A friend said I should post every time I finish a painting. I think I will. Good way to keep track.
My adult daughter is Autistic. There is a long, hair-raising story about her journey, that isn't quite mine to tell. She has been home for a few months, and it has been difficult, and at times quite traumatic, but she is finally going to be moving into her own apartment, with support.
People with autism stay fixated on certain subjects, and devote way too much attention to those one or two things. For Delaney, it is words. When she felt her care home was restrictive, she focused in on one of the characters in a song, Joshua Giraffe, sung by Raffi. Joshua lived in a zoo, and was sad there. Joshua drifted to Josh Groban, whose music Delaney loves, and one of the songs is called "Gira con Me," or "Wander with Me." You can see the appeal? Gira, with Josh? And Gira is the first part of Giraffe...that's what Delaney's mind does. There is another song that Enya sings, that has what I think of as an Enya-ism in the beginning, some unintelligible vowelly sound. To Delaney, one of these sounds like, "Shuari" and she says it to calm herself down. Safari sounds like Shuari, and Giraffe has "Gira" in it, so....I sat down with my 7-hours of freedom last night, and painted Delaney a giraffe painting, for her Safari apartment, which represents freedom to her.
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