Autism Awareness

Monday, April 2nd was World Autism Awareness Day and the whole month of April is Autism Awareness Month!

To help raise awareness for autism, the fastest growing developmental disabitlity in the US, Autism Speaks started the Light It Up Blue campaign. This year was the 3rd year for Light It Up Blue and each year it has gotten bigger & better.

Click here and take a look at all the public buildings around the world that participated in Light It Up Blue 2012!

Here's how our little family did our part to help raise awareness for autism...

I ordered a Light It Up Blue 2012 shirt for Addy & myself & we wore them on Monday.

Showing the front & the back of the shirt

The Light It Up Blue 2012 shirt wasn't sold in Alex's size, but he still showed support for his sister by wearing a solid blue shirt. (He's hiding his shirt because he didn't want me to take a picture of it, lol.)

And Nick had to go to work on Monday, so he wore a navy blue suit with a blue shirt & blue tie & his blue Autism Speaks lapel pin.

I also ordered us all Autism Speaks bracelets

& I painted my fingernails & toenails blue!

And throughout the whole month of April, I plan on keeping my fingernails & toenails blue & I plan on wearing all my autism awareness shirts as much as possible!

Not only did we wear blue for World Autism Awareness Day, but I also decorated our house. We are going to Light It Up Blue for the whole month of April.

I painted this sign & put it in my front yard.

And this one too.

I made this door hanger for my front door.

(I also made one for both sets of Addy's grandparents & 2 more for moms of kids on the spectrum in Addy's class.)

And I ordered blue christmas lights from Amazon & wrapped the columns on my front porch with them.

And of course my porch light is also blue.

Addy's resource teacher had talked to me about doing something on World Autism Awareness Day at the school. I sent her a GREAT list of ideas but sadly, about 99.99% of it we couldn't do! (The school was already set to celebrate Child Abuse Prevention Awareness on Friday, March 30th. The color for that is also blue & all the children in the school wore blue that day. So the principal said he couldn't ask the kids to wear blue again on the next school day. But all the teachers wore blue at least.)

One of the little boys in Addy's class that also has ASD, well his mom is an officer of the PTO. So she went & talked to the principal & he agreed to let us decorate for Autism Awareness Month in the hall around the front office. So on Monday, we went to the school to decorate, but ran into a little problem... The school had no power! Something was wrong with their main breaker or something like that. And so we couldn't use the poster maker or a hot glue gun or basically anything & everything else that we needed. So we agreed to meet another day to decorate (which we haven't gotten a chance to do because things just keep coming up! But hopefully we'll be able to do it Monday.)

The plan is to make an informative bulletin board in the hallway & to put puzzle piece diecuts in the windows & doors when you first walk in the school.

I typed these up & we're going to blow them up into posters on the school's poster maker and put them on the bulletin board.

I also made these for the 3 resource teachers, the PPCD teacher (Addy's teacher last year) and the speech therapist to hang outside their classroom doors.

And as soon as we finally finish getting the school decorated (hopefully we can get around to it while it's still April, lol) I will post some pictures & show ya'll what we did.

When April rolls around next year though, we're going to be much more prepared.