Proud Mum Moments (and a Nathan ADHD backtrack!)

Well YEAH I am one proud mum! Today was parent / teacher consultations up at the school and both of them got excellent reports!! I am never really that worried about Megan at school because she is highly motivated in herself and she's a sponge for learning. I mean seriously, I catch this girl singing multiplication tables along to a CD on the weekends!!! She is 9 and just generally great! Her teacher couldn't say enough nice things about her! Funny thing is that she said to me afterwards that she had actually been nervous about it and worried about what her teacher might say about her.

I do worry that my daughter is setting herself standards that are waaaay to high for herself and that she'll end up just like me and battling with herself to achieve. She is such a great kid - thoughtful, respectful and popular ... okay so she has a mouth on her and can seriously backchat, but hey she's a 9 year old girl and she's allowed occasionally!!

My 7 year old Nathan has ADHD and Aspergers and the school are very good and support him really well. I can't say enough how great their school has been! Funnily enough this has been the very FIRST time that I've not gone up for a parent / teacher chat with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach about what Nathan's teacher would say!! The thing is, Nathan has made such MAJOR improvements in his behaviour at home. He's had merits, stickers and headteacher awards at school, his toilet accidents are - well there haven't been any for weeks, and the fact that he has made such vast improvements at home could only mean a positive chat at school! I wasn't disappointed! His teacher gave me lots of positive feedback on him and his progress and yep generally it's all good!!!

Her biggest "beef" with him was to do with his handwriting and I have to agree. Part of the Aspergers side of things means he has trouble with fine motor control ie doing up buttons, laces, zips, pen control etc. In that respect he tends to "draw" his letters rather than write them and his hand writing is very messy. BUT she did also point out that his spelling was actually very good for his age, that he liked to write and writes a LOT for news writing etc, and that if he could just neaten up his work then he could actually be a very good writer. That was soooo encouraging, it really was!! He's having no trouble with maths or anything really, the main problems seem to be neatness in his work and the battle of wills that he has with his teacher when he wants to do things his way!!

It's a far cry from this time a couple of years ago before he was medicated. When we had the parent / teacher chat when he was in year 1 (he's in year 3 now) I came out of there pretty much in tears because his teacher that year didn't have one single academic nice word to say about him!! She told me that she couldn't even get started with the academic side of things until his behaviour was under control!

I did understand what she meant though, I do have to be honest there! At that time, I was pushing for the diagnosis process for Nathan and constantly on the phone to try to get him to the top of the waiting list for appointments. This is a child who, in the middle of a school assembly would start doing forward rolls or stand up and start spinning around. He was bouncing off of the walls and family outings were just complete nightmares because you just couldn't keep track of him from one second to the next! He never stood still and he had the concentration span of a .... "ooooooh look at that shiny thing"

Yeah exactly!!

When Nathan was first diagnosed I was so firmly against medication. I felt it was WRONG to medicate a child for behavioural problems and thus the battle began. Although I did "give in" and take him back to the doctor to say, ask for eventually beg that he be medicated because I had officially given up .... I don't regret trying the behavioural methods first! Besides, we (home and school) still use behavioural methods with him anyway. It was then a rocky road even finding the right drug for him, then when we found the right drug, the dosage had to be altered ... then he went through a real growth spurt and the medication had to be increased because his body capacity had increased!! I just hope that one day he can reduce down and come off the medication.

I seem to have got a bit sidetracked from my original reason for this particular post, but hey it obviously needed to come out and I'm never one for deleting anything I ever put in a journal. If my head thinks it - my fingers type it!

I guess what I was trying to say - the point I was trying so badly to make ... is that the drugs have allowed him enough concentration to let the world slow down enough for him to focus on it and start noticing things! It's turned Nathan from a boy I would worry about every where I took ... to a little boy (and his big sister) that I am exceptionally proud of!