Saturday 23 October 2010

Catching Up

There has been so much going on recently that I've not really had the time or inclination to post until now. We've all had colds too which hasn't helped!

Sam has had some fantastic days at nursery (probably helped by the fact that for the last week he's had some great nights sleep!). He has been a lot more focussed and attentive. And on one of the days he stops for his lunch he actually sat down at the table when he saw all the other children sat down and waited for his sandwich! His support worker made him wait 2 minutes and gave him his drink then another 2 minutes and gave him his sandwich. Sam basically doesn't do waiting so this was a real treat.

We are finding that Sam likes things to be in context. We really struggled for days putting on his school jumper, but when we do it just before we go out after he has his shoes on he is fine about it. We had just been trying to put it on him too early.

We've just had another 'team around the family' meeting which Andy was able to come to as well. We went in with the idea that we would get pushy if needed, but we didn't need to! Our team of professionals are the pushiest (but nicest) bunch around! After our initial referral for Sam to get a statutory assessment was knocked back I was concerned that the next one wouldn't go in for ages and the specialist advisory teacher is pushing for it to go in asap after half term. So excited about that, and she's sure that this one won't be rejected. She thinks Sam needs the highest level of support as (and this is the real hard part) the feeling is that Sam is most likely profoundly autistic. On the scale of criteria they use, profound is about as bad as it can get. So mixed feelings really, as I'm pleased no one is pretending he is fine and coating anything with sugar, but.....ouch (knife through the heart moment). The specialist advisory teacher is also on the panel which will diagnose Sam and it looks as though she's going to try and push him through for discussion as soon as she can.

I signed up for the More than Words course the other week and we had the specialist speech and language therapist here a few days ago to do a pre-programme assessment. She was lovely, took a lot of history and a short video of Sam. I'll start the course in November so it should be good! She is also on the panel that will diagnose Sam so it was great that she's met him, as she said any evidence she observes she will take with her to the assessment.

William is still great, he is nearly one now! His current favourite thing is pretending to eat and drink play food and making you pretend to eat it too. He is still pestering Sam constantly which is great too. The other day I caught them both squished into the same box which was quite funny! Don't know who got in first but I didn't care to be honest, just to see the interaction was brilliant.