Juggling Autism: The Chronicles of Ben Royko

Apologies for foisting my face upon you so many times here, but I just found that my phone seems to randomly snap stills of Ben’s videocalls to us, and what a pleasant surprise! Ben calls at all times of day,

A pleasant/unpleasant surprise… I just got word from This American Life that they’ll be re-running our episode from 2007, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (it comes in the second half-hour of the show, “Unconditional Love”), centered around Ben’s move

It’s been a little while since we checked with Ben of the Blog. He’s been busy. One of our frequent activities is shopping for books, and Ben enthusiastically leads the way. ~~~ Ben very seriously considers which one to pick

It took too long, but recently I had an epiphany. It came when I was on the website for autism’s new-kid-on-the-block, the National Council on Severe Autism. Its title is self-explanatory. It’s also depressing, because it shows how the autism

“Yeah, how can those even EXIST?!” said Tom Owley, with a tone of hushed reverence that caught me off guard, even if it shouldn’t have. Tom wasn’t a classical music geek per se, but he was a music (and art,

Ben likes jobs. As Karen and I are getting ready to head back to Chicago, one of our routines is Ben (and I) take out the trash and go get the mail. Moms and Dads (to be stereotypical) can be

Our apartment building in Cleveland has a kid’s room, and Ben treats it as a sort-of lending library for books. Usually it’s nice and tidy, but on Sunday, it looked like a toddler tornado had just breezed through. Sometimes I

WARNING — This has nothing to do with Ben or with autism (even if it does have something to do with Cleveland where we wouldn’t be if it weren’t for Ben and autism so…)! And if you aren’t particularly interested

As I wrote in the other day’s blog post, Ben’s a bonafide videocall fan. I spared you from having to gaze at my mug in those pics of Ben (thank the photo editing app), but this new one is as-it-is.

For years, we tried to do videocalls with Ben, but there had always been issues with signal strength and other technical hurdles. The bigger hurdle was probably Mom and Dad not being hip to the videocall trip – we didn’t