My beautiful, resilient daughter.
She was sad and went out to take a walk just now. I had told her I love her and had taken special care of her before she was born. So she was to take care of herself and come home safely.
She just showed up with dirty feet, happy as a 
, because she stomped in the rain puddles.
Concurrence here as well. I think puddle fun might be a universal thing. Even my little dog goes straight to every puddle he sees when we walk.
When my daughter was still having a "psychologist" visit us every week at home (she was almost four years old and mostly grunting and pointing instead of talking), the doctor suggested that we buy about ten large boxes of chocolate pudding mix, clean teh tub out really well and pour it all into the tub with a bag of chocolate chips, bag of marshmallows and a bag of raisins (various textures to discover on her own) and let her have her way with it. She could get as messy as she wanted to, she could squish it everywhere, no harm if she swallows some and generally get some of her need to explore touch and feel met. Then just hose it all down the drain and away when she got tired of playing that way.
We did that quite a bit and she actually began to try to talk more after that stress relieving "therapy." That Doc was a fucking genius!
Mud came later, but I get the idea.
Sorry to have to edit again, but trusting a fucking database to correct for my poor typing usually fails. I had left an "s" out and tried the spellcheck thingy haphazardly.
Anyway, the doctor we liked the most was a psychologist, physiologist And qualified as a GP, etc, It was a whole team, of psychologists coming to the house once a week, studying various forms of "PDD," who we were trying to support.
(you may have NO IDEA how difficult this was for me AND my wife, having people, even random people coming into our house every week, but we did it to help the kids' troubles, which we were just beginning to understand and I think it did help, after we both sucked itt up and just tried to deal with it all and learn from them instead of just fucking cower and hide or stand and become belligerently protective of space - probably can tell which was her style was which was my style.)
AND we were hoping to be SUPPORTED by their efforts as well. We had signed up for a long term study of our two autistic kids.
I honestly think we would not be where we are today if it had not been for just gutting it up and allowing these Doctors to investigate, monitor, watch and study and offer suggestions for us to try. I think it helped us.
It was tough to do!
