Saturday, June 20, 2009
"Mum, I'm a BIG BOY"
We went to Target to pick up a few essentials. A few of Colin's undies were starting to get a little snug, so we stopped to check the prices on some new ones. We walk over and he exclaims, "Mum, I'm a big boy! We need to get rid of my undies that my friends laugh at (he still has a pair of Thomas the Tank Engine) and get me all new BOXERS! I want boxers like a big boy!" So, we bought him a 5-pack of little boxer-briefs and he wears them SO proud! Through the day yesterday, he kept reminding me about how big he is now that he has his boxers on. *sigh* My baby is making his own underwear decisions...
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Colin's Evaluation Results
Two formal diagnoses in one week. I recorded my sessions with the Psychologists so that I would be able to transcript this to everyone. Sorry it has taken so long, but that is a LONG conversation and A LOT of information I have to sift through.
Christian and I went back to the psychologist. What we learned about Colin really did not surprise us. However, hearing the actual age equivalents for his development was hard.
Most interestingly, the two psychologists "debated for a few days" on what his diagnosis should be. Colin exhibits a number of social difficulties often found in children exhibiting problems with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). He has a history of engulfing perseverative preoccupations, as well as the social deficits and behavioral rigidity typically found in Asperger's Disorder (AD). He is unusual in that he also continues to show some behaviors more typical of a high level autism. So, after much debate, it was decided that he would be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome with Residual Autistic Characteristics.
Colin's intellectual functioning and academic knowledge were both in the low average level. He also ranges low average with expressive and receptive speech, manipulating phonological manipulation and speech articulation. Colin does have an average to above average level for his memory.
Colin's emotional development is delayed, with his sense determined by his immediate impulses and desires, but beginning to be influenced by his enduring interests, abilities and beliefs. His capacity to inhibit impulses, regulate emotions, tolerate frustration and delay gratification is poorer than his peers. He is insecure in his attachment due to ASD, with both separation anxiety and a functional/instrumental use of me. Basically, I am here to serve his every desire and whim at the moment he desires it. I have no purpose in life other than to wait and and foot on him.
Besides AD with residual traits of ASD, he has also been diagnosed with severe Separation Disorder and a sensory integration disorder, as well as ADHD.
Soon, the battle between the school district and I will resume. With the diagnosis in hand, advice from the woman across the street (she is a special education teacher in a nearby city) and the fact that I WILL NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THEIR BULL SHIT ANYMORE... Colin SHOULD be going into 1st grade with a special education support team on his side. Should the school district try to deny him, we are prepared to get an advocate and get the Texas Education Agency involved. I WILL NOT let them tell me that he is "too smart" for services and is only able to receive them if he has "educational needs." The bloody diagnosis papers directly state that he needs services.
SSSOOOO.... that's the story of my little guy.
Christian and I went back to the psychologist. What we learned about Colin really did not surprise us. However, hearing the actual age equivalents for his development was hard.
Most interestingly, the two psychologists "debated for a few days" on what his diagnosis should be. Colin exhibits a number of social difficulties often found in children exhibiting problems with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). He has a history of engulfing perseverative preoccupations, as well as the social deficits and behavioral rigidity typically found in Asperger's Disorder (AD). He is unusual in that he also continues to show some behaviors more typical of a high level autism. So, after much debate, it was decided that he would be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome with Residual Autistic Characteristics.
Colin's intellectual functioning and academic knowledge were both in the low average level. He also ranges low average with expressive and receptive speech, manipulating phonological manipulation and speech articulation. Colin does have an average to above average level for his memory.
Colin's emotional development is delayed, with his sense determined by his immediate impulses and desires, but beginning to be influenced by his enduring interests, abilities and beliefs. His capacity to inhibit impulses, regulate emotions, tolerate frustration and delay gratification is poorer than his peers. He is insecure in his attachment due to ASD, with both separation anxiety and a functional/instrumental use of me. Basically, I am here to serve his every desire and whim at the moment he desires it. I have no purpose in life other than to wait and and foot on him.
Besides AD with residual traits of ASD, he has also been diagnosed with severe Separation Disorder and a sensory integration disorder, as well as ADHD.
Soon, the battle between the school district and I will resume. With the diagnosis in hand, advice from the woman across the street (she is a special education teacher in a nearby city) and the fact that I WILL NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THEIR BULL SHIT ANYMORE... Colin SHOULD be going into 1st grade with a special education support team on his side. Should the school district try to deny him, we are prepared to get an advocate and get the Texas Education Agency involved. I WILL NOT let them tell me that he is "too smart" for services and is only able to receive them if he has "educational needs." The bloody diagnosis papers directly state that he needs services.
SSSOOOO.... that's the story of my little guy.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Some Chicken Pictures...
It's been hard putting everything together with Keely's Eval, so I figured I would throw in a few pictures of the chicken-friends.
What do you do with a dog run and old dog house? Build a chicken house!
The ducks... The week we got them, their first water play, and this week. Pom-Pom has the giant pom-pom. Quack is pure white (both female). Mack is the mallard (his green head fathers are starting to come in). And lastly is Gravy (the last two are male)
CHICKENS! Here are some of the girls in their house just after a HUGE storm.
Gloria, one of our Ameraucana hens. They lay green & blue eggs!!!
Silkies! The buff one is Bullet the Roo. We have 2 whites that we can't tell apart! Squished in the middle is an Easter Egger. She's a cross breed similar to an Ameraucana.
POLISH! They are a fun breed. We have two. This girl is named Elvis because of her crest.
What do you do with a dog run and old dog house? Build a chicken house!
The ducks... The week we got them, their first water play, and this week. Pom-Pom has the giant pom-pom. Quack is pure white (both female). Mack is the mallard (his green head fathers are starting to come in). And lastly is Gravy (the last two are male)
CHICKENS! Here are some of the girls in their house just after a HUGE storm.
Gloria, one of our Ameraucana hens. They lay green & blue eggs!!!
Silkies! The buff one is Bullet the Roo. We have 2 whites that we can't tell apart! Squished in the middle is an Easter Egger. She's a cross breed similar to an Ameraucana.
POLISH! They are a fun breed. We have two. This girl is named Elvis because of her crest.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Keely's Evaluation Results
Christian and I met with the psychologist. We thought we knew what to expect; what we heard surprised us.
FIRST, everything that is wrong with her is NOT due to some circumstance in her life. It is not due to a traumatic incident or what has been going on between Christian and I. It is genetic. These problems surfaced as a toddler... as some of you know, she was always... different. When she was 3, it was hard to really diagnose her with anything because she was so young. So, when she was young, they said "it looks like it will be this and looks like that..." they wouldn't formally diagnose her because she was so young. She DOES NOT have Asperger's Syndrome like they thought. AS kids are not this aware of their feelings and emotions. They are not this aware of what's going on inside them or outside around them. This surprised us the most, but when the psychologist explained everything, it made a lot of sense.
Keely was anxious through the evaluation, sometimes angry, sometimes oppositional. She has a very negative overall perception over life, and a VERY negative perception of me. Her "working memory," where you take in info in the environment and try to figure out what you may or may not already know, is being affected by her emotional problems. The attention problems may not be from ADHD, but instead because she is so focused on her anxiety, negativity and emotional problems. The medication that she was on at the time of testing stays in the body for a longer period of time, so the test was inconclusive (she failed 1 of 3 tests). Basically, her cognitive tests all came back in the average to superior range (that means her brain is working great).
She is 7. A normal 7 year old is usually pretty oblivious to what is going on internally. Oh, not with Keely. She is very aware of her anxiety, depression, strain on her social interactions and behaviours; she is very emotionally distressed and has a very low self concept. A VERY SIGNIFICANT level of depression. She has a pretty significant level of anxiety which she manifests into physical problems (being tired, tummy aches, potty problems, headaches). This anxiety is almost obsessive compulsive. She has to have things in order and if they aren't they stress her out and she dwells on it until it is changed.
She is a highly reactive child. This has been since birth. She has an over reactive central nervous system and gets set off by stimulation. She is very hyper reactive and this leads to a lot of anxiety. A situation to explain this is if someone bumps into you. You and I would see it as, "Oh, we bumped into each other," whereas Keely interprets it as, "This person did it on purpose." She has no rational thought, she thinks purely on emotion.
She also has an attachment disorder. This had been since she was a baby. The core is that she has problems with trust and this results in problems with relationships. As long as things are going okay in her mind, everything is fine. Once something changes (and this is usually a misperception on her part) and it is not her way, all hell breaks loose. She perceives this as being done directly to her as a result of her trust issues. It's a vicious cycle because you never know what is going to set her off.
FIRST, everything that is wrong with her is NOT due to some circumstance in her life. It is not due to a traumatic incident or what has been going on between Christian and I. It is genetic. These problems surfaced as a toddler... as some of you know, she was always... different. When she was 3, it was hard to really diagnose her with anything because she was so young. So, when she was young, they said "it looks like it will be this and looks like that..." they wouldn't formally diagnose her because she was so young. She DOES NOT have Asperger's Syndrome like they thought. AS kids are not this aware of their feelings and emotions. They are not this aware of what's going on inside them or outside around them. This surprised us the most, but when the psychologist explained everything, it made a lot of sense.
Keely was anxious through the evaluation, sometimes angry, sometimes oppositional. She has a very negative overall perception over life, and a VERY negative perception of me. Her "working memory," where you take in info in the environment and try to figure out what you may or may not already know, is being affected by her emotional problems. The attention problems may not be from ADHD, but instead because she is so focused on her anxiety, negativity and emotional problems. The medication that she was on at the time of testing stays in the body for a longer period of time, so the test was inconclusive (she failed 1 of 3 tests). Basically, her cognitive tests all came back in the average to superior range (that means her brain is working great).
She is 7. A normal 7 year old is usually pretty oblivious to what is going on internally. Oh, not with Keely. She is very aware of her anxiety, depression, strain on her social interactions and behaviours; she is very emotionally distressed and has a very low self concept. A VERY SIGNIFICANT level of depression. She has a pretty significant level of anxiety which she manifests into physical problems (being tired, tummy aches, potty problems, headaches). This anxiety is almost obsessive compulsive. She has to have things in order and if they aren't they stress her out and she dwells on it until it is changed.
She is a highly reactive child. This has been since birth. She has an over reactive central nervous system and gets set off by stimulation. She is very hyper reactive and this leads to a lot of anxiety. A situation to explain this is if someone bumps into you. You and I would see it as, "Oh, we bumped into each other," whereas Keely interprets it as, "This person did it on purpose." She has no rational thought, she thinks purely on emotion.
She also has an attachment disorder. This had been since she was a baby. The core is that she has problems with trust and this results in problems with relationships. As long as things are going okay in her mind, everything is fine. Once something changes (and this is usually a misperception on her part) and it is not her way, all hell breaks loose. She perceives this as being done directly to her as a result of her trust issues. It's a vicious cycle because you never know what is going to set her off.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
1st Quarter, 2009
4 months into 2009. Things have been chaotic, stressful, extremely hard to deal with and there has been a few glimpses of fun. I have tried so many times to write a new blog, but the emotional side of Marce took over and I couldn't finish. This is going to be scatterbrained and terribly wrote. I'm running on 4 1/2 hours of sleep, a whole lot of stress and just plain exhaustion. This has taken a few attempts to write and get across right.
January and February:
Kids behaviours started to spiral downwards. Keely became very angry, hard to even talk to. She would temper tantrum in her room for over an hour at a time 1-3 times a day. She wasn't the same child. She started talking about ways to kill herself (and for those of you who think "She's 7, she is looking for a reaction out of you..." NO.)
March:
The spirling Keely went from depressed with huge outbursts to the kid who pulled away from my hand in parking lots and running in front of moving cars. The kid who tried to get out of the house to lay down in the street and wait for a car to run her down. The kid who in the middle of eating dinner looked up and said, "I wish I knew how to get over the back fence so I could get hit by the train right now." SO... March 04, I took her to the pediatrician and told him how far down she had gotten in the past 3 weeks. He wanted to have her admitted to a Mental Health Hospital about an hour a way. That was one of the hardest things I have ever had to hear or do. During her week there, I saw her every day and talked to her on the phone every night. It was good for her to be there. The psychiatrist said that she has a mood disorder but didn't want to do a full diagnosis on her. Now she is on Prosac for her depression and Concerta for her ADHD (which has also made a huge difference on her behaviours). She started seeing her pediatrician weekly. She started seeing her counselor weekly. Although she seems so much happier, the counseling has seemed to bring up A LOT of emotional issues regarding me.
April:
Keely is continuing to see her counselor once a week. She had an evaluation on the 6th; I get the results May 4th. Colin has started weekly counseling with a FANTASTIC man who is a Certified Anger Resolution Therapist. On the 23rd, he had a full evaluation; I get the results May 12th. He started a new dosage of Concerta the first week of April and it has made an AMAZING change in his attention span. His teacher has reported that all of a sudden with the change of medication dosage he has made leaps and bounds. He has started to grasp sounding out words and started trying to write. The lightbulb turned on in his head and he grasps simple addition and subtraction. The best part is that when he starts to count, he does pretend dots in a straight row. Nobody can figure out how he knows when to stop the straight line of numbers, but in his head, he somehow does. It's rather impressive to watch.
During the first week of April, we added a new hobby to the mess. It's been a great new hobby on many levels. We have become owners of chickens. How? Why? Well, it all started like this... Mum and I were talking and joked about turning the garden area into a chicken coop and turning the doghouse into a henhouse for fresh eggs. 3 days later, construction began. We started with 3 fluffy day-old chicks and four day-old ducklings (the key word in that sentence is "started"). So, the girl with an absolute fear of birds has found herself loving ugly chickens.
The moral of the story, I've been pretty damn busy with going to doctors appointments and counseling appointments. I also take Mum out all the time due to her needing double knee replacement; I'm the chauffeur. More to come soon...
January and February:
Kids behaviours started to spiral downwards. Keely became very angry, hard to even talk to. She would temper tantrum in her room for over an hour at a time 1-3 times a day. She wasn't the same child. She started talking about ways to kill herself (and for those of you who think "She's 7, she is looking for a reaction out of you..." NO.)
March:
The spirling Keely went from depressed with huge outbursts to the kid who pulled away from my hand in parking lots and running in front of moving cars. The kid who tried to get out of the house to lay down in the street and wait for a car to run her down. The kid who in the middle of eating dinner looked up and said, "I wish I knew how to get over the back fence so I could get hit by the train right now." SO... March 04, I took her to the pediatrician and told him how far down she had gotten in the past 3 weeks. He wanted to have her admitted to a Mental Health Hospital about an hour a way. That was one of the hardest things I have ever had to hear or do. During her week there, I saw her every day and talked to her on the phone every night. It was good for her to be there. The psychiatrist said that she has a mood disorder but didn't want to do a full diagnosis on her. Now she is on Prosac for her depression and Concerta for her ADHD (which has also made a huge difference on her behaviours). She started seeing her pediatrician weekly. She started seeing her counselor weekly. Although she seems so much happier, the counseling has seemed to bring up A LOT of emotional issues regarding me.
April:
Keely is continuing to see her counselor once a week. She had an evaluation on the 6th; I get the results May 4th. Colin has started weekly counseling with a FANTASTIC man who is a Certified Anger Resolution Therapist. On the 23rd, he had a full evaluation; I get the results May 12th. He started a new dosage of Concerta the first week of April and it has made an AMAZING change in his attention span. His teacher has reported that all of a sudden with the change of medication dosage he has made leaps and bounds. He has started to grasp sounding out words and started trying to write. The lightbulb turned on in his head and he grasps simple addition and subtraction. The best part is that when he starts to count, he does pretend dots in a straight row. Nobody can figure out how he knows when to stop the straight line of numbers, but in his head, he somehow does. It's rather impressive to watch.
During the first week of April, we added a new hobby to the mess. It's been a great new hobby on many levels. We have become owners of chickens. How? Why? Well, it all started like this... Mum and I were talking and joked about turning the garden area into a chicken coop and turning the doghouse into a henhouse for fresh eggs. 3 days later, construction began. We started with 3 fluffy day-old chicks and four day-old ducklings (the key word in that sentence is "started"). So, the girl with an absolute fear of birds has found herself loving ugly chickens.
The moral of the story, I've been pretty damn busy with going to doctors appointments and counseling appointments. I also take Mum out all the time due to her needing double knee replacement; I'm the chauffeur. More to come soon...
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Hi January, How ya Doin'?
Hello January! I know that I've only known you for 3 days now, but I just wanted to say one thing... thanks for starting out uneventfully.
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