Sometimes it's brilliant when the weirdness inside my house meets the weirdness outside it.

The inside of my house is, by common agreement, something of an autism therapy research lab. My boy needs the help, my bride is able and motivated to provide it, and I give them a free hand and all the support they need. (My ability and enthusiasm for doing this wavers on occasion, for reasons good and bad, and that often leads to interesting times. But nobody wants to be doing anything other than what we're doing.)

One of the lab's prominent outputs is curriculum for teaching my son, getting him past what he's up against. My bride has an eerily good partnership with my son's educators, and they've been making good progress toward his goals for the year. One of the big goals is improving his reading.

What the teaching team has whipped up for that goal mixes new techniques for teaching reading with the oldest reader you're likely to think of: Dick and Jane.

We had the book as a gift to my boy from his great-grandfather, and the bride just ran with it. When my father realized what book we were using, he got very quiet for a few seconds, and said "I remember reading a copy of that book to Dad." That would have been close to six decades ago, and the thing still works like a charm.

There really is something to having your child read to you from Dick and Jane - well, really, from anything, but that one is such a great book for that point-at-each-word-and-say-it stage. I enjoy the look of pride on my son's face when I praise him for his reading; Dad says I was much the same. There's a level on which it does not matter that he's at that stage about nine years older than I was.

With everything going so well, it turns into a problem when you're closing in on the end of the book. The bride is on top of it, as with everything going on in the lab, and today was the day she tried to search the internet for more readers in the same series.

Now, the bride is no stranger to internet acquisition of specialized needs. Much of the lab's equipment was tracked down via painstakingly precise searches on obscure therapeutic terms. She gets into a mode where she scientifically coaxes out the right results, makes the right connection, and she's used to dealing with certain relevancy problems along the way.

It was brilliant to hear her tell, with wide eyes and amusement, how different it was to search for something new on Dick and Jane, how surprised she was at the sorts of results she saw.

(Coincidentally, she's about nine years older than I was when I first got to that stage.)

Welcome to the world outside the lab, sweets; it's weirder out there all the time.