First off THANK YOU so much to the people who supported my PDA North America fundraiser in honor of Autism Acceptance Month. You guys rock, and shirts should out before the end of the celebratory month, around 4/22. Your support means so much to us.
So we have officially have an eloper. There, I said it. Or maybe I’m only just starting to acknowledge it, I’m not sure. It’s a scary phenomenon that I always considered us extremely lucky to have dodged, knowing that there are many stories of children who wandered off and suffered tragedy. I guess in the back of my mind I already knew that the potential was there, as I always considered ours a “runner”. From the earliest days that he could run, he was prone to just take off running in the opposite direction you wanted him to go in, giggling manically in the realization that he possessed a power to make grown ups run. I always kept an iron tight grip on his hand in parking lots and out in public, wary of the sudden bursts of speed that I knew him to be capable of. When he returned to preschool after being home for the first 6 months of Covid, there was a policy that only one family could enter the check in area at a time, where they checked your temperature and you signed your kid in. I found this situation extremely nerve racking, as all of the other small children waited in line patiently with their parents to enter the building, while mine inevitably beelined down the sidewalk and away from the front doors. Every. Single. Day. He wasn’t trying to get out of going to preschool per say, it was more just like the Forrest Gump situation when he first ran out of his leg braces as a child, and from that day on he… was… running. The brief bouts of freedom and feeling of the wind running through his bouncy blond curls before he was detained again were like a drug that he had to get his daily fix of.
As frustrating as these bursts could be, I was always right there and mostly prepared for them. The random wandering started when Ninja was about 4 years old, and walked away from an outdoor soccer clinic held at the preschool. Luckily it was well supervised and he didn’t get anywhere, but it is the first instance in my memory of it happening. It happened so infrequently over the next few years, that I still allowed myself to maintain the delusion that we were so lucky not to have an eloper. Or maybe he was just so closely supervised anytime we went anywhere that any attempts to walk away were shut down before they could really start. Looking back on it now, given our sons intense and endless curiosity about absolutely everything and his extreme outgoing friendliness towards perfect strangers, I absolutely believe he would have wondered away to God-knows-where as early as 2 or 3 years old if he’d had the opportunity.
One day recently the boy left his second grade classroom and went to another classroom, unclear on why this was a problem, “because I wanted to see what a different class is like”. Fair enough, I guess. The next week he got off the bus at school and headed for the back of the building, rather than the front doors. No, kid. He has been stopped by recess monitors on a few occasions trying to leave the area, and has been known to just leave the rink/bench area during a hockey practice or game. One of those times he was discovered in the rink pro shop, another time in the directors office, another time in the locker room. There is zero doubt in my mind that he would attempt to enter the zamboni area and drive it if an opportunity presented itself. Do ice rinks hide the keys to those things? I honestly have no idea.
I was previously on a mission to find shoe inserts where we can hide an Air Tag, but he has these extra wide Fred Flintstone feet and it did not seem as though anyone makes special inserts for wide fit shoes. That is so perfectly on brand for us, since absolutely nothing in our world is cut and dry. I honestly didn’t know how else I would hide them, because if he knew we wanted him to wear one he would immediately remove it. Because that would be too much like a demand. Thanks, PDA.
It was ultimately a failed venture anyway (as far as home safety goes), since we live out in the country. Fun fact – did you know that an Air Tag only shows at the location where it last pinged if it is not near any Bluetooth device? Once Ninja wandered down to the woods, his location stayed at our house. No bueno. He is fast and he is smart and he will sneak out of the house whenever he’s not being directly watched. It’s exhausting. Recently I saw a neurotypical kid approach his mother and ask if he could go play outside. It was mind blowing to me. I discovered Angel Sense during my internet search for alternative solutions. It is a device that can either be worn like a watch or attached to clothing, and the corresponding phone app communicates with it to show his location. My PSA for Autism Acceptance month is that I discovered they are giving away free devices this month when you purchase the necessary subscription to the app. Is this one reliable enough for our rural realities? It should arrive this week, so we shall see.
Recently when I was walking the dog and husband was distracted, Ninja disappeared from the house. Now, we live on a fair sized piece of land, so there is no shortage of places to go. In spite of the acreage, I cannot keep that kid in our own yard. There is just too much temptation to conquer the world and whatnot. Husband and I split up to go in different directions, and I hopped on our little farm cart and headed towards the back field. Ninja came running out from under the barbed wire fence that separates our property from a neighbors, wearing a full pirate costume and wielding one of our kitchen knives that was apparently serving as a machete to hack through the thick jungle growth that is the neighbors wooded lot. I obviously offered to help him look for treasure, because what else can you do? He is so random that nothing at all seems unexpected or surprising anymore. Over the years I’ve heard many people comment on those folks who put their small kids on leashes out in public, and I sometimes thought they just weren’t trying hard enough to keep eyes on their kids. Here I am putting human LoJack on my kid and I now totally get it. I owe you an apology, leash parents. You do you.
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