Friday is here already and luckily Simon is working from home this morning so that I can head to the therapy session without Oliver in tow.  At the moment I am sitting in on all of his sessions as it would be too disruptive for Oliver to be in there also he stays at home.  We arrive at PTS sign in and after a short wait head to the gym with Miss Joyce.  Elliot seems very quiet and I am wondering if the early morning sessions are not working for him and if we should be a little later.  Obviously an earlier session would work for me as currently he has a 8.15 start which considering some days he doesn’t get up until after8 this can be a little difficult as we have to wake him early.  Not always a good idea :o)  Joyce gets straight to work and has a quick chat with Elliot about the toy he brought to class today.  One of Elliots little quirks is that he can’t leave the house with out some sort of toy.  This is not such a great deal but each day the idea of what he wants to take out with him changes and it can delay the house leaving process by a good 15minutes.  As I am usually running late this little “quirk” can get very stressful and tearful for Elliot.  Joyce asks Elliot what he would like to do today and she suggests they make an obstacle course.  Elliot is not as “animated ” as he was last week and keeps looking back to me for reassurance.  When Joyce asks a question he looks at me to answer for him.  Which clearly in the past I have been doing too much.  I encourage him to speak in his big loud voice and tell miss Joyce himself.  He tries his best but you can see how hard this is for him.  The poor guy just when you feel that some real progress is being made and that he maybe isn’t as shy as we think he has a session like this.  During the building of the obstacle course he keeps looking back to me to answer for him.  He does warm up by the time the course it built and really gets into the flow but it takes a big part of the session.  I wonder if me being in the session is holding him back.  I ask Joyce and as next week Simon is out of town I suggest that he attends the session himself and see if he gets on any better.  Working on one of the techniques that Christie started last week Joyce asks Elliot what his favourite part of the obstacle course was.  He tells her it was the stretchy tunnel so they draw a picture together to help explain to Miss Christie what fun they had swinging in the tunnel and doing wiggles.

Onto the SLT session.  I am sat on the floor playing with toys with Elliot when Jayne pops her head around the corner.  Apparently Miss Christie is running late.  This really isn’t an issue as we don’t plan too much during the day to get a smooth transition for Elliot to get to school.   Christie arrives and Elliot proudly shows her his toy and tries to tell her all about it.  He shows her the drawing he has done with Joyce and does his best to explain to Christie what he has been doing in OT.  She asks how we have been getting on and I tell her we have been doing the exercises and that he is doing a lot better at telling us what he has been doing at school.  I tell her that we are making a big effort to help him correct words he is struggling to pronounce we are reading lots more books to help with language development and encouraging him to speak as much as possible.  Christie comments that she can already see a big improvement in him which is really reassuring.  I discuss with Christie how she thinks having him in session on his own will work.  She suggest we give it a go and ask me to prepare some things to talk to Elliot about.  I tell her we are going to Gilroy gardens so she asks that we bring back a map and take photographs of the day out.  Elliot tells her that he will be playing on the Xbox so Christie asks him to draw a picture of what happens in the game so he can tell her all about it next week.  Elliot seems to think that this is a good idea and has a good session chatting to Christy.  I think it is fair to say that when Christy gets her Ipad out his eyes light up, they play a couple of games together and chat about them.  He has a quick game on angry birds as a tool to engage more conversation from him which he just manages.  We quickly discuss how next week session will work with me having Oliver in tow and agree that Elliot will spend most of the session on his own and I will join for the last 5-10minutes.

In other news we have finally managed to get him to remove his plaster from last weeks finger cut.  He went from being completely adamant about not having a plaster on to being obsessed with wearing one.  I sometimes struggle with these changes in direction with him and constantly seem to be asking myself does he have aspergers, are we imagining things on a good day.  On a bad day I am then on the other side, OMG he definitely has and am I in complete denial that he is much worse than we possibly think.  Oh the indecision and the endless questioning is driving me crazy.  At least it isn’t too long now until his session at the Centre fro Developing minds, hopefully this will give us the clarification we need, role on the 14th……

Another busy week in the Rust Household.  We have been busy helping a colleague of Simons and his family acclimate to living the bay area.  We went to the Childrens discovery Museum in San Jose, to make it an even bigger adventure we went on the VTA.  We met with our friends Conny and Alexander at the Chenworth station and got the VTA to right outside the museum it was great fun and just long enough for the boys.   They had a blast in the museum playing on the fire engine, in the ambulance, the mammoth exhibit, the craft area, the bubble are and saving the best till last the water area.  We spent lots of time in the under 5’s room upstairs also.  As one of Elliots biggest issues is spending time in big groups when they announced it was story time I assumed he would not want to join in.  The session started and Elliot asked to look at an area near the story corner and to my surprise he edged to the story are and ask to sit and join in.  Wow this was a pleasant surprise.  He didn’t join in with the “thick” of the children but was happy to sit at the edge and joined in with the songs at closing circle.  Wow what an achievement. It feels like we are making progress finally as a few years ago when I tried to take him to toddler groups he would not join in any circle time.  This success is some what short lived though when it is time to leave the museum.  We had chosen not to go into the water area until then end of the day.  Elliot was having so much fun enjoying himself that he did not realise that he had gotten so wet.  Another thing that would not always affect most children but really got Elliot bent out shape and got very upset by it.  How frustrating as I hadn’t thought about bring him a spare change of clothes.  So by the end of the journey we had a very frazzled mummy trying to explain to Elliot that he could get changed at home and it really wasn’t a problem.  Some days the issues we have seem bigger to Elliot and me than others I guess this was one of these days.  Oh well nevermind tomorrow is another day.

It’s monday morning again and it is time to get the boys ready to go for Elliot session at TSSV. AS ever the session starts at 10am.  It is really difficult to keep an eye on what is going on during Elliots session as Oliver is really being difficult this morning and standing outside the room shouting for Elliot.  The room Elliot has his session in has two way glass so that we can see in and he can’t see out.  Biggest problem is he can still hear and Oliver is pretty determined to make sure that he is heard :o(  It appears the session is pretty uneventful he was having a few issues with one of the exercises according to the notes but he soon got over it.  It helps that the session leader is very gentle in her approach and tries to encourage the child to take part but never forces them to do anything they are not comfortable with.

I am still very much in a stage of information overload as the mums that have there children in the Monday morning sessions have been on their journeys for longer than us and have lots more information of classes available.  I am currently thinking that the social issues may need a little more help so I am wondering about sports or gym classes I just need to find the right place.

Elliot: Session 8

• Cheers: with structure and prompting, participated in building the town. Watches everything, aware of all things happening. Needs to build social confidence to speak his ideas, will talk quietly to adult if not pushed to do so. Did not like the Hex bug vibration, but was eager to be the builder and rebuild the walls when the hex bugs crashed through. I gave him the opportunity to touch the bug when it was off, but he was not yet ready. I turned one bug off and perched him on top of the wall near Elliot so that E could see the bug, the bugs job was to watch out for escaping bugs! This bug was E’s “partner”. I always work to desensitize a child to a stimulus that they are not comfortable with – I do not push it – I structure the situation so that the child continues to participate at the level he is comfortable with, while continuing to provide opportunities in a non-threatening way, to access the stimulus.

• Challenge: maintaining group peer play, speaking to peers.

Inspired by friends blogging adventures I have decided that I will start an addition to Forkhall……….A 4 Aspergers??  I decided on the title as I have been thinking of an outlet and a way to chart our journey that we are currently on with Elliot.

I am sure that most of the people reading this will already know that this year has highlighted some issues for us that we are facing with Elliot.  His shyness still presents a big challenge along with other little quirks that Elliot has developed.  To get up to date where we are at please see the archives for January to April.  I hope to update the site at least weekly to inform you all of our progress and how the weeks pan out.  Hopefully you will find it interesting as we chart our  “Epic Journey of Discovery”  Good luck Elliot it is going to be a long ride……..

We finally get all the paper work completed for his “big” Evaluation with Damien Korb and dropped in at the centre to be sure they received it.  Within 10 minutes I receive a call to schedule an appointment, wow great news hopefully this will be the final piece in the puzzle to get the CPT code so that we can get help from the insurance company.  The date is set so fingers crossed.

Slight change to schedule this week.  Elliot has a field trip in the morning so we schedule the OT and SLT for after the trip in the afternoon.  Elliot is very excited to be going to see his therapists he really seems to be enjoying his sessions.  He takes great pleasure telling Miss Joyce that he had been sick in his bed at the weekend and proceeds to show her his buzz lightyear plaster also.  What difference a few sessions make he is very chatty compared to other sessions and warms up really quickly to Joyce.  She seems to have really tuned into what Elliot likes already and sets up a bucket swing for Elliot and they pretend that he is buzz lightyear.  He loves this idea and as he is swinging backwards and forwards he is given lots of different types of balls to get into the net on the wall.  After this another exercise to improve his balance and co-ordination, having him climb ladders and pretending to be in a castle so he can jump down again.  Which of course he thinks is great as he loves jumping.  As with other sessions he is nicely warmed up for his SLT sessions especially after the squishes Joyce gives him.

We now head to SLT with Miss Christie.   We recap from next week and discuss phonetics and letters of the alphabet.  It is difficult to be clear exactly what issues Elliot has with his speech as I spend so much time with him that I don’t always notice something right under my nose.  So I would agree it is far to say that the Speech and Language sessions are as much of a learning curve for me as Elliot.  It seems a lot of Elliots problems are not that he doesn’t know what to say there is just too much to say and he is struggling to access all the words together.  SO for instance when you ask him what he has done at school he wont really answer.  Miss Christie introduces us to a method of helping him access the information and get talking.  I guess it is a little like a mind map we start at the beginning of the day or a time when we know he is more receptive to sharing information with and draw pictures and work from there.  Also it starts to become more apparent that I am really not helping Elliot by finishing sentences for him or accepting a request with it being spoken correctly.  An example of this would be if he just points at something and says please.  Rather than accepting this I make him ask for what he wants.  If he isn’t very clear with his words I help him pronounce them and encourage him to describe things to me as well.  We go home with a few exercises to help Elliot strengthen his tongue again say L’s and words ending in LL