Local News: Sunday, January 20, 2002
Fund for the Needy
Giving kids a helping hand: Little wonders spark sweet joy
By Caitlin Cleary
Seattle Times staff reporter

BELLEVUE - Inside the makeshift walls of the Kindering Center, crawling, walking and swallowing are not easy or automatic progressions but cherished victories.

In the classrooms, covered gamely with construction-paper gingerbread men, stunted vocabularies expand to include new words. Silly songs rescue lost speech. The world, complex and remote, is broken down into steps and patterns for children to learn and practice.

In this way, parents are given back, bit by bit, the children who started slipping away from them months before.

Every year, 1,000 families with disabled or medically fragile children come to Kindering Center, a nonprofit neurodevelopmental center that benefits from the Seattle Times Fund for the Needy. Kindering Center helps children under age 3 with conditions like cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and autism to walk, crawl, stand, play, eat, learn and communicate, and helps parents care for their children.

But the waiting list for Kindering Center, the only such facility of its kind on the Eastside, grows every year. In 2000, 166 children were turned away. The few other Puget Sound area neurodevelopmental centers also are full, said development director Jennifer Pineda.
With home visits, family counseling, intensive speech therapy, a specialized preschool program, and other crucial early interventions, the toddlers at Kindering Center gradually transition into school, buoyed by better motor, language and social skills.

This is how Molly Morgenstern is emerging, bit by bit.

Molly is one of a rapidly growing number of children diagnosed with some form of autism. Last week in a classroom at the Kindering Center, she played with a mechanical frog, throwing plastic pieces into its opening and closing and rotating mouth, her father, Mark Morgenstern, watching close by.
"I had the book knowledge, the stereotypical view of what autism was," said Morgenstern, a drug and alcohol counselor. "That it's a kid rocking in the corner, not affectionate, not interested in the world. That stuff doesn't apply to Molly."

The 21/2-year-old, diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, is affectionate and engaging. She knows her ABCs and her colors. She can count to 15, complete puzzles and memorize hours of Blue's Clues videos.

Where Molly's autism makes its mark is in the realm of communication. She can label things and echo words, but must learn how to communicate that she wants something. She has to learn how to sign, to imitate the actions of her peers, how to follow directions, how to eat and sit and play with other children.

The currency of Molly's learning is music.

"Music is Molly's most absolutely motivating thing," said her teacher, Kari Grimit. "That's her best time, when she makes eye contact and imitates."

Five days a week, Molly attends the CUBS program at Kindering Center, a mixture of preschool and intensive, one-on-one instruction, modeled after an autism-education project at the University of Washington.

After 90 days in the program, her vocabulary has nearly doubled, Morgenstern said, interrupting himself to exclaim that Molly has just made the sign for "more."
Once a child who couldn't get through a 10-minute "circle" of story time, Molly can now do things most children and parents take for granted: sitting still, singing, listening, putting her mat away, getting her coat.

"One of the hardest things I've had to do as a parent is to trash all my underlying expectations of what her life is going to look like," Morgenstern said. "Now I just take it one day at a time."

Copyright (c) 2002 The Seattle Times Company