Those of you with DDs with ASD

[osospecial]

Hi, DD age4 was dx with ASD by a private paed. There has always been a ? over ASD because although her speech, communication and social skills are severely effected and she has sensory problem ( hypo sensitive) she has no rigid routines she has to follow or funny rituals.
Private paed said it seems to be less common for girls to display those traits anyway and was satisfied dd still met the criteria for ASD. Saw the NHS Paed again today and although she has agreed to bring ASD assesment forward and agrees it seems likely now she is still fixating on the fact DD doesn't have THAT particular trait. So I'm just curious to see what you guys think?

Oso, some shops offer appt times, they don't guarantee exclusivity of service but you can sometimes choose a time at the end of the day when it's less busy.

Of course getting the shoes on is a whole other issue

we have to keep the last 2 pairs of whatever shoes (school/trainers etc) as DD misses the old ones and pines after them and then won't wear the new ones until she can accept the old ones are done in

sounds daft when i put it into words, but i know people here will understand

totally. dd2 still occasionally starts crying about the winter coat I discarded a year ago. Anything that has to be discarded is met with "it was my favourite" even if it was a stick from the woods (avid collector of stones, sticks, feathers, etc, here - at 8yo).

dd2 had to watch Peppa Pig every day aged 4 to aged 8 or would lose it. she also sometimes mouths the last half of a sentence, and uses odd phrases like "even you know I" which private assessor dismissed as 'part of her previous expressive difficulties which have become habitual' (her language was severely delayed and disordered by age 4) I disagree with this because she always seems to have one or two idiosyncratic phrases on the go, they change with time. I find it so frustrating that a dx of ASD where there are subtle manifestations (as her mum I do not find it subtle at all when she is screaming at me for looking at her or trying to cut the skin on my arm with a big pair of sharp kitchen scissors) is missed owing to the odd subjective interpretation. I now regret allowing one practitioner to do the ADOS and not to having it videoed for scrutiny. The final decision to withold dx seemed to rest on the fact that she interpreted fairly sophisticated non-verbal communication from a photo, even though she MIS-interpreted some much more familiar non-verbal communication (a Mum sitting next to a girl doing homework - dd2 did not see that the Mum was angry, when the Mum obviously was very angry!). He just said dd2 was 'puzzling'. Harrumph.

Yes, AP. My experience with DD1 is that the problems snowball with each school year. By the end of primary school DD1's school was desperate for a statement. I am curious how DD2 would handle the imminent transition to year 1. They will not have the same amount of time and facilities to play as in Reception and the proper school work will start. i should add DD1 was diagnosed with Aspergers, which is now called Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

Oh gosh, Handy, my DD2 brings stones and sticks from the park too :) I didn't associate this with ASD, but now...

stones and sticks from park: no need to associate with ASD at this age, I would say. But, where 'unusual in intensity, duration' etc. is the crux of an ASD dx: is it still normal aged 8.5? or unusual???

Subjectiveness. All the way!!

We got a diagnosis of Aspergers just before the summer. It helps that the Ed Psych at CAMHS thought she showed signs from his first meeting, and that I knew what he was asking so with some creativity could show enough signs to him for the diagnosis.
First school was surprised when we started to mention it, despite being very experienced with ASD boys. The first few girls are getting diagnosed and personally I think they have "missed" several girls over the years.
Second I have started to recognise that certain behaviours are signs. The way she jumps around when she is anxious/angry/frustrated - its obvious now, but I was looking for hand flapping.
Third, it was not obvious at all at 5, because she was behaving within the normal bounds of a 5 year old. At 10 those behaviours are obvious. Actually also by 10 she has "mislearnt" social behaviour; that is from her interactions with other children she has learnt to do things which are seen as "naughty" because she gets positive feedback from being shocking. She doesn't have the natural social understanding to discriminate.

Her ritual behaviours include: watching the same TV program over and over and....; using certain repetitive phrases (orange peacock fillets); having to get to school on time; high anxiety on non-uniform days; would eat just Tuna sandwiches if I let her and so on.
We also have the reluctance for new shoes/trainers. She has new trainers but would prefer to wear the old ones; she is only letting me buy new school shoes because the others are far too small and broken (uniform anxiety has outweighed new shoes).

I've just read this thread, and it's been so interesting to hear about girls with ASD.
So many things sound familiar. My DD (4) has no problem at all with routines, butshe likes sameness, has concrete-type thinking and narrow interests. Reading the posts here has made me think that her bevahiour is more rigid than I had thought though.
Thinking about this, DD was referred early on, after her 2 year health assessment. I knew nothing about ASD then, other that it terrified me; I desperately didn't want DD to have it. I read a bit about it, and I really clung on to the fact that she had no problem with changes to routine, and that I could take her anywhere- proof to me that she didn't have ASD.
I was so happy when I saw her playing with her dolls one day, as she never had before. She put some tea-towels & the oven glove over the dolls, like she was putting them to bed. I was delighted - proof of imaginative play! She did the same thing the next day, but it was the third time that I realised that it was the same oven glove & tea towel. I hid them. The next time she brought her dolls out, but then couldn't find particular tea towels and oven glove, she just discarded the dolls. I tried to offer other tea towels, but she had no interest in them, or the dolls themselves. It hit me that she hadn't been "playing" with the dolls. My heart broke a bit that day.
The repetive watching of particar tv programmes also rings a bell. DD has always been a big Dora the Explorer fan.In the early days she had no reciprocal language at all, but had picked up some speech from Dora. My mum told me that there was defintely nothing wrong, because DD could count to ten in Spanish

marchduck the speech from TV program's is one of my dds "things". She now says "nein" instead of no.

Frusso DD sometimes call me Mama - raises some eyebrows where we live

Maybe "Learning Spanish from Dora" should be right up there with "Obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine"?

Mummytime - that is spot on!

Does anyone have DD speaking with American accent picked up from TV cartoons?

Like, yah

And then reverts back to pedantry on hard 't' and vowels

Bless them, LOL