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How could you vote out this cute face? #ASD

December 15, 2008 at 9:57 pm

Alex Barton

Here is the most recent update on his story.

Recently, I was sharing this story with The AP and showed her a couple of uTube videos about it. My purpose was to try to explain to her why I was so physically sick over The Elder being in kindergarten and getting these notes home.

I’m not sure what all I have blogged about The Elder Kindergarten experience. I would have to scroll through a couple of “lazy” tweet posts and some Success Sundays that may or may not be a week apart and may or may not be on a Sunday. I apologize for the lack of posts, but it has been a new era of unknowns, uncertainties, and anxieties.

Don’t get me wrong…The Elder is doing much better than I expected. Not that I had low expectations of him. I’m very much an optimist and believe in the best. However, he has EXCEEDED my optimism. And I can say right now it is a result of the kind of support we are getting from the school. That’s right. I said SUPPORT and SCHOOL in the same sentence and there wasn’t a NO or NOT in it either. The K Teacher is just so amazing. She actually makes eye contact with me at the pickup line! And…and…and……she smiles and waves at me. I know! And when I volunteer in the classroom (only twice so far, but I wanted to do it more often), she….talks to me. Crazy! And it isn’t yelling and it isn’t with furrowed brows or with condescending judgmental looks. At first, the “normalcy” of her behavior made me a little uncomfortable. At times it still does until I just get over my self-conscious self.

Well, the Alex Barton topic came up after a really difficult Thursday. October 29th to be exact. He had hit a few people in the cafeteria, he had thrown his shoes at 2 people (hitting them), and he had removed all the other students’ clips from the board that indicated which “center” they were stationed. I talked to him about it afterward. “What happened at school today?” in the same jovial tone I do everyday, and he gave me names of who he hurt and tried to explain to him what they might be feeling, such as fear. We sat down and wrote I’m sorry notes to the children. But now…I knew their names now. I don’t know if that was good or bad. But it didn’t feel good. Especially since I was volunteering in his classroom for the first time the very next day for the Fall Party. I actually felt like the children were judging me. How silly is that? But it was the parents that I was actually afraid to converse with. They’d ask who my child was and when I would point out The Elder it was like they gave me the “courtesy nod” and moved on. I know now that all of that was in my head. But when you read about stories like Alex Barton’s, how can you NOT have those fears? Fears that his classmates don’t want him there. And based on my past experiences, the fears that the adults don’t want him there? I got teary when I signed in at the office in total panick of what to expect when I got there. It wasn’t as bad as I thought. The lunchroom lady who lines them all up approached me while I was eating lunch with him (LOVED that!) and told me about some of the things he had been doing that was getting him in trouble there. But she ended with a very cheery and perky, “I love him, he’s so sweet.” Talk about a tension release!

Since then I have volunteered one other time and my fears were calmed even more to hear the other moms who volunteer more regularly tell me how sweet he is. Whew! THAT is why I want to volunteer more often. So much for good service to the school…it’s for my own emotional health! The Super Doc would be proud…

His new case manager is great too. She is a good communicator, she knows him inside and out and exactly how to turn him around. She even had him call me on my cell phone to leave me a message on my voicemail to help him remember to bring his library book back to school. Evidently a meltdown was about to ensue over the fact that he couldn’t check out a new book with one outstanding and wouldn’t get to take his test. (He has been signed up for the 2nd grade book club at the school library. The K teacher was already sending an extra book home for him to read, but he started to refuse them because he prefers the library books. He gets to take a test on them for comprehension and he has gotten 5 out of 5 right on most of them, 4/5 right on the others. He wants to take the tests. nerd.) But back to the resource teacher. She has even given me her cell phone number. Her personal cell phone number. Little does she know that I totally abused that knowledge with The Teacher. Funny though, I haven’t called her in a while. I’ll get on that.

And then lastly, The new Asst Principal. He was a Special Educator for 13 years and this was his first year in administration. He told us during the last IEP meeting (when we were having the meeting in one room, and he was in the other room because he was sent to the office for having a meltdown in the classroom. He didn’t know we were there) that he knew more about autism than he did about adminstration. That made me feel really good. kinda.

Then The Elder got his first pink slip last week. He has an official school record. My heart sunk.

He’s had a really good week this week. But the thing is is that it is so sporadic. It changes week to week, day to day, hour by hour. Am I overreacting? Is this normal? Is this ASD? He has a bomb inside of him that has NO fuse. It’s either dormant or it’s exploding. There’s no ticking involved. But you take him aside later when he has calmed down and he knows exactly what he did wrong and what he should have done. Fortunately The Resource Teacher understands that he isn’t doing the misbehavior on purpose, he just can’t control his impulses. But because he has no empathy or a bland affect it makes him look heartless or aloof or apathetic to often very serious situations, even though he understands them as we do. It’s so difficult to decode him at times.

What I’m excited about though is that we have a meeting with the OT on Thursday to give us the results of his evaluation. I pray he gets services because I think that would help a lot. He’s been getting in trouble in the lunchline for running into people, (When I was there, I saw that he was pretending to be shunting cars on a railroad. But hey! He was pretending!), leaning/laying on top of people during carpet time, and tearing and crumpling his papers. I had started the joint compressions again. He likes them a lot. He even tries to do them on himself. Gets tricky when it comes to compressing his elbow and shoulder.

We are also getting a behavior specialist observe him in the classroom. The Resource Teacher is very excited about that. That’s really going to make a difference if she can pin point which scenarios tend to trigger the meltdowns. It’s funny because as his mother, I can anticipate meltdowns in the heat of the moment, but if you were to ask me, “so what triggers your son’s meltdowns?” I would look like a fool because I couldn’t tell you. Not without giving you specific examples, but that doesn’t help someone who needs to be able to generalize it for a classroom.

So hopefully I’ll get to post again before the holidays to update on the OT meeting. If not, Happy Holidays!

Success Sunday PostID 1363

November 30, 2008 at 12:07 pm

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“We find the turkey in the woods. We cut our turkey and then we put it in our oven and cook it at 46 degrees for 65 minutes. We make the turkey taste just like chicken. We eat the turkey when it comes out of the oven.“
––The Elder

Recently The Elder’s kindergarten class was asked how they would go about cooking a turkey. The K Teacher typed up the classes responses and above is The Elder’s quote to be successful (ok so it was a stretch for this week).

Here were some snippets of the other responses from his classmates:

“We will cut the turkey in half and put it in the oven and burn it for ten minutes.”

“Grandma has to pick the feathers off of the turkey.”

“You let it cool off and then you eat it and go to bed.”

“I get a turkey at the bakery.”

“We cook it for 160 minutes in a VERY hot oven that we can’t touch.”

“We wait until everyone gets to the house and then we bake the turkey for one minutes in the microwave.”

“Mom goes outside to get a turkey, but I don’t know where. Then she washes it and puts in the oven for 10 minutes until it burns.”

“We shoot a turkey with a gun. We put it in the oven for 16 minutes. We get forks and knives and eat it!”

“Then we put mustard on it and we eat it.”


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Success Sunday (PostID 1305)

November 2, 2008 at 4:31 pm

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“Start by doing what’s necessary;
then do what’s possible;
and suddenly you are doing the impossible. “
––St. Francis of Assisi

I took a little hiatus. Ok, a long hiatus. But I would guess that I’m not alone seeing that this is just a busy time of year, then throw in a election in there too. I’ve had sooooo much to blog on and I’m sure I have already forgotten most of it if not all. I had been logging everything in my DayNotez (love it) but The Hub stripped Vista off my laptop and replaced it with XP (sweet) and my phone kept crashing and I had to hard reset it twice and reload everything on it and try to find a replacement for the applications that were crashing it. So Daynotez is neither on my desktop pc nor my phone. Oh yeah, and I’ve had to take care of The Kiddos. lol. We had Fall Break last week and we let The AP off for most of the week because The Lolo and The Lola were in town visiting. You know how that goes. You think you will be productive because you have built in babysitters but I’m way too social to sit at the computer when I can have adult conversations in the convenience and comfort of my own home.
This week were the Halloween festivities. And of course the month-end deadline – which is always interesting in October. Usually I pretend that the 30th is the last day of the month, but this year the 30th was on a Thursday which is my meeting night, plus I was recently elected president of my networking group and that has me a little stressed out because of technical issues at our first leadership meeting. Technically, I voted by the group to be president, but wasn’t allowed to run the meeting. I was more like a referee which is hard considering that I, standing, am still shorter than the other guys, sitting. On Halloween day, The PaPa and The Girlfriend-in-Law came to visit for the weekend. They are still here and plan to leave on Tuesday (They voted early)
Also, since The Elder is in Kindergarten, they had a fall party and I got to volunteer (so much fun) and I even stayed to have lunch with him at the school. It was fun to meet his friends. I had had a nightmare on Thursday night before the partyI had had a nightmare on Thursday night before the party that all the friends he has been referring to whenever I pick him up were not really his friends, but were bullying and teasing him and he interpreted it as they were being his friends. I was heart broken and at a loss of what I needed to do. In real life, he had hit 2 kids in the lunchroom with his lunchbox and removed all of the clips off the centers board in the classroom because he wanted to do the Blocks Center and there wasn’t any more room for a 5th person. Then he threw his shoes and hit a little girl. I made him write apology notes to them and sent them with him to school on Friday. That made me a little nervous to enter his classroom because I didn’t know what kind of enemies he was making. What if the kids were looking at me with the disappointed look on their faces as if to say, “you are a bad mom.” I was afraid to meet the other parents because what if their child told them how disruptive he is in class and how he hurts people and throws things and behaves badly, etc etc. We always think the worst huh?
Well, to my delight, the friends he speaks of love him just as much as he love them. one even said he wanted to sit beside me at lunch and gave me a hug (he was only about a head shorter them me! yikes!) and then blew me kisses because it ended up that The Elder was sitting between us. The first thing I noticed was how young The Elder looks compared to the other children. He is only 5. There are 2 other girls in his class that are younger than he is, but he is the youngest boy by a lot.
I was however surprised at all the things that I was able to do though. I had very full but very productive days this week, catching up on somethings. Even the Meeting from Hades had a happy ending, and my training meeting went well, even though I didn’t train on what I had intended. I was able to rearrange my schedule to make sure I had my priorities in order. i squeezed in time to do this and I overestimated duration on some tasks and had some free time to do something random (obviously not blogging, but with the downgrade to XP, my web username and passwords were reset and it actually took me a long time to figure out how to get into the Wordpress Dashboard!). The more and more I deferred blogging (not to mention the many times I pushed the snooze on my phone alarm that reminds me to do Success Sunday posts) the more guilty I felt for not documenting the goings-on (and there was a lot going on). But finding this quote gave me some peace. I was busy and I was productive, but I would have never been that productive if I hadn’t been able to recalculate my schedule on the fly. Who would schedule themselves that packed from sun up to sun down? on purpose that is? So in essence I was doing the impossible.
Would it be possible for me to take a nap right now?

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