Thank you, Hera. I used to think that if C. were bored enough, she'd pick up something and do it, but she never has and still doesn't. I know she's depressed, I'm depressed too. She has Medicaid (I don't have insurance, nor did she until she was accepted for Medicaid after a year waiting for it once she turned 18). But what could a psychologist or psychiatrist do? Her verbal skills are better then they were five years ago, but nowhere nearly good enough to talk about her experiences and her feelings. She can say Good or Not that much. And I greatly mistrust all psychotropic drugs, and I think all of the drugs for depression not only usually don't work but often cause suicidal or homicidal urgings which are sometimes acted upon. And I don't think it's depression solely caused by a chemical imbalance, but rather situational. She's worried about her future and has little to do in the present.

I'll try to give her more chores around the house. She cooks a lot and is careful and does great presentation. She took the trash out to the curb last night for pickup today. She cleans the cats' litter boxes very responsibly and carefully, every night. She can do the laundry and carry the dry laundry upstairs. On grocery day I carry the bags of groceries in and put them on the steps going upstairs, and she carries them to the kitchen and puts them away, something I think I couldn't even do anymore, putting frozen things in the freezer right away before the cats open the frozen chicken. I just saw her bathroom counter was dirty and thought I could tell her to clean it with paper towels as a regular job.

We're about to move into the volunteering stage of her pre-employment program. It has to be at a non-profit agency. We're having a meeting tomorrow to talk about it, I think the only possibilities, and they're the same for all these young people, are the Humane Society, the Food Bank, and, I suggested yesterday, casting about for non-profit groups, Habitat for Humanity. The person working with us in this program said she worked extremely well and accurately, even helping another volunteer who was having problems, for an hour and a half straight at the Food Bank and the library (which said it doesn't need any more volunteers for at least the next ten years).

Thank you for your suggestions. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thank you, Grace. I'm very tired and don't know when it's ever going to end. No rest but in the grave, as they used to say.

Thank you, Grace. I was teaching her to crochet, which I hadn't done in decades. There is a knitting/crochet group that meets at the library in the evening which I think she would enjoy both for the skill and the social interaction, but I have poor night vision and can't drive at night. So far she can't do it on her own at all, she'll do it for a few minutes then hand it back to me for a few minutes. A scarf that we're changing the colors on every three rows. I've been having serious problems with MS (vaccine mercury/aluminum poisoning in reality) and we haven't worked on it for over a month. (I've been doing the Exley Fiji water treatment for two weeks, but it causes extremely severe mercury/aluminum attacks, I'm not going to take it any more until after our trip: does anyone know anything about this? I guess it's because it pulls out so much aluminum and mercury and a lot just stays in circulation? Would going to one one-liter bottle of Fiji every other day be better?) I'm getting Amy's crochet kits in the mail every month, but all of them will have to wait until she's better at it. And the general Amy's crafts kits for girls as well.

She likes to cook and makes most of our meals now. She'll make Billy's Mother's Chicken this evening, from the Healing for Little Tummies cookbook (for GFCF and grain-free diets, of which we have dozens). She made a baked pumpkin pudding yesterday from the Felicity (American Girl) cookbook. I gave her the first Felicity book and a book I LOVED when I was in second grade, If You Lived in Colonial Times, Ann McGovern, and suggested she read them on her own, that if she could get to enjoy reading (and she was hyperlexic when she was five, knew how to read without formal instruction, but I don't know, something missing in comprehension), she'd never be bored again. She has stacks of magazines under her bed which she's never read, Catster, an animal mag for children, American Girl, Spider, Ladybug. Big board books of Bible stories she wanted to keep. We got sweet potatoes and apples for her to make a casserole with. But all of this takes maybe an hour or two and then she's back to boredom. We have literally hundreds of interesting books bought over twenty years for every age level, artistic coloring books for well-known fairy tales, activity books, she now puts our (old-fashioned photos using disposable cameras) into photo albums and likes to look at them, she has dozens of VHS tapes and DVDs which she knows how to watch independently, a boxed set of Flipper (we're going to interact with dolphins in Mexico), the Brady Bunch, the Partridge Family, Bewitched, many movies like Frozen, all the Disney movies, the Hunger Games, many Sesame Street and Hamtaro videos (she used to adore hamsters, both live and Zhu Zhu hamsters). She has an iPad with games on it (she begged for it for months, ONLY to watch an app in which Curious George's Birthday Surprise is read), we have a piano that I gave her lessons on for five years, a lap harp with music to put under the strings to show how to play well-known songs, we have two cats she adores and got Halloween toys for them, a pumpkin wand toy and a ghost catnip toy. I paid for her and her outings person to go to the Budweiser Clydesdale ranch (the caregiver LOVED it, but my daughter said it was all right, but she didn't like it much), I gave her money to buy something in the gift shop and she bought a mother horse and colt with a brush and paints, and she did a beautiful job painting them. We put them on our Halloween/Sawhain/Day of the Dead altar and will leave them through Christmas (manger scene). She'd like to go trick or treating forever, but last year was just too hard for me, and I told her when she graduated from high school, she'd have to change to sitting at the door to distribute candy instead. We're going to watch a mildly Halloween movie called Monster Squad. She's going to a Best Buddies Halloween party on Friday in an old Incantasia the Witch costume. I told her I'm just not up to carving a pumpkin, but am laboriously putting pin pricks around designs of a raven and the word Nevermore, to stencil onto our pumpkin with a black Sharpie. She drew stunning large pictures of our two cats, the one of our tabby is intricately detailed and I don't know how she did it, which I've framed but will need help hanging on the wall. (I gave her a very complete art set several years ago with several tablets of paper.) I suggested she draw our parakeet (she hates our dog), and she sort of agreed, but hasn't done it or anything else. We're going to MEXICO soon for ---- sake, I bought her a snorkel set and fins, beaches, Cancún, hotel on the beach, the Maya Museum (she says she likes museums, at least the idea) and El Rey, glass-bottomed boat tour of the MUSA statues on the sea bottom and a speed boat ride, Wet 'n Wild, Maya cuisine, we read The Corn Grows Ripe to prepare her and several books on the Maya, Mayan ruins everywhere, Crococún zoo with only Yucatán animals, including many babies to feed, Xcaret eco park including a Sea Trek on the bottom with an oxygen helmet and sting rays all around, two days there, Gran Cenote, Playa Paraíso, a hotel room in a hut on the beach with a ceiling fan and mosquito net, no electricity, a guided tour of Dos Ojos Cenote, shaking hands with a dolphin at Dolphin Adventure and also feed a manatee, snorkel at an easy coral reef with tropical fish at Akumal, Yal Ku, a guided jungle tour and Maya float at the Biosfera Sian Ka'an, a guided tour of Punta Laguna monkey jungle with spider and howler monkeys in their natural habitat, Chichén Itzá including the sound and light show the night before and Ik Kil cenote. This has been an imprudently expensive trip, we'll see if my health allows me to get through it and she enjoys it. Heat brings on symptoms in me, so we're going when it's as cool as it ever gets. Eighties Fahrenheit. I wish I could have found someone to go with us, but I couldn't. We'll spend a week in Mexico City first, we went there once before and she loved it, we stay with friends I used to live with there, we'll go to the zoo in Chapultepec (I wrote and she memorized a presentation on the pandas there in Spanish for her Spanish class last year) and row a boat on a lake there. La Feria just closed permanently because two boys were killed on a roller coaster there a few weeks ago: we had been going to go there. So now I hope my friends will take her and some teen-aged relatives to Six Flags Mexico, which she loved last year.

And she still says So what else have you ever done for me? (not quite that coherently)

I just don't know if this is a common aspect of autism or not, to be completely unable to think Why don't I...? That would be fun, or interesting, or useful.

My daughter is going nuts since she graduated from high school in May and we finished home schooling in July. I have been having significant health problems, and she is extremely lonely and depressed, even though a women paid by the state is taking her out to do fun things twice a week (I pay for the costs of what they actually do, the state pays her a salary and for gasoline, etc.) She's going to a Best Buddies Halloween party on Friday. She went swimming last week. We went to an incipient open air museum last week, went to paint clay figures which were fired in a kiln a few weeks ago, have eaten out several times, gone for ice cream, go to Mass on Sunday, she's cooking a lot. But nothing is enough and she lies with a pillow over her head a lot of the time, or stands in the door of my bedroom without saying anything, last night for an hour. I've told her that no one gets to go out and do fun things every day, but that's what she wants. It sounds as though this system were meant to operate without human input, but is that the best situation for autistic people? Any people? My daughter LOVES activity and being around cheerful, friendly people. The women yesterday showed me pics on her cell phone of my daughter jumping joyfully on trampolines and going through an obstacle course. She looked very, very happy. But as soon as she got home, back to being glum and depressed. She cannot entertain herself at all. A house in which everything was done for her but she was alone would leave her in despair.

I would market this also to people caring for elderly with early dementia such as family members.