autism/aspergers

I've been lurking too, my Sienna is a little bit 'special'. She's definitely not autistic, she is verbal and can engage with others, the best way I can describe her is just "special". She was verbally delayed which was put down to poor hearing, and this may be true as since having the second lot of grommets done her speech has improved drastically but isn't very clear and often requires me to interpret for others. She's due to see the speech therapist again.

She doesn't cope well in situations where she can't anticipate the outcome, or where things aren't the way she expects them to be. When our nanny went away for nine weeks, she spent the first 3 weeks pretty much refusing to speak to anyone and lashing out at the temporary nanny.

We have regular sessions with a clinical psychologist at the Kari centre with both her and Mercedes and they are keeping an eye on her, she has improved a lot over the past three months but she is still really hard work. She has lots of seemingly irrational fears - for example, she could hear roadworks outside and even tho I took her outside and we couldn't even see them she still insisted that we shut ourselves in the kitchen to get away from the 'man'. When we went to Oz at Xmas she bailed up at the door of the plane and I didn't think she was going to get on for a minute there but we managed to drag her on. She flatly refused to go in the airplane toilets tho.

We've also had major sleep issues with her, she'd wake and scream for hours unless someone lay in the room with her, and even now she's over that she still wakes and sits up in bed staring into space for up to an hour at a time, sometimes longer.

On the plus side, she is really empathetic, if she thinks anyone else is hurt or upset she gets really concerned. And she loves Chiara, she spends far more time playing with her than the other two do.

At the moment the psycholgist says its just a case of waiting to see how she develops as she gets older. IMO she seems to be getting easier to manage but I don't know if that's because she's getting better or because I'm getting better at knowing what she wants and how to avoid her 'meltdowns'. I can tell by the way she wakes up in the morning how the rest of the day is going to go - some mornings she literally wakes up screaming.

The hardest part is knowing how much I should indulge her behaviour, and how much I should expect her to be able to get over it - like should I accept her fear of the 'man' and sit in the kitchen or should I tell her to get over it and go about whatever it was I was doing. It's also hard trying to negotiate her needs around the other three coz she is very clingy and quite egocentric at times.

I don't even know if this is the right place to put this, it's really just a ramble.

That sounds exactly like Sienna. She freaked out in the carpark at Sylvia Park once coz there were construction workers there and she could see their vests. I try to prewarn her but that's hard coz at two they don't have the best retention!

We went to St Lukes the other day to have sushi and the Godfreys shop is right next to the sushi place, about ten minutes in she realised what it was and she got really edgy and she was like "cleaner, cleaner", not screaming coz none of them were turned on but she was still really, really uncertain.

freckle wrote: Do you think the sound sensitivities you have observed are possibly related to her improved ability to hear now that the grommets are in place?

I actually thought of suggesting that frecle as well - if you can imagine not hearing then suddenly all these noises and we most can handle but the louders one perhaps frighten her... As for Rhyley he never had gronnets nor any problems with his hearing (that i know of) i just think he has heighented hearing (if such a thing) Infact pluket hurse commented on his hearing being hieghtend (sensitive??) because he heard a lawn mower which was ages away.

hi emma does sound like shes very senetive james is to but its more towards feeling texture of foods he wont eat fruit hates the texture he also has problems with interacting with outher kids

hi guys...
sorry i have posted in an autism forum before but it didnt move along very quick and to be honest i cant find it now..lol
my youngest son (8) has autism and was diagnosed at 2yrs old...so i feel like i have been through enough to help others and share my views, in fact it is a bit of a passion of mine now as it is my main job since i left work when he was 3 to be there for him.
i watched oprah too. to be honest i didnt agree. i personally think opposite to them...my child doesnt have autism, he IS autistic. there is no cure.
in saying that it can become very managable and they can learn and things you thought they will never do, they do. life for us is a little different but the secret is to go with it. accept they are different and dont try to mould them into what they should be like. think outside the square.
he makes us laugh daily!in fact we wish sometimes we were a little like him cos hes honest and doesnt care what people think, which can be embarassing at the best of times!
we have tried diet change which caused major problems. we got involved with special ed at kindy andhe has had a teacher aide since. he has been at main stream school with the help of his aide and ORRS funded. this funding ran out at the start of the year (very distressing) and let me warn the ministry of education have alot to answer for! Autism doesnt seem to fit much of the catagories they have so alot of autistic kids get looked over and left up to schools to care for them.
this has been my biggest fight so far. it is sad cos there biggest diability for them is the fact they look fine. and sometimes have good days..you know
i could go on forever.....if i can be of any help to any one please PM or email and i would love to share more. i am from auck but moved to Chch last year (one of the reasons for our move was to be closer to the national office of Autim NZ.)

hey Aquarius
does your son have a teacher aide now? if so how many funded hours is he getting.... special ed only giving my son 7 hours they told me the max they give is 10 hours?? he is on the verge of being put/taken out of school, he is only 5, only goes to school 3 days at the moment and as of yesterday has be banned from the school bus

Hey guys i'm going to join in here as i am always helping out mum with my nephew who is in the process of being diagnosed... it's all very on again off again with him and apparently she was told no they don't think he has aspergers, however, in seeing him and mike's cousin who definately has been diagnosed as such, i find it hard to find differences.   

How hard is it to get funded hours fro schooling? my nephew has just turned 4 and i already told mum that she needs to get on top of things very quickly in regards to that as i have heard it can take alot to get funded hours for them.

The other side of this is that they think he may have foetal alcohol syndrome, however i am not so sure, from what ih ave seen he shows alot of signs of aspergers more so than FAS.

He is overly sensitive to noise, used to just squeal all that time at new noises, hates the radio on and will still freak out in situations where there are alot of people.   He is coming along very slowly with speech - which has really only just started developing into more than a few words a few months back, mum and i can understand him most of the time but most others can't. he is not good in social situations, loves my girls but very quickly will turn extremely violent and has really hurt the girls quite a few times - the unfortunate thing is i have had to teach them to look for signs that things are going a bit wrong to enable them to move away when they think he's starting to get a bit rough as it progresses from there to outbursts.

attention - he needs it, relys alot on my mum, often comes up to her and says "i need you nana" then off he goes again, he is fine when she is doing things with him, but literally if she even stops to take a breath, or answer the phone, he's slamming doors, opening and closing the oven again and again, until she comes back to him then he's happy as larry again.

Routine is a big thing, he does the same thing in the same order every day, new things scare him, he too needs to be talked into things over a number of weeks when they are going to happen or something is going to change. he is mad for trains, obsessed really, and has recently become fascinated by wheels, anything with wheels which has become dangerous as he always wants to "watch the wheels" - literally wanting to sit at the curb and just watch the wheels of cars going past or of peoples cars when they leave....

Logically though - you give hima puzzle, any puzzle, of the large jigsaw kind - and he can tip it out and do it by himself very quickly, far harder puzzles than my girls can do - mum tends to get him alot of puzzles to keep him busy as he also get bored of ones he has done a few times - they are no longer a challenge to him.

it's frustrating seeing all the stuff she's going through trying to get him help. even respite care has fallen through. I used to be able to handle looking after him but last time i did i barely got through 2 hours before going nuts!! i felt so bad but i had to get out of there, as soon as mum came home i was gone. I have no idea how she does it day in day out at her age.   

I do worry though as he's getting much worse with his outbursts and violent behaviour - i worry for her and for my girls as he's not a small boy, at only just 4 yrs old he's already taller than Paris (5 and a half), who isn't short for her age. I kinda just worry that with his growing size and strength - there's going to come a day where he starts to lash out at mum instead.

Hi there Luana, thanks for replying.

He does go to daycare 3 days a week, however up until early this year he was at one that was not good (has since closed down... enough said) mum had him there for convenience as she doesn't drive and it was 5 mins walk from her house and i was forever telling her when she said about things that were going on that she needed to move him!! so really alot of the help that he needed and could have gotten, was really missed out on so now he's at this point and the new daycare is trying to pick up the pieces, he has referals to SES, and should have special help but this is very very slow in coming so far.

Terribly frustrating, I am kinda angry at mum for that reason that she kept him at a terrible daycare just because she didn't want to walk an extra 10 mins to drop him off (which she now has to anyway) where he was not well looked after, and where he was yelled at, excluded from things, and generally manhandled, etc, which i think has contributed to how he is now. however such is the attitude of alot of my family.