Thursday Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

Grrrrrrrrrrrr is the best way to describe today! Part of me can't believe it is Thursday already. This week has gone SO quickly!!

I went "dog shopping" with Mum this morning. We drove to Ford near Arundel for a small local dog rescue place to meet "Amber". Amber is a 2.5 year old whippet that Mum met a couple of days ago and fell in love with! We went over there today with Molly (my dog) to see how they would get on but unfortunately the school called and I had to cut it short just as we'd started a walk, and go to sort out Nathan. Let's just say he'd had an "accident" of the toilet kind and I wasn't impressed!!

I KNOW it is part of his ADHD/Aspergers diagnosis, but still ... he's eight years old now and MORE than old enough to be able to take himself to the toilet, but unfortunately, I still find myself cleaning up his shit in more ways than one! He was very apologetic this evening and promised me that it wouldn't happen again, but it's all words I've heard before and don't really believe any more.

So anyway ... yeah a Grrrrrr day! I accomplished the sum total of naff all really yet was constantly on the go!

This evening I've tweaked the website a little, updated the testimonials from recent customer emails and worked on some number crunching.

My my what an exciting life I lead!!!

Nathan DR update and *shock* I'm a GOOD mother?

What a wonderful update to be able to give the doctor! Nathan has been seeing a specialist at the children's centre in the local hospital since we first started on the road to diagnosis four years ago, and although his appointments were once every 12 weeks, he's now only seen every 6 months for an update because he is stable on his medication and doing well.

He's also grown just over a centimetre to 118cm and has gained half a kilo in the last 6 months ... It doesn't sound like much, but for a child that eats hardly *anything* and is Skinny McSkinny that would almost snap in half ... it's good that he gains weight and height - even little bits!

Other than the odd toilet accident to be negative about (all part of his diagnosis anyway) and the annoying way he doesn't eat "proper" food, everything else I had to tell his specialist was all good stuff! His reading has improved tenfold and I took his current school reading book along for him to read a bit to her - she was impressed! Told her about how he's had several merits for maths, how his teacher commented on the fact that although his handwriting is messy, his SPELLING is actually very good for a child his age. It was just all good stuff to tell her! We talked a little about his eating habits, made sure I was positive (with Nathan in the room listening too!) about how he HAS been trying some new foods recently and discovered extra things he likes.

She said to me how NICE it was to hear a parent being so positive and encouraging about their child!! She said all day that she hears nothing but negativity from parents and that Nathan's improvements are obviously very much down to being in a supportive environment and good parenting.

Made me proud of myself to hear someone "official" tell me I am a good mum! I know I am faaaaaaaar from perfect and I screw up a lot as a parent, but I think we all do because there aint no book out there that can tell you how to do it - you just have to love your kids and want the best for them and that isn't exactly hard to do :-)

Wow ... the things I learned about my son tonight!!!

Wow, the things I have learned about my little boy tonight have truly astounded me!

It's been a weird day really. I woke up this morning and I really just didn't want to drag the kids into the workshop with me! I turned the alarm clock off and allowed myself the indulgence of a lay in until 9.30am! I could hear the kids downstairs but there were no sounds of screaming, so I just huddled myself under my duvet until I FELT like getting up!

This evening at hub's suggestion, we all went out for a "family" meal ... the kids have been so well behaved recently and it was hub's payday - plus the freezer is pretty much totally empty, and with me clearing out the kitchen cupboards yesterday ... well there wasn't much in the house!!

Anyway, after trudging around a few different places, trying to find somewhere that didn't have a 20-30 min wait for a table for four ... we finally got seated back at the first place we went too!

The kids were impeccable with their behaviour! I was proud of the pair of them! We went to a family friendly restaurant that provides colouring pens and activity sheets

That's the background ... but the thing is ... after a few glasses of wine I was feeling decidedly squiffy so we weren't exactly hugely forthcoming about getting the kids in bed! Hub was doing some work and I was watching Dawn Porter do her lesbian thang (so gotta post about that separately!) when it occurred to me to get them into bed!

Fast forward past the whole go to bed, kisses & cuddles bit ... I'm sat here with another glass of wine and Nathan comes in telling me he has had a bad dream about colours!

THAT intruigued the crap out of me so I asked him to explain. He told me that his dream was yellow with a black hole in the middle but that sometimes it was colours other than yellow.

OMG it was fascinating. I got him to draw his dream for me and he drew a big circle (in biro) that he told me was yellow and then did a black circle in the middle of it. From there I got him to make me a list of happy and sad colours, but he re-named it colours he liked and colours he hated! Yellow was top of the hate list, followed by black and all kinds of dark colours. Top of his love list was red orange and pink together like a sunset... and that just blew my mind! He said blue is an okay colour as long as it isn't too dark, white and grey are in the middle and he absolutely loves ALL (his words) types of green.

It was fascinating and totally blew my mind. He took his list to bed with him but I plan on secreting it away later to look at properly. It smacks of being a very Aspergers thing ... and it reminded me a lot of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" ... I forget the author but it's about a boy with severe Aspergers (Nathan is mild to mid) and it was just wow ... because that boy saw yellow as a bad luck colour too. It is definitely worth mentioning to his specialist at the hospital when he's seen again.

Utterly fascinating. I saw an insight into my little man tonight that I have never EVER had before.

I should NOT still be cleaning up sh*t with no babies in the house!!!!

Major, huge .. no fucking ENORMOUS vent about to happen here ... avert your eyes if you are offended by the word POOH.

Nathan has ADHD and Aspergers. Although I've mentioned it here before, I've not really blogged a huge amount about his diagnosis and what it means to "us" as a family group.

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - it basically means that he is like a constant live wire with energy free flowing 24 hours a day. He cannot sit still without fidgeting or bouncing and nothing (except the computer, Nintendo DS or playstation) will hold his interest for more than a few minutes. He can run off without warning in a busy street or supermarket, talks incessantly … and basically is constantly exhausting. It’s easier to say he has basically no concept of self preservation!

The signs were there when he was about 2 years old that there was something not quite right about him. I’d already had Megan and although she was a girl and girls are different … there was just something I knew as a parent wasn’t quite right. I had real trouble toilet training him at 18 months … decided to wait till he was 2½ … then decided to wait till he was nearly 3 … and when he started pre-school at 3 and still wasn’t properly toilet trained we were pretty much told to either put him back in nappies or remove him because they didn’t have the staff to deal with it! He was also then held back for a term from starting school because he STILL wasn’t fully toilet trained and still having a lot of accidents. The GP was useless and said he’d “grow out of it” and that it was a typical toddler! I was told that they wouldn’t do anything about the toileting until he was 4 and I literally had him down there the day after his 4th birthday!

It took a LOT of pushing on my part to get an appointment through the child services department to get him seen by someone … ANYONE that would take me seriously and at that point it was a 9-12 month waiting list! It was literally by phoning at LEAST once a week to see if there was a cancellation and making myself known to the receptionist that we FINALLY got an appointment after about 3 months wait.

Ugh there were so many forms to fill in. We had to answer these pages and pages of questions about Nathan’s behaviour, and similar forms were sent to the school. To get a diagnosis for ADHD both the school and parents / caregivers have to respond similarly to the questionnaires (they are tailored differently for each of us)

We met with so many different doctors and people … and then the diagnosis was made, it was like the world made sense! When the doctor first mentioned autism I was really scared because my only “experience” of autism was watching the movie Rain Man and that is SO FAR from Nathan!

Aspergers (AS) is different though. Autism is a huge umbrella that Aspergers is only a small part of! Aspergers is generally classified as a delay in language and cognitive development, motor ‘clumsiness’ and “atypical” use of language. That’s the technical description anyway. AS is different though … people with autism don’t generally like people invading their personal space, but Nathan LOVES being cuddled, held and we always have our “snuggles” before he goes to bed at night. He is very affectionate and loves nothing more than personal contact.

Here’s the Wikipedia description of Aspergers ….
“Unlike those with autism, people with AS are not usually withdrawn around others; they approach others, even if awkwardly, for example by engaging in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic while being oblivious to the listener's feelings or reactions, such as signs of boredom or haste to leave.”

See, I read that and thought OMG that is SOOOOO Nathan!!! When he plays his fave Pokemon game on his Nintendo DS, he’ll literally narrate everything he’s doing and tell you all about which Pokemon is which, what their skill levels are, who they can beat and everything that is going on in his game at the time! You sit here and say “oh really, uhuh ….. yeah they can do that? Cool!” whilst really not listening to a word that he is saying! He'll contine talking well past the fourth or fifth time you have told him NATHAN SHUT THE FUCK UP! OMG how awful do I feel saying that? Especially knowing that he could read this at any time in the future!

Nathan, if you are reading this … sweetie I KNOW it isn’t your fault. I love you SO much, and I will ALWAYS love you no matter how much sh*t you smear all over my walls, but PLEASE you really have to understand that it pisses me off to STILL be cleaning up your sh*t at nearly 8 years old!

Even NOW he is 7 years old (8 in May) and although the accidents are fewer and far between, he still shits himself.

This evening I found my stairway walls and carpet smeared literally in Nathan’s cr*p. I smelled it before I saw it and the maddening thing is … when I called for him to get his butt there right now … and I said to him “I’ve just found something on the stairs Nathan … what could I have found?” He looked at me, then looked at the floor and very quietly (and I KNEW he was ashamed and embarrassed!) he said “pooh.”

Yeah umm you could say that. Smeared all over the walls AND the carpet up the stairs.

He got yelled at, told no computer tomorrow and was sent to bed early.

At the time of writing this (10.40pm) he is asleep in the hallway in a pile under his duvet. I made an executive decision to just leave him there and I’ll put him to bed after I take him to the toilet in half an hour or so.

*sigh*

I REALLY don’t know how to handle this sometimes. It’s NOT his fault and I KNOW that. Christ, life since prescription medication for Nathan has been bloody fantastic compared to what he is like without the drugs, but I hate that he could turn around to me in the future and be angry with me for medicating him. He’s 7½ years old and is on 30mg equasym XL a day which is a fair dose considering his age / build.

Still, what are you supposed to do when your son smears excrement all over the walls and carpet? He still has to be punished no matter what….

So why do I feel so guilty?

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!

Busier than a great big busy thing!!!

My lack of posts for two days isn't because there has been nothing to post about ... more that I've hardly stopped! Busy has not been the word for my life recently! By the time tonight is over, I'll have done 4 candle parties since last Saturday night and I think I have about reached my limit!! I've been out of the house working every night this week - either doing a party or in the workshop pouring wax and gawd I need a night off! At least tonight is a fairly local one so I won't be finishing too late.

Thursday is always a busy day - I've not long got home from work and then Nathan has football 4-5pm and Megan has Brownies 6-7.30 so in between I have to get them fed, finish off the housework and then make sure I have everything ready for tonight so I can leave as soon as their dad walks through the door!!!

Proud Mama Bear moment ....
Megan and Nathan had parent consultations up at the school on Tuesday evening and I am so proud of both of them!! Megan has been struggling with maths for a while now and she had trouble grasping some of the new concepts last year, but she's made huge leaps and improvements in the first couple of months in year 5, and she is working really hard to achieve it too. Her reading is just through the roof and she's working well in everything. Nathan seems to be very calm and concentrating well at school (he's in year 3) which is a remarkable change in this time last year. There has only been one day since the start of the school year where he was apparently uncontrollable and there's a question mark over whether he actually took his medication that day or not. Because of his "problems" he has something called an IEP (Individual Education Plan) at school where they identify areas that he needs to improve on and work towards. Last year his targets were things like sitting still and not doing unprompted forward rolls in the middle of the classroom! This year it's things like capital letters and full stops - real education instead of trying to control behaviour. it's an enormous thing for Nathan.

Both of them have done so well - I'm soooo proud!!!

Cauliflowers Fluffy and Cabbages Green

I am such a sucker for school performances. There's just something so adorable about the sound of kids singing that reduces this grown woman to a snivelling heap!

Today was totally unique though! I hadn't realised it at the time, but I sat all the way through Nathan's Harvest Festival performance today without actually worrying myself silly that he was about to get up and start spinning around in circles or doing rolly pollys, kicking people in the process and generally creating mayhem! I sat there and watched proudly as my boy sat beautifully while the other children did their bits, he SANG (I was close enough to hear that there was definitely musical noises coming out of his mouth!) and he took part doing all the actions. He also seemed to really take pride in himself too.

Since Nathan was diagnosed with ADHD and Aspergers (high functioning autism) it has made some of his more errr "unique" behaviours a little more acceptable because knowing that it's not just him being beligerant and that it's actually his brain chemistry and unique makeup .... well it's another tick in the "I'm not a bad mother who can't always control her son" box!!

I am incredibly lucky that he goes to a very good school where there is excellent support for him, and they always have a Harvest Festival performance ... well, two actually! First school today and Middle school (Megan's) tomorrow. I love how they do put a lot of emphasis on the real meaning behind harvest time and that it's not just about collecting food to give to the less fortunate, but about trying to eat seasonally and how our food is made from the land. Ack it's the greenie in me!

Anyway - my boy made me proud today. Life is good :-)

Small boy wise beyond his years

We all have days like it don't we ... don't we? The ones we REALLY don't like to admit to where it is all fubar right from the moment you open your eyes. Yesterday morning was like that. I was stressed because I had an afternoon candle party to get ready for and that threw me because I usually do parties at night, so I was already feeling tense when I woke up.

I hadn't slept well either - so by the time I stumbled downstairs all bleary eyed I just exploded into a fire breathing dragon (FBD). Now I should explain that there are two extremes to my style of parenting. On one extreme you have Mary Poppins where it doesn't matter that you broke my expensive vase darling because I know it was an accident and you didn't do it on purpose. On the other extreme is the FBD that will give time outs and instant discipline (namely removing Nintendo DS and banning all electronic gaming for the day!) BECAUSE I had already told you eleventy hundred times NOT to play with your damned ball in the house!! Most of the time I exist in a fairly happy world living nicely in the middle of my two extremes!

So anyway, yesterday started as an FBD day. I asked Nathan what he would like for breakfast and he replied chocolate toast. Off I go on my merry way (not quite in full FBD mode yet) to pop the toast in the toaster and to get him his ADHD meds. NOW I also need to explain that my being sick in the mornings for the last few months is brought on partly by smell and toast is one of the worst culprits, so I don't do toast unless I REALLY have to!!

I ask my dear son to come and butter his own toast to make it easier on my rapidly increasingly queasy stomach and then he announces that he doesn't in fact want toast, tells me he never ASKED for toast and that he actually wants coco pop rocks cereal with NO milk. All of this is while he is bouncing up and down on the sofa, upside down with his feet on the wall and he is totally losing it because it takes about half an hour for his ADHD meds to kick in!

I just completely lost it. For no real reason either - I just let rip in full FBD mode yelling at him about wasting food and then instantly felt awful. I said sorry straight away, sorted out his breakfast (coco pop rocks with no milk) and then managed to calm the FBD down by having a coffee in the conservatory with some peace and quiet ... gradually returning to normal mummy mode.

When I went back into the lounge, I went straight over to Nathan to give him a big hug and the conversation went something like this ...

ME: Nathan, I am really sorry that I shouted at you but I was angry because you had asked for toast and then you wasted it.
NATHAN: Mummy, we've already talked about it and you've said sorry. I've forgiven you and we don't need to talk about it all day.

Talk about a HIGHLY astute little boy there! Gawd there's more than a thing or two I could learn from my 7 year old son!!