 - The Telephone - YIKES!!

I can often go days or weeks without realizing that my daughter is different - this is probably because her quirks have become so well known to me that they seem normal. But this week I had a glaring neon sign put in my face - it said ASPIE! ASPIE! ASPIE!

My daughter's birthday party is coming up soon and we're sending out e-vites. We don't have email addresses for all of the girls that she wants to invite, so I had her call a friend from school to get her email address and the email addresses of a few of the other girls on the invite list. Well - this completely undid her! The thought of calling someone on the phone stressed her out completely. She has this thing where, when you answer the phone and say hello, she says hello back, and then if you say hello again, she says hello back again. She doesn't say "is so-and-so there?" or "hi, this is ..." when the person on the other end says hello. I'm used to this so when she says hello the second time, I usually will just start the conversation. Well, other people don't know this of course, so when she called her friend and her friend's brother answered the phone, he hung up on her after the second round of hellos. I called back and when he answered asked for the girl then handed the phone to my daughter. When the girl came on the phone and said hello my daughter didn't say anything back! I had to tell her exactly what to say through the entire conversation. It was so awkward!!

This experience taught me a few things: first - because my daughter hasn't had friends from school before now, she hasn't had the opportunity to have phone conversations with friends or individuals outside of her family circle; second - we really need to practice phone etiquette; and finally and more importantly, she's spent the last couple of years learning to model her social interactions based on facial expressions and body language - social pragmatics - but, on the phone she can't see a person's face or their body language, so she has no idea how they're responding to what she's saying.

This week we'll be practicing - I'm going to call her on her cell phone and give her different scenarios so that she'll understand the appropriate answers and or behavior during phone calls. Just one more life lesson coming at the most unexpected time - continuing the journey!!

Remember - DIFFERENT IS BEAUTIFUL!!