A Look Back At Kai's First Semester of High School, and New Year's Mochi

This time of year is a great time to reflect back while also looking ahead.

2018 was a significant year for Kai as he graduated from middle school and began high school. After eight and a half years at a therapeutic school, his return to a regular school for high school has been mostly successful. He seems to be doing well in his classes - it looks like he will earn A's in English, reading, science, and history plus a B in algebra for his first semester. Though his classes are considered to be "fundamentals" and seem to be very basic. We worry that these classes won't offer him the opportunity to attend college, but that will be a discussion we need to have with his school.

Besides grades, though, our biggest concern going in was whether or not Kai would be able to handle the environment of a much larger school. In that regard, his transition has been relatively successful. His classes are all within a self-contained special ed program so he is getting a lot of support. While Kai is making gains in many areas, he still struggles when his environment becomes ambiguous and unpredictable. He especially struggles with socialization, preferring to exercise control over things and not wanting to have direct collaboration with peers. We were hoping that attending a regular school would expose him to more socialization opportunities but he has little desire to socialize with others, and while we encouraged him to join extracurricular clubs to expand his high school experiences, the few he tried haven't gone particularly well.

The best 'extra' experiences have been those we enjoyed together with him, such as at a couple of his school's football games.

Kai's cousins are part of the marching band and Kai enjoyed seeing them in the halftime performances.

Most kids go to the games with their friends, not their parents. Not sure if that is something that Kai will want to do in the coming few years.

I have a feeling that in terms of socialization, progress will be slower than we had hoped. But as Kai goes into his second semester of high school, let's see if can be more comfortable in ambiguous situations.

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A Japanese tradition is to make mochi for New Year's. As Santa brought us a mochi maker this Christmas, we made our mochi for the first time.

My wife used the mochi machine to cook the sweet rice and then knead and pound it. (In the old days, pounding the rice was a manual process and part of the ritual of making mochi.) My wife took the mochi out of the machine.

She then showed me and Kai how to shape the mochi into individual pieces.

And then it was our turn to try.

With our own machine, we can make mochi whenever we want to and don't have to make too much at one time.

We had some for lunch today and will have more tomorrow with our ozoni, the Japanese soup containing mochi rice cakes that is part of the Japanese New Year tradition.

Happy New Year!

A Japanese Weekend, and OCDs

My wife grew up in Japan, but our son practices relatively few Japanese customs. Kai likes to eat rice and seaweed, and he learned the hiragana and katakana alphabets last year, and he goes to karate class, but that is about it.

This weekend, he expanded on this.

For breakfast on Saturday, my wife made ozoni, which is a clear, Japanese soup that is traditionally served at New Year’s. The soup contains mochi, which is rice cake, as well as kamaboko (Japanese processed fish cake), mitusba (a Japanese herb similar to parsley), chicken, and peel from yuzu (a citrus fruit).

Kai sipped the soup and liked it. It took a little more prodding, but then he tried the mochi. I wasn’t sure that he would like it as it has a bland taste and sticky texture, but my wife thought that he would since he likes rice so much. Of course, my wife was right. Kai loved the mochi and ate it all up. He even asked for more. After all of our battles over getting him to eat breakfast, I never would have thought that the most food he would eat in the morning would be from a traditional Japanese dish.

Later that day, Kai wanted to do origami. Origami is the traditional Japanese folk art of folding paper. In origami, colorful square pieces of paper are folded to make animals, flowers, or objects. The most well known origami model is the paper crane, but pretty much anything can be made.

Of course, Kai, being Kai, was not interested in making birds or animals or anything like that. He wanted to make letters.

And, so, with just a little help from Mom, he made all 26 letters of the alphabet. About a year ago, my wife tried to interest him in origami but, at that time, he was unable to do any of it by himself. This time, he followed the step-by-step instructions on a website. And, while he asked for Mom’s help on some of the more complex folds, he was able to do most of it himself.

We are happy that Kai gained a bit more exposure to his Japanese heritage this weekend. But, after thinking about it, we suspect that his desire to make an origami alphabet has less to do with an interest in Japanese and more to do with his OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) flaring up.

Like many kids with autism, Kai obsesses about things. His obsessions tend to center around letters and numbers. When we see his obsessions more frequently, we know that something is up. The past several days, besides the origami, he was writing letters and numbers and talking about them even more than usual. Our understanding is that an overgrowth of yeast in the gut can lead to an increase in these types of OCD symptoms. And, that taking antibiotics can increase yeast levels. Since Kai had been on an antibiotic for the past two weeks, it may not be a coincidence that he has been all things letters for a few days now. If we see that obsession die down as the antibiotic wears off, that will confirm our suspicions.

In the meantime, we’ll focus on the positives. The origami is great for his fine motor skills. And, hey, he even ate more mochi for breakfast this morning.