Life reassessment

The main reason I haven't been fencing recently is that my wife and I have been re-examining out lives, in an effort to simplify. If you have been following this blog, you will have seen that my son is autistic. My wife and I recently attended a 4-day parent training for an autism therapy program called Relationship Development Intervention (RDI), developed by a man called Dr. Steve Gutstein.
RDI is the first therapy system that actually seems to treat autism. The most common therapy system for autism is called ABA, or Applied Behavioral Analysis. ABA tends to use behaviorist theories to get kids to behave well (no rocking or head banging, or whatever) by rewarding them for positive behaviors (sit in the chair for 5 minutes and I'll give you a cookie...) It turns out this does not teach the kids to think for themselves, so they still freak out if faced with a new situation. Dr. Gutstein actually thinks that ABA only teaches the kids to be more autistic.
RDI, on the other hand, attempts to recreate the parent-child, master-apprentice relationship, so that the kid can learn how to deal with new situations, by seeing their parents do it. You can read all about it (including a paper that should be published soon, that demonstrates autistic kids getting better - that is no longer testing as autistic) here.

Anyway, part of the process is to see what can go from your lives to make way for time with your child. We got rid of basically everything for a while (hence the no fencing) to see what we could really do without, and what we needed. Time for ourselves (as adults), especially exercise, was definitely a needful thing. I have also learned that there is an fencing group starting up at the gym for the university that the hospital I work at is a part of. They also meet at a time shortly after I get out of work. I'm really hoping this works out.