Saturday, May 7th

We took the kids to the Home Depot Kids Workshop this morning. Alexander and Laney hadn't been to it before but Gabriel knew actually what to do from his Loews building experience. The activity is FREE and instills a big sense of accomplishment. The kids were able to use hammers and wood glue to create tulip planters. They are adorable. Some of our playgroup friends joined us which always makes an activity more fun.
We weren't entirely sure what we would do after that and it was only 10 am. We decided to hit up the Hinton garage sales. We had a great time walking around Hinton, drinking lemonade, and checking out the things that were for sale. We found snow pants, sweaters, shoes, toys, and a few other things that needed a home. The kids played on the playground too. It was a fantastic way to spend the day together.
We grabbed a snack and drink at Sonic - a fun treat - after walking around for a couple hours.
Gabriel had several autism moments. It breaks my heart to watch him interact or try to interact with other people and they just "don't get it." As always, I put on that fake smile and push through it. His latest issue is where we park the van. Apparently we need to be in the lead whenever we park but that means being in the last spot and it isn't always available. It isn't an easy issue to accommodate so we're going to have to figure out what to do about this problem. A parent of a typical child could help them get over the issue but that doesn't work on a child with autism.
On top of that, Gabriel is scripting. We haven't seen this in a while but out of the blue he will say, "I'm Mario, not Gabriel." Or "I'm bigger than Alex." It doesn't have anything to do with the conversation at hand but it gets blurted out any way.