'the rock sinks to the bottom'

‘Save yourself, save yourself’, my 6-year-old boy hollows from where he is perched on the side of the shell-shaped sandpit. Sitting not too far away I wonder to myself if this is what living with Aspergers is going to be like. Erin has always quoted movies and it is becoming more and more obvious to me. Though I’m not sure if it is because he is getting older and it loses its cute-factor or if reading that some Asperger people quote movies verbatim has heightened my observation.  Only two days ago, while standing in the kitchen Erin blurted out ‘When I am an adult I will say different things because I will watch adult movies, now I watch kids movies and so I say kids things’. His sporadic displays of utter self-awareness often shock me. After all it has only been a few short weeks since I read that the practice of quoting movies and books (a lot) was an Asperger’s trait rather than just a Erin trait. Apart from his display of self awareness it was the thought that this avid quoting could not only continue into adulthood but that Erin had appeared to absorb it into his communication style.

‘He often interrupts and says things out of context’, his teacher wrote in a letter to the pediatrician. This conjured up a sorrowful image of my beautiful boy interrupting to say something like ‘the brachiosaurus eats leaves off tall plants and tress’ while the 28-strong class diverts their attention from the teacher to this boy who says things off the top of his head.   When he was two he would often, for no apparent reason (of course there may have been one for him) say over and over ‘the rock sinks to the bottom’. Every time he said this it would be with the exact intonation and emphasis on the same parts of words as the time before and the time before that. It took another watching of the movie Ice Age to realize that this is something that Sid says once in a not very memorable scene.