Happiness is…

It’s almost 6:30pm.  Husband’s at work, and I’m sitting in the lounge.  Upstairs in Teenaged Daughter’s room the plasterer is finishing up the last of the walls.  TD’s room had to be emptied almost completely (only the bed frame remained in the room), which means that the master bedroom isn’t usable today, either, as TD’s mattress and most of her clothes (of which there are a LOT) completely cover the king sized bed.  Downstairs isn’t looking much better, either, as the work on the conservatory starts in a few days’ time and a lot of things that were in there are now piled in the dining room.  Once again the house is trashed, but this time the uproar isn’t bothering me as much as it normally does.  The reason for this is simple, and is right here in the lounge with me.

TD stayed at a friend’s house last night, so, not surprisingly, she got very little sleep.  Since both her and my bed are out of service she’s curled up on the couch under a blanket I crocheted, fast asleep.  On either side of the couch is one of her brothers, sitting in the wing chairs.  On the floor at my feet, curled up on his blanket , is the dog.  Teenaged Son is on his laptop with his headphones on, and Preteen Son is on his iPad, also with his headphones on.  I can’t see from here what PS is doing on the iPad, but chances are it involves zombie killing on Minecraft.  I’m obviously on my laptop.  Beethoven’s 6th symphony is playing on the stereo.

We’re all quiet, either asleep or wrapped in our own little worlds.  We’re all relaxed, and all content.  None of them have outright told me this, but if the boys weren’t content why would they be down here with me and their sister, and not in their bedrooms two floors up?  None of the current building work affects their bedrooms, and there certainly isn’t room to store anything more up there (I’ll refrain from commenting on the regular state of TS’s bedroom, as that would break the mood), so they’re not displaced the way their sister is.  They chose to be down here.  There’s very little interaction between any of us, but that doesn’t matter.  My kids all want to be in the same room with each other and with me, even if the company they seek is passive rather than active.  We just like being near each other.

Right here, right now, I’m a very happy woman.

So where’d spring go?

It’s May, and I’ve turned the central heating back on.  It was humid earlier, but now it’s chilly again.  We can’t get over this awful weather.  Our part of England had the wettest April on record since 1910 or so, and while it’s not raining as much since May started it’s dull, overcast and below normal temperatures.  Wrapping up warm is necessary before going outside to dodge the almost constant showers.  Yes, yes, this is England, but this weather is crappy by local standards, and that’s saying something.

What’s especially annoying about the constant rain and drizzle is that we’ve been busy emptying the conservatory and utility room, and needed to put the furniture in the garage.  As the garage is already full of a lot of other furniture and goodness-knows-what at the far back it meant we had to pull a lot of stuff out of the garage before we could put the conservatory furniture in and fit the other pieces around it.  Thankfully it all fit.  We weren’t sure it would, and thought we may have to ask our very lovely neighbour with whom we share a driveway if we could use her garage for some storage.  Seeing as we’d previously just kind of thrown furniture in the garage without really sorting it out there was more space available that we’d realised.  Some of the smaller bits of furniture have been in the garage for almost 6 years now.  Our house in Canada was far bigger than our current house, and though we’d cut down drastically on the furniture we brought with us there were still some shelving units and small tables for which we had no room.  We’ve been hanging on to these bits and pieces because we knew when we bought the house we’d be redoing the conservatory, and some of those pieces may come in handy then.  I’m very glad we have all this furniture, most of which only needs a sanding down and new coat of varnish to look good.

Six years.  In a way it feels as if we’ve lived here much longer than that, but on the other hand it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that we’ve lived here for so long already.  Six years of living in a pretty constant state of chaos thanks to the seemingly never-ending renovations.  We knew when we bought this house that it needed some work.  The bathroom wasn’t great, to put it mildly, and neither was the kitchen, but they were both usable.  It turned out, however, that the electrics were in far worse condition than we’d realised, and in order to make the electrics safe in the kitchen (which included removing the extension cord below the sink which carried all the electricity to the utility room, garage, and potting shed…yes, I’m serious) all the cupboards had to be removed, so we had no choice but to invest in a new kitchen when we’d hoped to put that job off for a few more years.  The completion of the rewiring has taken about 5 years so far because we’d run out of money and had to save up again, and also because there were other jobs which would sometimes take priority, such as the brick wall in the front garden being in danger of collapsing two summers ago.  Nothing is ever straightforward in this house.  Just ask the tradespeople I’ve hired over the years.

The previous owners, though seemingly nice, harmless people, may have imbibed in some cheap drugs when they chose the colour schemes for a lot of the rooms.  Dropping acid is the only explanation for the blood red in the small bedroom (which they’d quickly covered with off-white paint, but they’d done a crappy job and didn’t paint behind the radiator) or the migraine-inducing bright yellow in the dining room.  Even worse in the dining room was all the woodwork had been painted blue with what I reckon was outdoor paint.  It took four coats of white undercoat to cover the blue in the built-in cupboard, a lovely original feature in this 1930s house.  There’s a lot more painting to be done, and paint ain’t cheap, but we’re getting there.  Teenaged Daughter’s room is being replastered this weekend, so will be redecorated in the next few weeks, including new carpeting.  That’ll be one other room completely finished.  Yay!

Still, we have no regrets buying this house.  You know the old saying “location, location, location”?  That describes our house.  It’s close to the river, close to 5 bus routes, within walking distance of town centre if you feel like walking uphill, near the local commuter station and less than a 30-minute walk from the main train station, and has every amenity we need close by.  It was affordable not just because of the work it needed, but because we’re in one of the cheaper neighbourhoods of the city.  It’s not a big house, but thanks to the loft conversion there are enough bedrooms, and the new conservatory will be like a proper extension in that we’ll be able to use the room year ’round.  We have no intention of going anywhere for years, especially as we have a child who may never be able to live independently, so it’s worth all the investment (and being seriously in hock to my father!) as this will be our home for a long time.  As an added bonus we’re blessed with good, friendly neighbours.

Along with the conservatory and utility room the patio and path to the bottom of the garden are also being redone.  At the moment stepping out of the back door is a serious tripping hazard; you take one step out and then step up either on to the path or on to the patio, which are at different heights.  I’d like to know who hired drunk monkeys to do the hard landscaping (or it could have been the acid again), but we’re looking forward to having one step out of the conservatory and having the path and patio “on the level”, as the locals say it.  Last summer I picked up some patio furniture for a good price, and we’d love to be able to spend as much time as possible in the garden…and this is where the lack of spring is worrying.  We’ve had bad luck with summer weather for a couple of years.  Having all this work done and not being able to use the garden yet again will drive us to drink.  Well, at least we’ll have a really groovy conservatory to sit in while watching the rain.

Fidgeting

It’s evening, and I’m watching a program on the origins of the universe with Husband and Preteen Son.  It’s a topic which interests all of us, though you’d never know it if you snuck a peek through the window.  Preteen Son is playing Minecraft on his iPad.  Husband has a newspaper in his hands.  I, as usual, am knitting.  Had our teenagers been with us, Teenaged Son would have been on his laptop and Teenaged Daughter would be plugged into her iPod while possibly simultaneously browsing on her laptop.  If she was merely listening to music on her iPod she’d be twirling her hair or fiddling with a piece of lint.  The same goes for me if I hadn’t been knitting or doing some other crafty thing.  The reason for this is not because we’re not interested in the television program, but because none of the humans in the house are capable of sitting still.

I’ve always been a fidget.  Having 3 older brothers, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house full of Lego and Meccano.  I was forever building things when I wasn’t getting covered in mud or spending hours in the sand box.  My mother, bless her, did buy me girly toys, but dolls and doll houses bored me.  She’d also buy me crafty things like bead sets and children’s needlecraft kits (I don’t remember not having a needle and threads in my hands), which kept me occupied for hours.  As much as I love reading (I don’t remember not knowing how to read) I’ve never been able to just sit still with a book.  This is where things such as playing with loose threads or twirling a strand of hair around my finger comes into play.  I have been known to read a book in one day, but I certainly wasn’t sitting still while doing so.  I don’t know whether this is related to my fidgeting, but I’ve always been a daydreamer and have always had an active imagination.  This meant that I wrote some very nifty compositions in elementary school, but it also meant that I bored easily if the subject matter didn’t interest me.

TD has the same symptoms as me.   Like me, her wandering, imaginative mind means that she’s excellent in English composition and even writes some fan fiction (for which she refuses to provide me with a link, though I don’t blame her!).  TS, who was known both as Head Wound Boy and Destructo Child when he was younger, learned to commando crawl at 6 months and hasn’t stopped moving since.  His fidgets are even worse than mine and TD’s.  He, too, is a very creative writer.  PS can sit still longer than any of us, but if he’s doing so he’s hugging himself or hugging a cushion, a stuffed animal, the dog, or cuddled up to me or Husband.  For him, sitting still doesn’t so much require fidgeting as some sort of pressure stimulation.  Come to think of it, he grips the iPad more tightly than he needs to when he’s curled up on the couch with it.  He also has an incredible imagination, one that smashes some autistic stereotypes to pieces.

Husband?  He was the toddler who used to regularly lock his mother out of the house, who is the 5th of 6 children yet was the first child who required his parents to put a very large, very sturdy guard in front of the coal fireplaces, and exceeded TS in the head wound department by having required stitches.  When he was about 7 he somehow got his leg caught in a slide in  his local park, and was so stuck the fire brigade had to be called to free him (to this day no one knows how he managed that).  He is no more capable of simply sitting down and watching television than I am, though I have yet to assimilate him into the world of knitting.  He can watch telly and read a book or newspaper at the same time, which I admire because I don’t have the concentration skills to do that.

The interesting thing about fidgety parents is that they don’t always notice that their children are more fidgety than most other children, because not sitting still is the norm for everyone in the household.  While I knew TD, our oldest child, was an active baby (she learned to roll from one side of the room to the other when she was 5 months old), I never realised how much she moved and explored until I took her to a children’s reading time at the local library.  She was not yet 2, and while other children her age sat quietly on their bean bags my daughter was doing what I can only describe as vogueing all over her bean bag.  I was actually a bit embarrassed.  I realise, of course, that there have probably been parents of other fidgety children who tried the reading time thing and realised it wasn’t suited to their children, and that only those children who sat reasonably still regularly attended these sessions, but I honestly was surprised at the difference between my child and the other children.  TD had always been a happy and easy baby.  As far as Husband and I were concerned it was perfectly normal to rig the house like Fort Knox and move bookcases out of the room where very young children played to keep the child and our few intact possessions safe.  When TS came along we had to invest in expensive wooden toys because he kept breaking the cheaper plastic ones (“I wonder if this comes off?”  SNAP.  ”It does now.”).  While PS had pretty extensive fine and gross motor skill delays and finally walked at 21 months, his ability just a few months later to open the doors of the built-in cupboards in the dining room and climb the shelves to reach the junk food on the top shelf was, shall we say, not exactly expected.  In fact, I kept blaming the older kids for the junk food thefts until I caught the actual culprit in the act.  All these things, and then some, were part of our every day existence.

Fidgets are not uncommon.  How many children are incapable of sitting still in the classroom?  Over and over these children are told to sit still and pay attention.  Fidgeting, though a natural state for these children, is not acceptable.  Their hands must be still.    Their bodies must be still.  They must put themselves in a position which is not natural for them.  Now, instead of playing with a thread or with a pencil and concentrating on what the teacher is saying, all their concentration is focused on sitting still, because sitting still is not something that comes naturally to them, not because they are poorly behaved, but because their brains are wired to keep at least part of their body active.

Fidgeting is, as far as I’m concerned, a form of stimming.  And stimming, as you may know, helps people to calm down, to relax, to focus, to concentrate.

Stimming is a term normally used with aneurotypical people, but I reckon it applies equally to people with supposedly normally wired brains.  As I’m thinking how to word the next sentence I type I’m stimming by fidgeting with my fingers.  At school I could hide my fidgety fingers under my desk, so I was hardly ever in trouble for it.  But what about children who require more stimming that I ever did?  They are the ones who constantly land in trouble for simply being themselves and doing not just what comes naturally to them, but what they need to do to get through the day.

PS’s school ran a series of sessions for parents about sensory stimulation and sensitivities.  This is a school that understands stimming.  It’s a school which allows pupils to have a “fiddle toy” in the classroom if they benefit from having one.  Some pupils, rather than sitting on a standard metal and plastic school chair, sit on a medicine/exercise ball so that they can bounce slightly.  They’re small, painless adjustments for the school, and are of massive benefit to the pupils.  Now why can’t all schools do this?  What’s wrong with a very fidgety child having a fidget toy?  It could only benefit the child, and if the child benefits, the entire class benefits from having a calmer, happier classmate who can concentrate on his or her lessons because he or she no longer has to focus on keeping hands and body still.  It’s this idea that children without a recognised special need such as ADHD or ASD are all capable of sitting still that does the harm.  Individual needs don’t come into play, and that is always harmful both in the short run and in the long run.

Leave fidgets to do what they do naturally, and everyone will benefit.  It’s such a simple concept, but sadly I doubt it will ever become the norm.

Truth Is

Reblogged from Just Stimming...:

Author’s note: Yesterday in the blogosphere there was an Autism Positivity Day Flash Blog, sparked by one author noticing that someone had found their blog by searching “I wish I didn’t have Asperger’s.” Due to my own situation, I couldn’t participate, but today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, and I still have something to say.

Sometimes in the morning I am petrified and can’t move Awake but cannot open my eyes And the weight is crushing down on my lungs I know I can’t breathe And hope someone will save me this time…

Read more… 1,585 more words

I want to share this amazing post by an amazing blogger, a woman on the autistic spectrum. While this post deals specifically with Asperger's, it applies equally to situations where a person feels at a disadvantage for any reason.

And life goes on…

April was not a good month for me, to say the least.  I was feeling very down about the nonsense with Preteen Son’s school attendance and some other stuff with which I won’t bore you.  I spent a lot of time sitting on my arse faffing around on the computer.  Hardly any crafting or cooking was accomplished, which is always a bad sign.  Thankfully I hadn’t sunk too low that I couldn’t start to pull myself out of that hole.  The knitting needles have been busy again and I’ve made a point to start cooking much more food from scratch again.  It’s given me a sense of accomplishment, and it’s made me feel better.

It helps that the world continues to turn around me.  While I wish it would stop sometimes, or at least bloody slow down, it forces me to deal with matters as they arise.  PS’s school nonsense hasn’t been resolved, but I’ve done all I can to deal with the situation. The work on the lean-to and conservatory is starting May 14th, so Husband and I have been forced to start sorting through all the junk in those rooms as they obviously have to be emptied completely before they’re demolished.  Chores need to be done and bills need to be paid.  The children need a mother who can deal with their needs.  Life’s nowhere near perfect, but I don’t feel as out of control as I did just a few weeks ago.  Forcing myself to take one day at a time helps.  I’m quite a control freak, and don’t always deal well with life throwing yet another monkey wrench into the works, but when I put my mind to it I can usually break things down into baby steps so I can cope with them.

Heh, I keep starting to add more to this post, realise I’m only posting aimless ramblings, and delete what I wrote.  Guess I’m just glad to feel reasonably on top of things again, and to be blogging again, even if it’s just a short I’m-still-here post.  Onwards and upwards, eh?

Stumbling forward…hopefully

It’s not been one of our better months, hence the blogging silence.  There’s been a lot I’ve needed to wrap my head around, and I’m still not quite done.  My mental vision is clearer, but it’s taking a toll on my physical health.  My sleep was very bad 3 or 4 weeks ago.  I was waking up constantly and having dreams that were not overall disturbing, but definitely strange.  That left me exhausted, and though I’m sleeping better now I still find myself very tired by the end of the afternoon, even if I’ve not been particularly active.  It’s getting better, though, and I’m feeling stronger, even if my physical health still has a bit of a way to go.  My concentration isn’t quite back up to scratch, either.

Of constant concern is the well-being of my father and Husband’s parents.  Husband’s father is on oxygen for a minimum of 15 hours a day, and he’s becoming weaker.  Husband’s mother’s overall health is improving, but she is nowhere nearly as robust as she used to be.  My father’s memory is showing signs of deterioration, and my brothers tell me his physical stamina isn’t what it used to be.  He’s doing well for 85, but it’s still of concern, mostly because he’s hopelessly stubborn and refuses even to have a cleaner, never mind have his meals delivered.  He’s also convinced that doctors don’t know anything, that he’s not actually diabetic and doesn’t need to visit the cardiologist or the GP as often as he does.  All we can do is keep an eye on him.

My sister-in-law’s mother passed away some weeks ago.  She’d been battling cancer for a few years, and she lived longer than was expected, but it’s still a bit of a shock and certainly a great loss.  I’ve always been fond of her.

In the meantime Husband and I have discovered that we’re on the county’s Educational Welfare Officer’s list of bad parents.  Preteen Son has been ill more than usual this school year, and he’s missed quite a lot of school as a result.  About 10 days ago, completely out of the blue, we received a letter from the school stating that PS’s attendance score was unacceptable, and that if PS had one more medical absence without a doctor’s note we’d receive a visit from the Educational Welfare Officer.

Can you say complete hysterical breakdown, boys and girls?

I felt betrayed.  We’d had to fight the county to get PS into that special needs secondary school.  There’s no way he could cope in a mainstream school, even with full-time support.  We were so happy and relieved when we learned he’d been accepted by his school.  And now…now the school was turning against us.  PS still has 3 1/2 years left in that school.  How the hell could we expected to get a doctor’s note every time PS was ill?  A lot of his sick days, I’m sure, are down to stress thanks to his anxieties, and he’s also prone to every virus making the rounds.  He’s feverish, he has a headache, he often also has a stomachache, and he sometimes sleeps all day.  On the few occasions that he’s slept it off by midday I’ve driven him to school so that he could at least attend the afternoon classes.  There would be absolutely no point whatsoever to drag him to the doctor when he’s like this, which is why we never have.  The situation, as it stood, was completely unworkable.  Therefore, I began to look into homeschooling.

Homeschooling was the only option open to us if PS hadn’t been accepted by this school.  The problem with homeschooling, however, is that PS would be missing the socialisation he so desperately needs from a school setting.  He’s a bright boy and there aren’t any major issues with his learning apart from his awful penmanship and overall poor fine motor skills.  It’s his social anxieties which give him the most issues, and this is a school full of committed staff members who understand his condition.  We honestly believe there is no school better suited for PS, yet now we’d felt as if we’d been branded negligent parents for keeping our child home from school when he wasn’t up to going.  Yes, I felt betrayed.  And insulted.  Yet another blow against our fragile parenting confidence is the last thing Husband and I needed.

There was also the issue that our GP certainly wasn’t going to appreciate our taking up an emergency appointment just to get sick note for a child who would have been better off staying in bed.  With this in mind, and also with the thought that, were we to withdraw PS from school we’d need to go through our GP to access speech and occupational therapies (currently accessed through the school) I made an appointment to see him later in the week the letter arrived.

The day before the GP’s appointment I’d finally calmed down enough to call the deputy head teacher, who’d signed the letter, and attempt to discuss the situation with her without breaking down yet again.  She wasn’t able to call me back that day, but she did so the following day before the GP appointment, so that worked out well.  As it happens, it was a somewhat positive conversation.

I knew that the county, rather than the school, was behind some of the vitriol of the letter, but what I didn’t realise was that the school has no say whatsoever over attendance.  Bizarrely, special schools have the same expectations of student attendance as mainstream schools, which makes no sense whatsoever.  Still, them’s the rules, and though the deputy head stayed professional during our conversation I could hear the frustration in her voice.  Apparently the Educational Welfare Officer comes to the school about once every 2 months, looks through the attendance records of all the students, and gives the head teacher and deputy head hell.  Good times.

Well, at least it wasn’t the school personally that was questioning our commitment to providing our child with an education, but as the school’s hands are tied I was still asked to try to not have PS off school so often.  The deputy head was pleased to hear I was meeting our GP later that day, and the agreement was that I ask our GP to write a somewhat ambiguous note that I’d been to see him to discuss the situation and that we were working together to move things forward, or some such nonsense.  As I expected, our GP rolled his eyes at the letter (ours wasn’t the first one he’d been shown by a freaked out parent), confirmed that there was no way PS would get a note every time he was ill, coaxed me to get PS to school more often, and would gladly write the ambiguous letter.

I know we’re probably overprotective of PS.  It’s very hard not to be.  However, we struggle to shove him off to school when he looks like death and is weepy and feverish.  It may be a case that the next morning he wakes up like that I drive him to school rather than PS taking the school bus, and I talk to his teacher, making it clear that I’m beside the phone as soon as the teacher decides PS really should be home in bed.

The letter should be ready to be picked up from the GP’s office on Tuesday.  The trouble, however, is that the letter may not make a lick of difference where the Educational Welfare Officer is concerned.  While Husband and I do feel better knowing we’re now battling the county instead of the school (yes, I know that doesn’t make much sense), we’ve not ruled out homeschooling yet.  We can’t, not until we know for certain that this medical situation won’t blow up in our faces.  As I mentioned above, PS still has 3 1/2 years to go at this school.  If the Educational Welfare Officer is going to continue to give us grief we may still pull PS out of school.

If there are two things I hate, they’re uncertainty and waiting games, and we’re stuck in the quagmire of both.  When PS had been accepted by this school we thought all our major troubles would be over.  Silly us.

Self-realisation

“I used to think that other people misunderstood me.  Now I realise that I misunderstand other people.”

These words were spoken by Teenaged Son earlier this afternoon.  We were sitting in the front room with Husband’s brother, who’d popped in for a visit.  Husband is at work, and Teenaged Daughter had taken Preteen Son swimming.  TS and I were discussing how he and PS were forever driving each other around the bend when they were still sharing a bedroom.  It was then that TS stated he thought he may be a bit autistic as well.  Some of his friends had mentioned that they think TS might be, due to his quirks.  My reply was that he may be on the edge of the spectrum, but that we never had him assessed (though we came darned close a few times) because, unlike PS, he was such a happy, contented toddler.

TS has certainly always been quirky.  He regularly screamed himself to sleep as a baby, but otherwise he was happy and quite a remarkable flirt.  He was a huge eater.  He commando crawled at 6 months and, by the same age, was a master of the stacking cups.  As he grew he began to show his inquisitive side in a manner which drove Husband and me around the bend, because to say he was destructive would be an understatement.  By his first birthday the house was full of sturdy, expensive wooden toys because TS would break all the cheaper plastic ones.  There was nothing malicious or nonsensical behind his actions.  The way he handed objects it was obvious he was figuring out how things worked and how they were put together.  That was all well and good, but problems arose when, with his quite remarkable strength, he managed to dismantle things which were never meant to dismantle.  Another sign of his sharp mind was his skill with puzzles.  By 2 1/2 or thereabouts he could do 25 piece puzzles upside down…as in, the actual pieces, not the picture on the puzzle.  His spatial abilities were mind-boggling.

In other ways, though, he lagged behind considerably.  It’s a good thing he was such a sturdy toddler and preschooler, because he had no sense of danger ’til he was 4.  What he also lacked, which has always puzzled me, was the self-preservating reflex of holding out his arms to catch himself if he was falling.  His arms would stay by his side and he’d literally fall flat on his face.  As intelligent as he was he was never paying attention to where he was going, and walking into walls, doors and trees wasn’t that unusual if we weren’t quick enough to stop him.  Small wonder his nickname was Head Wound Boy for several years.  He was so prone to injury that we made him wear a helmet when was was on playing his sit-and-ride toy on the driveway.  We put off getting him a bike for obvious reasons.

Though we knew he could understand everything we said, he didn’t talk until he was 3 1/2, not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t want to.  Now, please don’t ask me how Husband and I knew that.  We just did.  Together with the lack of speaking was a lack of listening.  TS would be so wrapped up in whatever he was doing that he simply wouldn’t respond when somebody called him or spoke to him.  Again, we knew it wasn’t rudeness, it was TS shutting everyone out completely.  When he finally did begin to talk he’d invert the words in his sentence, or use the wrong word altogether, as in a completely unrelated word.  It took him several years to completely grow out of that habit.  We reckoned it was partially due to his mouth not being able to keep up with his brain.

TS’s inability to concentrate on what people were saying to him drove us nuts over the years.  He could never be left unattended.  This was a child who I would take with me when I needed to use the toilet, because some days his destructiveness was so extreme that I literally couldn’t leave him by himself for a second (Husband, apparently, was the same at that age).  Thinking about it, I could never get him to look at me when I was talking to him.  I could be kneeling in front of him with my hands on his shoulders and telling him to look at me and listen to what I was saying, but he’d do neither of those things.  The extremely frustrating part was that he’d be told not to do something but would turn around and do the exact same thing again.  It wasn’t to be naughty; what was said to him simply didn’t sink in, or didn’t stay between his ears for more than 5 seconds.  It was the proverbial broken record scenario, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he wasn’t such a handful to begin with.  Let me reiterate, though, that he was never nasty.  He was perfectly happy in his little bubble, and never really meant to hurt anyone, despite the number of times that he literally reduced me to tears of frustration.

Looking back, there have been sensory issues over the years, but at the time I didn’t think much of it.  By the time he was 3 or 4 months old he didn’t want to sit on anyone’s lap.  He’d tolerate being held if the person holding him was standing up or walking, but he didn’t do sitting down at all.  He’d struggle, and be happy when he was put on the floor.  The fact that he behaved like this before he could move on his own puzzled me, but he never did sitting still in any way, shape or form.

Though TS was an excellent eater as a baby and toddler, he became more and more fussy about food as time went on.  While he eats far more foods than PS (which, let’s face it, is extremely easy to do), he really is a fussy eater.  PS, too, started out eating many more foods than he does now.  Though TS has never shown signs of having sensitive skin he can’t stand having clothing labels next to his skin.

TS will be 14 in a few weeks, and he has matured incredibly over the past few years.  He’s still forgetful and occasionally too rough with objects.  His room is still constantly a mess, but we’re talking about a teenaged boy.  He’s begun to learn from his mistakes.  His social skills have improved, but he’s still our quirky boy with the sharp wit and great sense of humour.  He’s still very intelligent, but not so much book smart as learning by himself how the world works.  He’s obsessive about things, and he recognises it.

As I mentioned before, Husband and I came very close to having TS assessed when he was 3 or 4.  It was his reception class teacher who suggested to us to leave TS for a few years and see how he developed during that time.  As his speech and ability to listen to what people told him improved he decided to leave well enough alone.  It was when we learned about autism through PS that we realised that a lot of TS’s quirks fell within the spectrum, albeit on the edges.  We’ve kept an eye on him over the years, and though he has sometimes struggled in social situations and unintentionally hurt people by saying the wrong things he was happy overall and coping well enough.  I’ve never discussed our suspicions with TS, so I was relieved when he brought it up himself.  I told him that if ever he wanted to be assessed we’d arrange for that to be done.  Unlike PS, who vaguely knows he has something called autism and that he wasn’t like the other kids in his old mainstream school but isn’t sure why, TS is fully aware of himself and his quirks.  I don’t know if he actually qualifies for a label, or if such a label would help him in any way.  Either way, TS does say he’d like an assessment.  With a smirk on his face he said it would give him an excuse for his social awkwardness.  In all seriousness, though, he said he likes his quirkiness, and is happy with the way he is.  We wouldn’t change him for the world, either.