A bad morning getting my Asperger's child to school....[blush]

[swanriver]

My patience ran out this morning. He would not brush his teeth, he would not get ready, he was dilly dallying and shilly shallying. I screamed and shouted.
Usually it's fine, just that we organise everything for him. He is 9. School is 2 mins walk away. Today I felt he just needs to take responsibility and stop being treated like a two year old...His twin sister walks to school by herself.

Now I feel completely burnt out by battling to be patient every morning, and not being patient this morning... High school is not far away, and I wonder if all this helplessless is entirely learnt behaviour and he could be soo much more directed if we were tougher..

Good to hear things went well this morning swanriver.

Ours was anything but, entirely my fault. I am exhausted after very little sleep for a couple of weeks with first me being ill then dd - who also kept me up most of last night. I'm stressed about my neurology appointment and the house was a total tip after the weekend, which always puts me in a bad mood anyway.

Dh usually does ds1's inhaler with him, but despite me reminding him twice this morning he still hadn't done it so I decided to do it myself. BIG mistake, obviously ds was used to Daddy doing it, so that already put him on edge, then when I pumped it into the spacer he spluttered and accused me of overdosing him! So, instead of remaining calm and explaining he hadn't been overdosed, but thanks to his reaction I now had no idea how much he did get, so he probably got too little, I lost it and shouted that as Daddy is so perfect, perhaps I should just stay in bed until they're at school in future. Then ds got all upset and said he didn't know what he'd done wrong, so I told him it wasn't great to accuse your mother of trying to poison you - to which he of course said 'I didn't say that, I said you overdosed me'.

I feel awful now, because I was still in a strop when they left for school and I know he's going to have a bad day because of me now.

You're absolutely right about having to work out what works for your whole family and each one is likely to be different.

We never have DS or TV at bedtime or before school either. The only 'screen time' he's allowed before school is educational - so Maths Whizz or Mathletics and then only for the agreed time that he's earned.

Ds1 is pretty high functioning and also a walking calculator, so we don't need to do tokens - he just adds up how much he's earned in his head and I write it down on a pad by the kettle. I know this wouldn't work for everyone though. Initially, when we did the checklist, we would just add up the ticks earned that day before DS time (which is at the same time every day, after homework but before tea) and make sure we we're all clear on exactly how many extra minutes he'd earned that day.