Shutting down this blog

Blogging hasn't really helped me to cope, and hasn't really achieved anything (for example, despite a direct mention in the NDCS Families magazine, I have not been contacted by any other parents if children who have both ASD and ANSD).

Bye bye.

I'll probably just leave the blog to fade away, I won't actively delete it. You never know.

Demonstrating his disabilities ...

For various reasons, I had to take Andrew into the office briefly this week. My work colleagues all know about Andrew's disabilities, but they had recently expressed a desire to see how he was growing.

Knowing that I wouldn't be able to keep hold of him all the time, I used his disability buggy. They immediately asked if he could climb out of the buggy to play with them and, given the size of the group, I let him sit on the floor with them. He played quietly and intently for a few minutes, firstly with an ID badge on a lanyard (a favourite) and then with a discarded birthday balloon.

Seemingly before anybody could blink, he got to his feet and ran halfway across the huge open plan office.  Chasing after him, my colleagues quickly learnt three things:

1 - he is not physically disabled and can run very fast

2 - he doesn't care where he runs, and

3 - shouting after him to "Stop!" doesn't work because he's deaf.

Their reaction was mixed. Some thought it funny, until I pointed out that he can behave similarly in a supermarket ... Some were sympathetic but you could see they were thinking "Thank goodness my child isn't like that" ...

Now if only he'd had a meltdown when eventually caught, they would have seen how bad life can get ... But maybe, given that the office was busy (200 people on my floor!) it was better that he didn't!!

Dear Diary ...

... I'm sorry that I haven't written for a while. (Sorry to all my blog readers too!) Life hasn't been brilliant during the last five weeks, and it has taken its toll on us.

Andrew has calmed down a great deal since the madness of early September, but he has not returned to the "happy autistic" that we once knew. We see the old Andrew sometimes; and we see the new, quick-to-anger, distressed-for-no-obvious-reason Andrew sometimes. The furniture is surviving, probably thanks to the wall and door padding in his room. Hard plastic toys are now carefully rationed, and are removed once he falls asleep so that he cannot throw them when he wakes. Family outings haven't really resumed.

School asked us to collect him one lunchtime after a particularly bad morning. I then had a mini-meltdown of my own - if a specialist ASD school were unable to cope, how on earth were we, as untrained parents, meant to know what to do? It transpired they sent him home due to his raised temperature (unsurprising after screaming all morning). My mini-meltdown has had a good outcome though - school are giving us more family support, and are trying to arrange for professional support too so that we can get a break from caring.

We are exhausted. Andrew is sleeping, but wakes 2 or 3 times each night and is difficult to re-settle. We are sleeping, but always with one ear open, listening out for him so that we can try to settle him before he gets too distressed. We need time to re-group, time to take care of our own health, so that we can take care of him better.

You wouldn't believe a small 6-year-old child cause such mayhem.