Have you ever picked up one of those books that you just. couldn’t. put. down? Didn’t matter that you had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day… you just wanted to keep going.

That’s what it was like for me reading the posts of MBA Mommy. With a background in marketing, she now writes beautiful posts about life with her husband and two kids in CO, and what it’s like to be an MBA = Mom of a Boy with Aspergers.

Reading stories about their journey since the diagnosis in May 2010, you can’t help but feel the warm fuzzies with every triumph too. Take Bilingual Aspie, a post about finding a language immersion school for her kids to learn Mandarin, and Gifts of Autism, a post about lessons learned from having a child with Autism, for example.

One of my favorite stories came in the middle of a very informative post debunking common misconceptions about Autism. In You Want The Truth, MBA Mommy recounts a time she was at the playground with her kids.

“Z was playing by himself with his airplane and S had made a friend and was running around with her.  As an NT, she took to the give and take and loosey-goosey structure of playing with another child naturally.  On the other hand, Z wanted them to do what he wanted to do….bury his plane in the sand.  And he couldn’t understand why they weren’t doing it.  So, he came up and asked me,

“Mommy, how come no one wants to be my friend?”.

After I picked my broken heart up off the floor, dusted it off and duct taped it back together, I said, “Well, Z, sometimes other kids don’t want to do what you want them to do.  They want to do what they want to do.  Did you ask the girls if they wanted to bury your plane in the sand?”

“No.”

“Well, why don’t you invite them over?”

…..”Girls, you can come bury my plane in the sand now.”

OK….not a perfect invite, but it worked.  Mostly because S adores her brother and is always looking to play with him.  The girls came over and buried the plane in the sand with him.  That is, until he got upset because they were doing it differently than he was and he tried to force them to do it his way.  At which point they got up and went off on their merry way…playing something totally different.  Again, it wasn’t a perfect attempt but it was a successful at bat and it gave me yet another teachable moment with him.

“Hey, buddy.  Why do you think the girls stopped playing with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I think it’s because you wanted them to bury the plane your way and you got upset when they were doing it their way.  Sometimes it’s ok for people to do things differently than you.  It’s not wrong.  It’s just different.  I bet if you tried it again sometime you could get them to play your way for a little while if you played their way for a little while.”

He thought about it for a moment (it takes him longer than a typical kid to process things sometimes) and then jumped up and ran off to play on the jungle gym with the girls. “Girls…..I’m going to play with you now.”

Mommy 1.  Asperger’s 0.“

Thank you for sharing your stories, MBA Mommy. Follow her tweets on @mbamrsmom.