Single parenting (or, holy shit, what am I doing?)

You may have noticed around the blogosphere that lots of autistic children like to be outside. Hiking, walking, biking, swimming, inspecting blades of grass...something about the great outdoors seems to have a general appeal, at least based on the blogs I read.

TH is no different. From his earliest days when he would sit out on our deck in his exersaucer while his dad drank coffee next to him, TH has been an outside kind of boy. Kneeling in almost every picture we have of him, examining the ground, sand, grass, ants, soil up close and personal. Walking three miles without complaint at age 3 in San Francisco, trekking Tennessee Valley. Doing a three-mile loop with me almost every day this spring around our center-city lake. His obsessions are all things nature, with his longest-standing love still being acorns.

And the rest of us love it, too. Is it autism or just because he's part of us, the parents who once did a seven-week, 12,000-mile round-trip to Alaska, including the Arctic Circle, in a packed-to-bursting Honda CRX, hiking and camping in the rain almost the entire time? Doesn't matter. What does matter is that we, as a family, are often at our best outdoors.

But we live in Texas. Where only yesterday, the heat index was already over 100 F. Kids and heat and hiking and other outdoor activities beyond a swimming pool simply don't go together well. Our kids overheat within 20 minutes during the Texas summer, begging with pitiful hot-pink faces to be back inside. And we're right there with them. Heat makes us cranky and leaves some of us neurologically challenged.

Which is why this summer, we're not living in Texas. We're living in Colorado. For the entire summer. Most of us, that is. Already, TH and his brothers have hiked and played outside for hours every day. TH was so elated during one afternoon in a mountain meadow that he favored some nearby, much bemused elk with a series of his signature dances, one of which involves sticking out his butt and wiggling it around, during which he somehow manages still to be all pointy angles. In other words, he's having a great time, as are we all.

Except for the Viking, who is back in Texas. He'll be visiting periodically, but the man does have a real job, unlike me, his wife, who taptaps away on a computer at home for a living. Thus, it has come to pass that for the sake of outdoors and mountain breezes and healthy children who won't be hiding indoors all summer from the heat and humidity and sun, I am here, in Colorado, single-parenting our three sons for weeks at a time.

And so far, we're having a delightful time of it. But it's only day three of this single-parenting gig, so stay tuned.