Story about Devon

      Elisia is a mother of a seven-year-old autistic boy and a non-autistic five-year-old girl. Elisia was introduced to the concept of PhotoBooks and used them to help her to reach her son, Devon.  Her biggest concern was his rude behavior when she would have a friend come to her home for a cup of coffee or to just talk about something.  Devon would demand Elisia’s attention to such a degree that Elisia began to feel that she had no life other than Devon.  She wanted help changing this behavior.

      Devon had been in his own world ever since he had been diagnosed with autism just before his third birthday.  He had always been a quiet child, but after her daughter, Reece, met and surpassed his language skills before she was one, Elisia realized that something was very wrong with Devon. He had been a fussy baby, very hard to quiet or comfort. He never really made eye contact with her, and never sought out physical demonstrations of comfort.  By the time he was preschool age, Devon was obnoxious in his efforts to get Elisia’s attention, especially if she had an adult friend come over to visit.  Elisia tried everything she could think of to either distract Devon or to get him to leave her alone for even five minutes of adult conversation. It was to no avail.  Devon had no concept of manners, and the more his mother wanted him to go and entertain himself, the more insistent he became for her time.  If Elisia were alone at that time of day, Devon would have easily found something to do.   As time went on, Devon began to demonstrate typical autistic behaviors where he would stim by twirling the brass fastener on the side of his bed, something he could do for hours on end.  Devon also had a fascination with balls, and would roll and twirl a ball for hours and hours.  If Devon had a ball in his hand, he would pay no attention anyone or anything.  One of Devon’s teachers instructed Elisia to take all balls out of the house and not let him have them.  Elisia was reluctant to take away the one thing that seemed to really relax and settle Devon.  She found an article on the internet where a doctor said that when an autistic child stims, they have a need of some sort for that object.  Rather than trying to control them, he recommended supporting that particular behavior, and so Elisia bought balls.  She bought big ones, medium sized ones, small ones.  She and Devon would play all sorts of games with the balls, but she was growing more and more frustrated because Devon would pull all the balls out of the crate she used to store them, but then would never put them back in. 

      After hearing about the PhotoBooks, Elisia decided to create a PhotoBook of Devon and his balls.  She had an older digital camera that she didn’t mind teaching Devon to use, but she started first by taking pictures of Devon while he was playing games with his many, many balls.  When she looked at the resulting photos, she noticed that his face was very relaxed, something that was unusual, because Devon always seemed to be on edge.  Perhaps there was something to supporting Devon’s desire to be surrounded by balls.  Elisia took more pictures of Devon, playing games of dodgeball (played with soft nerf-style balls) with his little sister in the house.  She took pictures of her husband playing with Devon.  Until she had a number of photos, Elisia didn’t show the photographs to Devon.   When she felt she was ready, Elisia had all her materials ready.  She chose to use the three-ring binder method with page protectors.  She purchased lightweight cardstock in 8-1/2” x 11” size of various bright colors.  She tried to match the colors to the various colors of the balls.  She said she wasn’t quite sure why she did this, but when she introduced Devon to the project she was glad that she did.  As soon as she started showing Devon the photographs, she was astounded at his reaction.  Devon was enraptured with his image on the pictures, and he loved that the pictures were of his beloved balls.

     Elisia mentioned that Devon could take pictures of his balls so that he could make a whole book about them, Devon was instantly a cooperative student.  He insisted on doing this his way, as was typical for him, but as soon as Elisia showed him on the back of the camera that the picture might not have been what he was trying to get, Devon began to listen better, and started to take better and better photographs.  What Devon wanted to do was first to take pictures of all the same colored balls.  He would gather them all in one space and then take pictures of all of his yellow balls.  When they printed the photographs, Devon wanted to put them on the yellow cardstock.  They were able to then type a label for that page that said, Devon’s Yellow Balls.  They went through all the colors and created a page for each color of ball that Devon owned.  Then Devon decided he wanted to take pictures of all of his big balls, then the small balls.  He wanted pictures of balls high up on the table, and low down on the floor where he took pictures from the upstairs landing overlooking the living room.  Elisia was stunned to see how creative Devon was about his balls and the creation of his PhotoBook.

       Before too long, Devon would actually obey Elisia’s suggestion to get his PhotoBook of Balls to look at when she wanted to have an adult friend over for coffee.  Devon would spend long periods of time going over and over the pages of his PhotoBook. This was Elisia’s only PhotoBook project at the time I spoke with her, but she had numerous ideas for future PhotoBooks.  “I can’t believe how easy it was to work with Devon on this project.  It was the most fun the two of us have had in a very long time!”