Happy Birthday Zachary!

My beautiful little boy turns 3 today. The pictures are
from yesterday's family birthday party which was a good time.
 
Daddy was master chef and made a wonderful presentation of homemade subs, homemade potato and leek soup, taco dip, and a wonderful GFCF cake.

Top presents included match box car sets which he seemed to enjoy as much as the typically covetted Thomas the Train selection.

Zach has yet to get the concept of opening his own presents.  We tried to model and he sort of tried, but was too interested in the last opened present to realize there were more coming his way.  Sophie was eager to oblige and gave Zach a hand not only unwrapping, but testing to make sure the toys operated as expected. 

Yesterday started off with a fundraiser walk for Autism Speaks at Longbranch Park.  Sophia proceeded to have a double sensory meltdown while there.  The organization is not one of my favorite for a few reasons.  They are terrific fundraisers, having made $19 million from this walk alone so far. Autism Speaks is well known by its creators who are grandparents of an autistic grandson.  However, when the mother of their grandson started to reveal in her belief that vaccines may have contributed to her son's autism, and in biomedical interventions,  the grandparents quickly dismissed her.  This has always made me so sad.  But this is not the reason the organization makes me weary to recommend them as wear to put your charitable dollars.  Almost none of the money raised by Autism Speaks reaches families, like us, desperately in need to fund programs and services for their children.   A majority of their funding goes towards research, which is great, although they are extremely skeptical and stick to very "safe" research areas that feel like they produce very little information that a parent can use for their child in the near term.

I don't mean to bash them - autism awareness is a lot more visible now than ever before, in large part due to AS, and is important to me and likely countless other parents and people with autism, and this awareness should not be taken for granted.  They just seem to roll in quite a lot of cash which doesn't seem to make its way back to families struggling with the financial burdens of the disease. 

If you are interested in making a donation that can help families more directly, I would recommend finding a local FEAT group in your area.  Families for Effective Autism Treatment is a not-for-profit organization of parents and professionals founded to support families of children.  There are likely other groups that do similar efforts, but this is one familiar to us here in CNY.  

So let's make this next year awesome for my little boy - lots of progress, lots of smiles, and lots of love.  Go get 'em Zachary.