And back to our regularly scheduled Asperger's

TH continues with his Pokemon obsession. This obsession, while slightly expensive, has yielded a few interesting surprises and advances in TH's development. The first is that this child, who still lacks executive function to the point that he continues to forget that most pants with buttons also have zippers, has organized his thousands of Pokemon cards.

I use the term "organized" loosely.

About two years ago, we bought him large notebooks with hundreds of plastic sheets into which one can insert a total of 18 cards, baseball, Pokemon, Chaotic, whatever. They spilled about the room for years. We slipped on them and almost died. Pokemon cards littered every surface of our home. I was heartily sick of Pokemon cards.

Then, for some reason, this summer in June, he discovered the notebook and the plastic pockets and piled up all of his cards and inserted every single last one of those things (minus those useless "energy" cards) into slots. It's not organized in any way, and the duplicates are legion and not grouped together (am I uptight much or what?), but...all of the cards are now in this big, fat notebook.

Except for the ones he bought yesterday. TH has recently devised a new form of relaxation for himself. We've never told him that he has to wear headphones while on the computer, but he does. I think he likes the way they feel on his head. He'll sit there with his enormous headhphones on and search YouTube for Pokemon and Chaotic videos and watch them intently. And he's stumbled across a cottage industry of videos in which other avid Pokemon card users film themselves turning over the cards from a stack, one by one, and describing them in terms of "species" and "HP." (FYI, a high HP is good, apparently.) I didn't realize we'd have to be applying parental controls online at this early date, but here we are. I'm worried that he'll type in some Pokemon name but introduce some kind of typo that takes him to Poke-something else...and then we'd be in trouble.

Inspired by his friends in Pokemon obsessions, TH has now made his own Pokemon video. This is his second advance in development--he actually planned and executed a complete project from beginning to end. We rushed home with yesterday's card purchase and broke out our sad little digital camera and...yes, it's true...filmed a stack of Pokemon cards. They're uploaded on my YouTube account as we speak, and to my surprise, he's gotten seven views. Who are these people?

His facility with reading the names, identifying species, and citing HP testifies to his obsession. He constantly reads books that simply list the different Pokemon characters and their specifics, carrying these things from the bathroom to the couch to the car to the bed. He watches the videos of people turning cards over, one by one. He thinks all the time about buying new cards. And as I type this, he's now writing a blog post for me to put up on his blog. Guess what it's about?