6 Questions for Meredith Tekin, BCCS, President of the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES) Recently, Rocketaround.com had the pleasure of interviewing Meredith Tekin, President of the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES), an organization that plays a unique role for the neurodiverse community, and for neurodiverse families with an interest in adventure. Here are Meredith’s insights. Rocketaround.com: What is IBCCES and how do you support neurodiverse families? Meredith Tekin: IBCCES is a training and certification organization. We focus on providing knowledge and supports to professionals in healthcare, education, public safety, hospitality/entertainment, and corporate…
Author: Lee Lynch
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s messages of love, inclusion, hope, and peace breathed energy into the global equality movement that has impacted the lives of so many people over the years. On this MLK Jr. Day, several members of our neurodiverse family visited sites in Alexandria, VA, outside of Washington DC, that symbolize the historic fight for equality and the need for respect for the dignity of all human beings. We also reflected on how important the words of Martin Luther King Jr. have been and continue to be for neurodiverse individuals and their families. The struggle for…
Our neurodiverse family recently visited the holiday display literally named ICE, which occurs each year at the Gaylord Hotel at National Harbor in the Washington DC area and other Gaylord Hotels around the US. ICE is an impressive display of larger-than-life ice sculptures carved from two million pounds of colorful ice. The theme for ICE changes each year. In 2022, each sculpture at the National Harbor show depicted a scene from the classic holiday movie, “A Christmas Story,” and one of the final sculptures was a giant carved scene depicting the department store Santa Claus who admonished Ralphie when he…
A neurodiverse family’s typical holiday plans disrupted For us, the holidays have always meant family. Almost every year since we became a neurodiverse family of three (then four…then five + dog), we have traveled from the Washington DC area to North Carolina to visit parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, and friends. It’s part of the rhythm of our season. But earlier this season, we needed to change things up to be there for a family member who had a hard year and couldn’t be home for the holidays. So, we headed south to Miami, FL, and did our best to minimize…
For those of us who live in the DC area, we often avoid the crowds around the National Mall when we seek adventure close to home, and instead visit one of the many northern Virginia or Maryland sites. Recently, our family did just that when we visited National Harbor, which sits in Maryland, directly across the water from Alexandria, VA. National Harbor – which has more than 40 restaurants, tons of onsite shops, as well nearby retail outlets, and at least eight hotels – is worth a visit any time of year. But throughout the holiday season – from Thanksgiving…
Whelp, adventure can have its downside. I haven’t written lately because we’ve been doing what this blog is about – traveling and adventuring. Orlando, Myrtle Beach, Miami, and around DC – that was all great-ish, and we’ll delve into those excursions on upcoming blogs, but at this very moment, I must admit, adventuring in the age of Covid has a downside. And that downside is Covid. We made it through all the far-away trips, becoming increasingly emboldened to no longer follow Covid masking and distancing precautions. Then two of us were infected likely on an adventure just three miles from…
Camping can be a welcomed adventure for neurodiverse kids – because of wide open spaces, fresh air, and the calming quiet of the outdoors – but for our son Jeffrey, it’s always seemed as though the significant differences between a camping experience and his everyday routine, and the unusual sensory aspects of camping, such as it being hotter- or colder- than usual environments, sleeping in a different bed (and sometimes on the ground instead of a bed) and often sleeping with other people in the same space, and direct exposure to rain, wind, mud/dirt, animals and insects – have outweighed…
I first became aware of the concept of elopement when reading the book Traveling Different – Vacation Strategies for Parents of the Anxious, the Inflexible, and the Neurodiverse, by Dawn M. Barclay (see Traveling Different book review here). I’ll admit I had to look it up. And when I did, I realized that one of our neurodiverse sons had eloped earlier in life but not in quite a while. I naively thought we were safe from any more of that, but soon came to realize it is a very real and potentially dangerous problem for many children with autism spectrum…
I recently had the pleasure of reading Traveling Different – Vacation Strategies for Parents of the Anxious, the Inflexible, and the Neurodiverse by Dawn M. Barclay and my first impression was, will be an incredibly useful book for our neurodiverse family’s adventures. Traveling Different starts with the premise that every family deserves to travel, and from there, offers tips to help it open the world up to every parent and child. The author seeks to make the book helpful to parents who want to travel with neurodiverse children, but that’s not her only audience. She says as she researched the…
14-year old Jeffrey has visited eight countries and many cities in his life, and we’ve all learned how to better travel and adventure with our neurodiverse family through his experiences. Several months ago, Jeffrey proactively took part in an eight-hour Pokémon Go event near home, planning and preparing for his day and coming home happy. From a parent’s perspective, it felt like serious progress. Q&A discussion with Jeffrey about the adventure follows: Rocket Around Question: What kind of adventure do you like? Jeffrey’s Answer: Exploring things I haven’t seen before or finding new things. RA Q: Why do you like…