i've been lurking for a few days, and i like it here. i have been diagnosed with ad/hd (and also schizoaffective ,which i disagree with, and would like a second opinion on at some point in the future) and my husband had been diagosed with adhd when he was in school, and still has some definite issues.
our kid is 5 years old and has always been a handful, but nothing we considered to be totally unhandlable or out of the ordinary. that is, until he started kindergarten this year. he's got a bunch of issues that we took as normal that most other 5 year olds don't have. so i started researching, and it seems a bit like aspergers, and maybe ad/hd, but we're not sure.
one thing is for certain: the more I learn, the more i'm thoroughly convinced my sister has asperger's. and perhaps her daughter as well. it's just interesting to learn, i'm a lot like my sister, but not quite as.....closed off...as she is. (not sure if that was the appropriate phrase or not.) i can understand her in a lot of ways that others can't. and i've always been able to explain her to people, because i can feel her.
but my kid has had a child study done with his school, and after my prompting, there is a meeting scheduled wednesday where we will discuss how best he should learn in school, and approve the go ahead with his evaluation.
this last month as been hectic for him, starting kindergarten. the lastest drama was the teacher having to do the heimlich maneuver on him because he was choking on a whole chicken nugget. there is a whole bunch of history behind him and his chicken nuggets, mainly that this is all he will eat, along with a small few bits of other stuff. he use to eat a lot more things, but he regressed back to eating only chicken nuggets by the time he was between 2 and 3. He usually has very methodical ways of eating his nuggets. he nibbles around the edges and use to leave the middles. The teach convinced him that the middles were good, so he had started to eat those too. That he choked on a whole nugget was so odd to me, because it would take a LOT to convince him to do something of the like with stuffing his mouth and food. it turns out he has severe "schedule anxiety". the lunch room is chaotic, kids are leaving and coming and he's always worried about being left behind without finishing, so he rushes everything. EVERYTHING. His coloring (i can tell, there is a bit of history behind that too) as well as his food. The teacher tells me that he is constantly asking her what time it is, very worried about what's going to happen next, and if he's going to be left behind.
he's also got some definite motor issues that hinder him at school, and he is being considered for writing therapy, and he completely zones out in his (near perfect, i might say) simulations of Iron Man to the point where he inapprorately acts out parts at school. that's all he thinks about, morning, noon, and night. he's completely consumed with Iron Man.
He has decent vocabulary, but, what I can only describe as, not-so-reliable communication skills. I take him to school and pick him up every day because i just don't think he is communicative enough to express himself to other kids enough to survive school bus shennanigans, nor do i think he would have the proper communication to tell an adult about anything bad that may happen on the bus so that they could solve it. I just can't bare the thought of him riding the bus, so we moved into town for the purpose of being closer to school so I could drive him every day.
he doesn't even have the means to express himself to the teacher when he feels sick. twice now he has told her he "wanted to go home" and she didn't quite understand it to mean that he didn't feel well, and didn't pay much attention to it. so he acted out both those days. he becomes very defiant if he can't make what he wants known well enough to be understood. so both of those days, I pick him up to find he's been disciplined for acting out. , and he can make out to me that he wanted to go home, so that's why he acted bad, and both days he had a fever.
anyhow, i could write a book on my son. i don't know for sure if he has asperger's or not, but the more i read, it sounds a lot like him.
16 Oct 2010, 1:15 am
