i just don't know if ds is SN or not :(

[saladsandwich]

i had ds's parent consultation with nursery (he is 3 tomorrow) i left feeling so happy, he is behind but they reckon when his speech catches up then he'll be right up there, i thought excellent, there was a few minor things, ds copying excessively, he does shove alittle but so do other kids and he only plays alongside other kids not with them.

the last 2 days have been tough, ds has done nothing but take his socks off because of the seams then want them back on after he's picked fluff from each toe its mad to watch him pass each toe along, when i try undress him he says ouch so dressing/undressing is becoming a battle, he is doing nothing but cry over things he sees as broken, chocolate pieces not being equally square leads to him being heart broken, today i bought him a bun and the icing had been pressed in a little by the bag and he sobbed and sobbed.

he as been talking today but every so often he will keep repeating the same line from a film over and over again, he was crying before bed because i went to read a different book...

he has another developmental paed appointment in january but i just don't know what they'll make of him, last time they said speech was holding him back but his speech is coming but it doesnt explain him crying over things like he does...

sorry its abit long, its been a long day of crying over broken/not perfect things and "not in my town you don't" - the quote ds keeps repeating!!! oh and cereal the boy keeps asking for cereal!!! x

sorry for the long ramble, another thing, he has a love of books, absolutely loves books, but he must have the same book for bed everynight and he never ever gets bored of the page "where's elmer hiding" then he finds him and laughs, hes had this book for easily the last 6months... we watch disney cars everyday, he repeats a few phrases off that, forgot today, he expected me to build a "mack" from stickle bricks, major tantrum because we didnt have enough red bricks, it didnt look like mack and couldnt fit a lightining mqueen inside... not sure if this is a positive or a negative that hes building things well i am building things???

Oh, salad, we're not going to be able to reassure you. Lots of his behaviours suggest spectrum, but neither can we DX, we are only mums and we can't actually see him. The eye contact thing is a fairly classical red flag. My DS2 had brilliant eye contact as a baby, then seemed to lose it from 18 mths or so. He looked at you almost sideways. He was much better by 5 or 6, but his eye contact is still pretty fleeting at 12.

DS2 was an early reader (pre school age.) He could quote huge sections of his favourite books and he found the same jokes just as funny the 100th time of telling as the first. But once he had more language he struggled to explain what was happening in the stories, why people were happy or scared etc. He could read really well, so the school in infants thought he was doing fine, it wasn't until juniors when more analysis of the text was required that his difficulties became more noticeable.

Lining up the crayons, systemising, is also a trait. Colouring appropriately is another good sign of his underlying intelligence, though.

Poor attention span for things not on his own agenda is a basic developmental delay, I believe, not necessarily ASD, but the spikiness of his delays and abilities is fairly classically HF ASD. If you plotted his developmental profile it would be spiky like the Alps, with highs and lows, not pretty much a straight line like an NT developing child.

Keep on the warpath for support and DX and remember that an ASD DX is not the end of the world. You only have to read some of Amberlight's posts to see that.

thanks very much....

in my area they dont generally diagnose any children till much later, they seem to wait and see, but ds is getting everything he needs at the moment, i think any diagnoss or suggestion would just satisfy my sanity tbh, it was mentioned fleetingly at his last appointment for medical stuff at childrens hospital that his behaviour and medical stuff could be linked, we go back 31st of jan there, they are top drs in their field and couldnt wish for better so i may go through them for referrals if we get no answers locally.

ellen his eye contact just reminds me of someone who as switched off, he is yet to say hello or hi to anyone so i know his social skills are behind because he is capable of speech to do that, he will say bye if prompted. he uses thankyou but its not always in the right place. he still sometimes repeats what i say in a questioning tone, SALT said its because hes not understanding whats been said.

his development is up and down you are right, physically he is perfect, with colours imo he is outstanding, the community paed was taken aback when he saw him match the colours and point to colours when asked, the only colour he gets wrong occassionally is gold, i sat and watched him do a digger shaped 10piece jigsaw by himself, only thing is he doesnt think to turn the pieces over to see the picture underneath so if i dont turn them over he thinks they are missing.

god i dont half go on, its been a hard x mas this year.... broke my heart when he piled all the christmas stuff in the middle of the room and declared santa isnt coming... :(

(((hugs))) salad. He does sound mainly delightful! I can tell from your posts you are rightly proud of him. I'm sure he'll continue to surprise you. Xx

thanks, he is great, apart from the tantrums.

today he did something that makes me think not asd? there is abit of a lump in the carpet where the floor boards have swelled with the cold weather (not noticable really) ds decided he doesnt like it, cries about it, forgets for 10 minutes then keeps going bac to check it? then he he says "ooks ike a bige dat" i could kiss him when he comes out with full sentences like that :) so his speech is there inside, but also is this a sign of imagination? or is he just seeing the bridge shape?

argghhh he is a little conundrum guess only time will tell with him. X

"then he he says "ooks ike a bige dat""

ah, I can remember something similar and how excited I was.

I can only tell you that it's wonderful and important that he can see that a lump is "like" a bridge but isn't a bridge. It just tells you that another foundation-stone is firmly in place, one you'll be able to build on.
Once I realised DS2 had this "A is like B but isn't B" concept I used it all the time for all it was worth, by the way........... combined with a particular sing-song intonation that reinforced concept.

i hope its the sign of progression :)

i'm just going to copy bits from my posts here for the community paed but i'm going to write some questions too, i need to know if ds is sn or not, at the moment a diagnosis isnt really going to make a difference, the nursery look after ds well but no one as said ds is sn,

his report (6months ago) says he is roughly 12months behind in language, social and self care skills his other skills are pretty much in normal ranges, his behaviour and sleep have been noted his visual was put above average and the community paed is seeing him every 6 months.

thats all i have to go on, i dont even now if 12months delay is significant enough to be sn? his speech to be exact at the time was 9-12months behind, he is now definitely 12+ months behind, this might sound odd but i feel he has enough language to have a conversation now he can link words together. he wont get any more speech therapy now till he is about 5 so i will have no way of knowing now how far behind he is, they havent really heard him speak.

hes been so good, been looking for the things in ds that make him appear like just a nt boy... hes started copying language from the tv but today he was watching tellietubbies, he is scared of the sun on it? but he loves it because of all the repetition in it he knows what to expect... he shouted his word for hoover at the tv when the hoover needed to clean up! hes never done that before :)

then he sat and picked his toes one by one removed every inch of fluff from between them, his method is facinating... then he had some chocolate broken off from a bigger bar and he cried because the squares werent perfect.

took him shopping andd he coped in next! feel like we've had a good day :)

Hi OP, the thing about ASD and imagination is often misunderstood - it's "social" imagination they lack, ie they find it hard to put themselves in other people's shoes, and guess their reaction....
They don't necessarily lack the creative one... my DS lacks empathy , but he loves to write "books" - he makes up stories with weird worlds and lots of numbers ... and from an early age he was playing pretend games ( very strange ones, of course, like pretending he was a microwave). I have just looked online though, to look for a quotation for you, and lots of sites are not very clear about that, and are frankly a bit rubbish.... I remember that when Asperger's was first mentioned to me (DS was 3 1/2), after reading lots of websites I was reassured he didn't have it - it's only when I discovered a forum of parents discussing their own Aspie kids that it became obvious.
That time when you just don't know is the worst, isn't it ... bleakest times of my life ...
Best wishes x
(...Quote I found.... "People with autism have difficulty understanding and predicting other people?s intentions and behaviour and imagining situations that are outside their own routine. This can mean they carry out a narrow, repetitive range of activities. A lack of social imagination should not be confused with lack of imagination. Many people with autism are very creative.")

It'll be fine. But you'll need to trust your instincts that there is 'something' non-typical and push push push to make the medics listen. Speech delay, quirkiness and intelligence usually needs a professional label of some sort, otherwise nursery etc can end up using unhelpful, or unkind, amateur labels.

No-one wants their child to have ADHD, asd, dyspraxia, semantic-pragmatic or whatever. But 'behaviour', 'problems at home', 'poor social skills', 'naughty', 'immature', 'lazy', 'not very bright' don't help teachers or anyone else to find successful strategies. In some ways it's even more helpful for the children with less severe problems, for when it isn't that obvious and the severe fall-out mostly affect themselves and their mums.

We finally went to panto today. I told the ticket guy, 'DS has SN, so we need....' And just being allowed in five min before everyone else, getting a programme to look at while I sorted out paying, plus having a seat at the end of the back row, meant he had a really great time.

mountains thats interesting, i'd have never thought about that really. ds doesnt really do imaginative play but he copies things. nursery say he copies other kids, he knows the nursery boundaries yet if a child does something say jump off a table ds is 2 seconds behind doing it.

maria glad you managed to watch a pantomime and enjoy it :) we had to leave the pantomime this year, i'm wondering if he went with some familiar faces he might prefer it.

today we had major major tantrums in town, i'm getting to the point i think i'm going to have to just stop taking him! he will only eat at KFC, sit at a certain table, eat a certain meal, everythng sin a certain order with ds, beans first then chips back to the last of the beans, the chicken and some chips go home. today i tried him with a fillet burger, i had to give him my pop corn chicken but he accepted the bread, he asked for it in bits, i took a piece off for him and he sobbed and sobbed it was broken. i had to squidge it together it fell off he set off again, then he needed a wee so his gran saved his dinner but when we got back he thought he had to sit with her, major crying again over his dinner not being where he left it luckily no one sat there while we where gone (toilets are not in the KFC)...

please someone tell me this is not normal and i'm not going mad.

Hiya salad. You aren't going mad. This isn't normal.

The reason I told our happy panto story was that I'd seen a recent panto disaster on one of the threads. Guess that was yours then .

DS is 8 now. We took his 5 year old sister and left the toddler behind. Only two years ago, DS was the unpredictable panto-wrecking screamer. So it was him we often had to leave behind .Part of the difference was a higher dose of his ADHD meds, part is maturity and development. But mainly it's having the formal asd diagnosis so I know I'm not imagining the need to treat him differently to the average kid. Which of course enables him to access a lot more things that average kids do .

i don't know whether it was my panto disaster lol, ds was just petrified, had to leave at the interval :)

the thing is with ds, like now he seems to be a happy little boy playing with his cars and interacting with me.

last night we went to a birthday party, he wasn't badly behaved but he wouldnt eat dinner with everyone, he played with 1 toy on his own pretty much for the time we was there. he had a paddy before we went over some flavoured water of all things! i took the plastic cap off the sports lid, 15mins he went on and on, oh and he refused to eat dinner yesterday for 40mins over me turning the laptop off??

maybe hes just controlling? likes control, i don't know, his behaviour baffles me, a song came on the tv today on kids tv and he wanted me to keep singing it then he said i was one character and he was the other, he did as the action in the song said :) he didnt take the play further but i was just glad he'd thought to give us the "parts" of the song :)

Before ds1 was diagnosed, I was going crazy. 'Normal' one day, moderate-severe behavioural/social/communication difficulties the next

You could chase a more comprehensive diagnosis at this point. Or you could simply insist that your ds's language delay and major difficulties with the unexpected are officially identified as being significant. Which from your posts, they are.

This mini-label alone would mean you don't feel like a loon for having trouble with these areas, and would mean you have some access to the SN types of support, limited though it often is.

Three benefits came to us from having a label of some sort:

Knowing it wasn't my 'fault', so I could stop blaming myself for causing the difficulties and instead recognise that he needed supermum skills.

Medication (obviously not useful for all kids, but helped us hugely)

Having a peer group of SN parents (here and in RL) who just 'got it'

well, i think you are right, i need something...

think i'll ask the community paed for his thoughts on ds what it could be, if hes not willing i will say i need to know how best to help ds so i need some help. we are not at the point where we need to claim dla or anything so a label isn't needed but i need it for me although it would be nice to be able to get ds some SALT.

also feel a fraud even being on the sn board let alone walking into a sn group :(

it werent even turned 8 and ds set off because his drink was empty, i filled it up and he wanted it "not full" 15mins later i just asked why? why don't you want it full? i asked a few times and i'm not sure if he thought about it and thought why, was baffled by the question so gave in, or just naturally ended the tantrum but it worked... so thats my method the next time he does it.

ds today has been absolutely shocking!!!! he was fine all morning, took him to play group and he was ok, even got playing with another child... it was only chase but its progress. picked him up from nursery and i have been pulled again for his behaviour pushing other kids over for nothing, he did it yesterday too, hs constant with it.

got him home from nursery and hes been so hyped up, im reay to rip my hair out x