Wow! It has been quite awhile since I've been here.  I miss posting my feelings and having everybody's encouragement.  My work computer network has some sort of weird filter, and I can only get on parts of DailyStrength, but my wife's sister stayed with us over the holidays, and she discovered through her computer that one of my neighbors (I don't know who) has a wireless hub, and I get a good enough signal to get online.  Now, it's on to the good, the bad, an the ugly.  I've been battling some pretty tough "demons" lately.  It pretty much started when Harrison got his flu shot.  What his ped. didn't bother to tell us until after the fact was that the version they gave him was NOT preservative-free (thimerosal).  I was sick to my stomach.  I had an overwhelming feeling of guilt, like I did it again.  I was very angry with them for giving him that shot, and I was angry at myself for allowing it to happen.  I could feel myself start to slip into something.  I don't know if it was depression, apathy, angst or what.  It was something I was fighting, and I just couldn't figure it out at first.  My wife and I weren't getting along.  We spent all our emotions dealing with Harrison that when it came to each other, we had nothing left to give.  We weren't emotional; we weren't intimate.  We were pretty much nothing.  It got to the point where I plainly said to her that we have to fix what's broken, or soon, there would be nothing to fix.  After many long talks and many tears, we figured out that we never really fully dealt with our emotions surrounding the miscarriage, and we were taking it out on each other. That made things a little better, but I was still on my crusade which was to figure out what caused Harrison's autism and to fix it.  That just compounded the anger and anxiety I was feeling, and I took it out in my training.  I started "hitting the weights" even harder and more ferociously that I ever had.  It got to the point where my wife wouldn't come near me when I was working out.  I was so agressive that I've never had so many torn muscles, strained tendons, etc.  Just when I'd recover from one training injury, I have another one.  My wife told me I needed to slow down, but I didn't want to because I was pushing weights that I never had before, and that seemed to be the only gratification and satisfaction I could find.  It also didn't help when I found yet another article detailing how vaccinations could be a possible cause of autism.  Every time I found another article, I got angrier.  That's what started my anti-vaccine preservative crusade, and this was a good outlet for some of my energy. I still have much work to do when it comes to my emotional state, but at least I'm headed in the right direction.  My wife has helped greatly.  She lets me have "down time" when she can see that I really need it.  I have to fix myself for my family's sake, for my son's sake.  Previously in my life, I thought about the futility of making New Year's resolutions.  I thought that we shouldn't need a single day out of the year to make us want to better ourselves.  I'm reversing my thoughts, and I'm going to use the new year to really try to change my mental state, and here is my first attempt at looking at things from the "bright side". I thought the last part of 2007 was pretty horrible.  I "lost" my son to autism, and not more than a month later, I lost my baby to a miscarriage.  I didn't think things could get much worse, but maybe they were getting better.  My son was just diagnosed with autism when my wife miscarried, but maybe it was God's way of saying that we were taking on too much at one time, that we needed to slow down and handle one thing at a time.  Maybe the last part of 2007 wasn't so bad.  Since Harrison was diagnosed with autism, I've become much more in tune with his needs, which has brought me closer to him than I ever thought possible.  What father wouldn't want that with his son?  We have such an undeniably awesome connection, and I think his autism was  part of it.  Aside from what I've already said about the miscarriage, my wife and I have had to be there for each other more than we ever had before, and that has brought us closer than I ever thought possible.  What man wouldn't want that with his wife?  All of this has brought us, as a family, much closer together.  Maybe the last part of 2007 wasn't so bad after all. As for Harrison's road to recovery, it's an unclear map.  But I have the greatest compass of all: an undeniably incredible family. Cody