How modern technology keeps the peace in our special needs household. To the cloud!

Blake loves routines. We have to drive to and from destinations in very specific routes.

This includes the lanes in which we drive as well as the specific path taken.

My cars CD player recently started malfunctioning. As a result of this Blake decided that he would only ride in his moms car. His mom’s car has a six disc CD changer.

He has a very specific sequence of CDs and we have to listen to all of them in order when we drive. When we stop at a location the disc number is incremented. This means if you’re listening to CD 4 and you stop for gas, you’ll be listening to CD5 next.

This is just one of those things — and we pick our battles. My wife’s car needs some work and we’re going to take a trip soon. I had to convince Blake somehow to ride in my car on this trip.

All he would say when my car was mentioned is that the CD player was broken and that he could not ride in it.

What I did today was nothing short of amazing and owe it all to modern technology.

I took every CD he had, some of which were mixed artists that we had burned from our iTunes collection long ago and uploaded them to Amazon music.

I’ve been created playlists called CD1, CD2 and so forth. Now in my car even if the CD player is broken — he was willing to sit inside as long as he could control the streaming of our music from my iPhone coming to our speakers from the cloud and could visually see CD1 (the playlists).

I named each playlist after the CD .

He’s happy that he gets the same experience that he gets in his moms car — now in mine. Without technology I don’t think this would’ve been possible.

On another note if you’re a special-needs parent with an iPad or iPhone — make sure you back up the device regularly. Sometimes publishers “un-publish” Apps from the app store and if you deleted one previously there’s no way to get it back unless you have it on your back up which you can typically do on a computer. To save me with an old Thomas the train app he loved and is now discontinued 😳.