Ok. Day 2 begins at 6AM. Gracie is up and out of her room( where we had put a gate up to keep her in) . Chris and I have no other choice but to get up because she was already on the outdoor deck. I am not a morning person but since I was up I took our shepherd-husky Tasha for a walk - a short one- and came back to the house to find the door open.
No alarms go off in my head yet- I just forgot to close it tight. I found Gracie's teddy bear on the landing - still no alarms. I go upstairs. Chris and I ask at the same time-
"WHere's Gracie?"
Ok NOW THE ALARMS are going off!!!
I run down to the pool- the first place I know she would go. Chris comes out. She's definitely not in the house. I run the back way to the garage, thinking she might head to the car since she wants to go home all the time. Nothing. At a loss I go back to the house. Chris has gone to the front of the development after asking one of the janitors if he saw a child. So now he is looking to- He heads straight to the bay! THank God I didn't think of that! Chris found her out by the fountains , carrying all her valuables, (puppy, her car steering wheel from her stroller and her musical teapot- she had dropped her teddy bear on the way out!)
Thank God that her guardian angels were with her and that we didn't live where there is alot of traffic and that it was early.
So now I had to get an alert bracelet for her. Security found her and was trying to get her into the golf cart to bring her to their little housing unit at the entrance and she was having none of it.
THank God Chris came at that time.
Ok. She can't talk. She doesn't like to be touched by strange people. The guards were probably fit to be tied.
I found out today that this happens alot with autistic kids. They even have a name for them.
They call them Elopers. Is it me or is that a dumb name for the situation?
From US NEWS and WORLD REPORT:
Nearly half of children with autism wander or "elope" from safety -- often to pursue a special interest or goal -- with more than half of those kids disappearing long enough to cause great concern about their well-being, new research suggests.
Researchers from the Interactive Autism Network, a project of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, found that close calls with traffic injuries were reported for 65 percent of the missing children and near-misses with drowning were reported in nearly a quarter of all cases.
"There's reason to believe that this is a leading cause of death in children with autism and possibly the leading cause of death," said senior study author and Interactive Autism Network director Dr. Paul Law. "Still, that's in some ways the tip of the iceberg, because most families are able to keep their children safe but have to modify their entire lives to do so. Families are often blamed for this and they're certainly not deserving of that because this is a very difficult problem."
Wow that made me feel better. So now I have another project. It never ends.
After I had time to calm down, I tried to picture how it must have looked through Gracie's point of view. But I don't even know how she perceives things. Does she see them in pictures-patterns-? How did she feel when the strange people came up to her? She made sure she had all her valuables before she left. Was she trying to go home?
So we will see what lies ahead tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment