Holiday Craziness

Well, my eldest son's autistic behaviors are shinning through today like you wouldn't believe.  Just when you think things are getting better with him, the holidays have to show up to throw him off.  He can't keeps his body to himself for the life of him today and ended up grounded from the Wii which is his favorite thing in the whole wide world.  He always gets this way when we have something going on out of the norm.  He senses it and all his autistic symptoms go into overdrive.  He's bouncing, stimming, and unfortunately crashing into his sibling.  He also had a huge meltdown about Tae-kwon-do practice and refused to go.  He was in tears about it, so I didn't make him go.  I am hoping next week after the holiday craziness has worn off, maybe he will give it another try.  But with Christmas on the way, I don't know.  I just got his uniform a couple of weeks ago, and he is only half-way through the session we just paid for so I wish he would at least finish up the session.

Good news though, my tiny guy has decided he likes sweet potatoes which is awesome given that will be a popular food this week.  He's not too keen on turkey but loves the stuffing and sweet potatoes.  I am planning on making him more dairy free pumpkin pie pudding too.  I also found some dairy free honey buns at the dollar general, so he can have something special for breakfast on thanksgiving when the other two have their powdered donuts I bought them.

However crazy the kids get over this holiday season, I am thankful that they are my super smart, totally awesome kids!

Soft Clothing Giveaway

As a mom of three kids with varying degrees Sensory Processing Dissorder, I know how hard it is to find clothes that are ok.  My daughter is the worst in this aspect as she is vary picky about all of her clothes and her areas she is picky about varies from day to day it seems.  She sometimes has to change her clothes five times before she is comfortable for the day.  Now there is this online company called Soft who makes seemless socks and flat seemed clothes of soft material that looks like popular clothes kids would wear.  There are knit pants that look like Jeans and dress pants and t-shirts that have ties printed on them for boys and sun-dresses for girls. All very cute, and the bonus is they are having a give-away.  I signed up and if you have kids with sensory problems you should too.  Here's a link http://www.softclothing.net/products/sale/giveaways/, Check it out!

Thanksgiving fun has started

Well, we are gearing up for thanksgiving.  We have been talking about the meaning of thanksgiving and when I asked my niece what Thanksgiving is all about she said, "God gives us toys and food."  So I guess she grasped part of it.  I am having a hard time explaining to four year olds what being Thankful really means.  They get that they are supposed to say thank you for things but I don't think they really understand what that means.  Oh and we made paper bad "chickens"  I mean turkeys.  The kids kept calling them chickens and they don't really get why turkeys go with thanksgiving either!  :)

Here's the project.  We traced their hands and cut them out of colored construction paper. We stapled them to the bottom of a lunch sized brown bag that they decorated.  I cut out turkey heads out of paper for them to color.  They stuffed the bags with pages of an old phone book crumpled up and I stapled the end and stapled on the head.  They loved them, except my tiny little guy who was afraid of the finished product.  We had to hold it in front of him for the picture because it was too crinkly for him.  :)

I also made a couple of turkey folder games from my favorite site and I will post a link.   I made the color matching turkey one for my niece and the turkey feathers addition and subtraction game for my little girl and the harvest patterns for them to share.  Here is a link to that site.  http://www.filefolderfun.com/SubjectThanksgiving2.html

I also made one where you match the number of dots on a turkey feather to the number on the turkey.  I got that one out of a book that I copied and colored but it would be easy to hand draw and make.  My niece did really well with that one.  It is good for preschoolers working on number recognition.

I just love holidays, they work so well with themed activities and the kids just love them!  Even my eldest got really into drawing his thanksgiving dinner today with some unconventional choices like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches lol.

Doctors, Therapists, IFSPs oh my.....

Well little guy has been being seen by early intervention therapists for 6 months as of yesterday and I had an IFSP (individual family service plan) meeting yesterday to decide where we go from here.  He has sensory integration problems as well as a severe expressive speech delay.  He also displays some repetitive behaviors and has had loss of speech skills which are consistent with an autism spectrum disorder.  He is however very social which has the therapists not knowing what to think.  He has been seeing the developmental therapist weekly for six months with a focus on speech.  He has not made much progress as far as speech in the past six months.  He did go from a four month speech level up to a six month speech level and has some communication skills like signing that bump his communication up to a 10 to 12 month level.  He is 18 months old by the way.  His sensory problems have worsened and are causing some serious feeding issues that the therapists are concerned about.  Anyways, they bumped his therapy up and he will now have 7 appointments with various therapists a month.  8 if you count the one where he is seeing two therapists at the same time.  He will be seeing two different developmental therapists, a nutritionist, an occupational therapist, and a speech therapist.  Thankfully half of the therapists will be coming to our home to do the therapy.  Also, they are finally sending us for diagnostic work to check for autism or any genetic conditions that may be the underlying cause of all this.  Sure I have only been wondering and worrying about it for six months but it seems like forever.  Hopefully it all goes through quickly and we get some answers.

This was meant to be an update mostly for family members but reading back over it, I realize it sounds like a rather depressing post.  I will say little guy is such a fun, happy little boy, and I enjoy his little quirks and wouldn't trade any minute of it!  He is constantly finding ways to get around his speech delays and really gets his point across in the most amusing ways.  One day he wanted me to help him put his sunglasses on, so he brought them over.  I knew what he wanted, but I thought I would tease him a bit to see what he would do.  I put them on my own head which he thought was hilarious.  He then grunted and pointed at his own eyes and then at the sunglasses.  He was so happy when I responded and helped him put them on.  He is such a sweetie pie, and I thank God every day for my little boy and all my little kids.  They are perfect just the way they are.

Trick-or-treat

Well it was chilly and it took a while to figure out the layers so everyone was comfy.  My daughter is super picky about her clothes and getting her layered and warm was a bit of a challenge.  They all three had a blast.  Little bitty guy was a pumpkin and he loved carrying his little Elmo bucket up to all the houses.  He loved it if they let him pick something out.  Little girl kept getting scared of the decorations that made noise so she skipped a few houses, but luckily most houses didn't have anything scary out.  My eldest ended up falling in a small hole in someone's yard and got soaking wet down one leg.  He was very upset and had a full-blown meltdown, but ended up finishing up the night anyway.  He got a ton of candy and that made up for being wet and cold for the last half hour.  We finished off the night by heading over to Grandma's house for Halloween cookies and a little rough housing with Grandpa.  Then today I picked through the mountain of candy and made sure little bitty guy had nothing with milk in his bucket, and little girl had stuff that she likes since she is so picky even with candy.  My big boy likes everything that is called candy, so he ended up with a bunch that no one else likes or can have. Oh and Mommy had to have her share too,  haha not like I need it!  Hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween!