Final thoughts ...

I survived the phone call.  15 minutes over the estimation ... it took 2 hours & 45 minutes.  This was the final part of our participation.  Unfortunately, I was not able to pull off painting while talking.  I had high expectations, too .. including a list of other to-do's if I got done with some painting [laundry, dishes, etc.].  But no.  I mostly sat on my bar stool staring at surface of my workbench ... because the questions involved some concentration.  The mess [photos] above is the surface of my workbench.

While staring at it ... I realized how much it symbolized what was going on.  Bits & pieces of the past mixed with things of the present.  Different colors from all the different time periods & emotions.  If you look at it closely you can see little traces of things that you'll understand.  Other things you have no idea what the heck it is.  Underneath it all is a map.  And to someone ... this all makes sense.  It looks sort of like a mess [and I know some things were definitely harder to do than others], but it is all part of something bigger & better than what we can see now.

A little over a month ago, we saw a flyer.  It read something like this.  The University of Missouri is where Kyle & I met & graduated from.  It's what first caught my eye when I saw the brochure.  After reading every word & realizing we were who they were looking for, making the phone call & hearing that we did qualify ... we felt called to do it & knew the end [finding a cause for Autism] would justify the means [day trip to Columbia, pages & pages of questionnaires, DNA samples, & my 6 hours & 45 minutes total of interviewing].

Everything we did ... will be a part of an anonymous case study.  It's not for us to get information.  It's for us to give information & help contribute to finding a cause for Autism.  We'll be a file folder [or something like that] that researchers from anywhere in the world [not just Columbia, Missouri] can pick up, leaf through, examine & look for those links.  I'm so proud of my little family for being an anonymous case study in one of the coolest, largest Autism studies going on in the world.  Fingers crossed someone picks up our file folder [or one of the other 3,000+ families participating] & says "oh looky here".  :)  ['Cause you so know that's what researchers say when they find stuff.]