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Showing posts with the label Aspergers

Missing Education due to Illness

The Importance of Attendance If you read any news articles on education, correspondence from your child’s school, or are simply clued up on parenting then you will know the importance of school attendance. Schools place a great deal of focus on targets and will often offer incentives and competitions to encourage and increase attendance figures, but what if your child has a serious illness. What happens if they really are not well enough to attend school. What happens then? Attendance targets at Ryan's school are currently set at 95% attendance for the school year. Therefore realistically your child can only miss 10 school days due to illness. Medical appointments such as GP or Dentist do not count, but you are encouraged to make these appointments outside of the school day where feasibly possible. If your child consistently misses school, even if it is only one day a week, that equates to 39 days over the school year. Even missing one day in a week results in pressure on the

Three Months Cancer Free

Cancer Free On 5th August 2017 we hit a new milestone. Three months post-chemo and cancer-free . I can't believe the progress Ryan has made, it has astounded even me. The doctors are impressed and I'm impressed. His hair is growing back beautifully. It just looks like a really short crew cut now. He has put on a wonderful amount of weight that puts him now absolutely on the typical average scale for his height and age. He also no longer has Adrenal Insufficiency either which surprised even the doctors that he recovered so quickly. We now need to go and buy him new clothes because he's grown so well and improved so much and I’ll need to buy a new school uniform ready for September. Ryan’s sleep patterns are still a mess though, to the point he is almost nocturnal and that's not for want of trying to form some sort of routine by waking him in the mornings and letting the dogs into his room, but he does seem to tire still quite easily and he did manage to pick up

Autism - You Are Special

Twenty Dollars A well-known speaker started off his seminar by holding up a $20 bill. In the room of 200, he asked. "Who would like this $20 bill?" Hands started going up. He said, "I am going to give this $20 to one of you - but first, let me do this." He proceeded to crumple the 20 dollar note up. He then asked. "Who still wants it?" Still , the hands were up in the air. "Well," he replied, "what if I do this?" He dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. He picked it up, now crumpled and dirty. "Now, who still wants it?" Still , the hands went into the air. "My friends, you have all learned a very valuable lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $20. Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way

Sleeping on the Window Sill

The build up to moving from Primary to Secondary school became more and more apparent as the months rolled by and the time crept ever closer. Ryan's meltdowns increased and he took to regularly sleeping on his window sill. In his bedroom he has a lovely deep sill that we made into a window seat. He spent a lot of time sitting, contemplating and so it appears, sleeping. Unfortunately Ryan was once again excluded during year 5 for violent behaviour, which although is inexcusable the reasons go back to that metaphorical fizzy pop bottle . The instances of bolting from school and becoming angry with the world once again escalated, but we now knew why these were happening and the SENCos from both schools where in close contact helping us all to prepare for Ryan’s next biggest challenge. Ryan was given extra ‘transition days’ in his new school to prepare him and make it a little less daunting, but the stress was too much and Ryan developed Shingles. He was really poorly for

Conners Questionnaire

Autism Ryan saw the Paediatric Team for the first time on Wednesday 12 November 2008, two days after his 7th birthday. The paediatrician we saw was the first person to take me seriously and agreed that we had a right to be concerned about Ryan’s development and mental health to date. That day was the first time that the term Autism was used officially. The paediatrician made an urgent referral to the Educational Psychologist team, gave me a bunch of questionnaires to complete and some that the school needed to do and off we toddled with a further appointment for 6 months time.  I make this episode sound light, but it really wasn't. We had spent over an hour with the Paediatrician who had taken an in-depth history of our lives thus far (fortunately I had kept diaries which really helped answering the myriad of questions). The reason I make this sound light hearted was simply because of the relief we felt that we were finally being taken seriously. Remember I had first raise