Kymber’s Get to Know You (January 9, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I have been quite tired over the past few days, so didn’t do much writing. I’m still proud to say that this is my sixth blog post in January. Considering that some months in 2024, I only published five posts total, this is good.

Anyway, regular readers may remember me participating in the Wednesday Hodgepodge for a while. I stopped doing that, because I didn’t like it that the overwhelming majority of participants’ posts were heavily Christian-based. Now though, I seem to have found something to replace it with: Kymber’s Get to Know You. Here are the questions for this week and my answers.

1. What is the most memorable activity you did with your family as a child?
Not an activity we did as a whole family, but play-based learning with my parents comes to mind. For example, my father taught me to calculate squares using computer chips he’d been removing out of the devices himself. I also remember us looking at maps together. My mother also made little books in large print for me to learn to read when I was about four. Here in the Netherlands, children don’t usually learn to read until they’re six, but I was a precocious learner. My parents will probably be proud to see me list these “intellectual” activities.

2. What quality do you appreciate most in a friend?
Acceptance. I want to be myself with a friend and if they aren’t willing to accept that, fine but they aren’t my friend. I will also accept my friends for who they are. I don’t mean that mutual annoyances can’t happen. They happen between me and my spouse, who I consider to be my best friend, all the time. However, when it comes down to it, we accept each other for who we are.

3. What is one characteristic you received from your parents you want to keep and one you wish you could change?
My mother jokes that I inherited all my positive qualities from my father and all my negative ones from her. I was almost going along with it, because indeed the first positive characteristic I thought of comes from my Dad and the first negative one from my Mom. However, I’d like to boost my Mom’s self-esteem a bit (should she ever read this) and lessen my Dad’s. Therefore, I’d like to keep my Mom’s creativity and get rid of my Dad’s snobbishness.

Precious Memories of My Father

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today in her Sunday Poser, Sadje asks us to share our most precious memory of our father or the father figure in our life.

My father was a homemaker and my and my sister’s primary caretaker when we were children. As such, he, rather than my mother, was the one I’d see when I came home from school.

As a child, I took very much after my father, but now I have very mixed feelings about our relationship. My father is intelligent and he knows it. He also knows that I am intelligent and he feels that this somehow negates all my problems. In his opinion, all people who disagree with him, particularly those in the helping professions, are stupid.

Because my father and I are both intelligent, my father did encourage my cognitive development from an early age. This is evident in my different response to my parents when prompting me, for example. There’s this Dutch nursery rhyme that goes: “One, two, three, four, paper hat, paper hat.” Whenever my mother chanted: “One, two, three, four…”, I’d reply with “paper hat”. When my father chanted the same though, I’d reply with “five!”.

this is not a direct memory I have of my father though, as I was too young to form actual, verbal memories when this happened. I do remember, however, my father teaching me math when I was about seven. He would show me square calculation by using computer chips that were square-shaped. He’d lay them in a row of, say, three, then lay them in a square of three by three and explain that this is a square calculation. (The Dutch word for the square calculation and the shape isn’t the same, so I had to follow an extra step.) Similarly, he’d explain squareroots by doing the reverse.

We would also spend long evenings looking at his world atlas to see where different countries and other geographic areas were located. I still had enough vision to, with some difficulty, follow his finger along the maps.

When I got older, I had to catch up on reading, as this was one of my weaker subjects, mostly because I didn’t like the fact that I had to read Braille. My father encouraged me, well more like forced me, to do extra reading at home. One memory I have is of me reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Dutch when I was about eleven. To show me that he, too, was taking up a challenge, he read the book in its original English. I am currently listening to the audiobook in English on Apple Books.

In short, my father nurtured my intellectual side. Currently, I much more value my creative side, which my mother nurtured (a little). Still, my memories of doing academics with my father are mostly good.

Unusual Interests: Calendar Calculation and More #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day 21 in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I will be writing about my unusual interests. You see, like many autistic people, I tend to have interests that are intense and unusual in focus.

As a child, I was advanced for my age in math. When I was around six, my father taught me to do square and squareroot calculations. He used a set of squares (which were really computer chips) to teach me, laying three in one row and then squaring it to nine. I loved this.

When I was eight and the kids in my class were doing multiplication tables, this would be boring to me, as I had all tables from one to twelve memorized already. To make the activity useful for me anyway, I chose to start with the table of nineteen. Don’t ask me why I skipped thirteen to eighteen, but I did.

When I was a bit older still, I taught myself to do calendar calculation. Most people not familiar with autism I encounter have never even heard of that skill, which is a common savant skill in autistics. It involves calculating on what day a certain date falls. Usually, this skill is presumed to be memory-based, but I actually knew the rules for doing it. I also learned about the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar in 1582 and took those ten days that were skipped into account when working with dates before then. I have a newspaper article from late 1999, which I still treasure, titled something like “the fight about time” in Dutch. It explained why the year 4000, unlike other centennial years divisible by 400, shouldn’t be a leap year. How fascinating!

Later, I developed other “unusual” special interests. For example, I used to draw maps when I was around ten or eleven. I always drew Italy, though I knew a lot about topography in general.

When I was in the psychiatric hospital and touring potential supported housing places, I had no idea about their location, except which trains and buses to use to get there. I wasn’t as good with topography anymore. I at one point had most bus routes in my province memorized from Wikipedia.