Anyone who saw my post in AIBU from Friday (which I never should have started!) will know that I had an incident with DT1’s room leader last week.
To be very brief, I have twin boys (32 months now). DT1 has ASD, DT2 has ASD and various other medical issues that mean he is in the baby room at nursery while DT1 is in the toddler room.
I struggle with DT1’s room leader / key worker as I find her tone very hard to read at the best of times - she often sounds annoyed when I don’t think she actually is. I often think she’s scolding me or telling me off about my son’s behaviour when I think she’s just telling me what’s happened (DH feels the same so it’s not just me).
Anyway, today I had to take DT2 for a hospital appointment so DH picked up DT1 on his own, which is a big relief as I would not have coped well with what happened when he got there, especially after our run in on Thursday.
When I got back from hospital DH told me that she had pulled him aside and told him that DT1 has been taking food from other children at lunch time so we need to give him more food. DH explained to her that he does this at home too, and it’s not about him being hungry - it’s that he doesn’t understand that other people’s food isn’t his, and he wants it so he takes it.
He is not hungry - he has milk in the morning, breakfast when he gets there at 8, a good size snack mid morning, and then lunch is either a sandwich, pita bread, today it was gnocchi, plus fruit and usually some rice cakes, mini breadsticks etc. He then has snacks in the afternoon and a good size dinner.
At home we do not allow them to take each other’s food - we tell them no, take the food off them and give it back, and sit them back down. But this often causes tantrums because he doesn’t understand. Even if he still has, say, banana on his plate, he will still try to take the other one’s banana.
DH said that he got the distinct impression she was implying that we need to stop DT1 from taking other children’s food. DH was clear that we do our best to do this at home, but he’s autistic (duh) with very limited receptive language skills so there’s only so much we can do about it and we definitely can’t stop him doing it when we are not there. But we don’t know whether she actually meant it this way or not, given the difficulty in reading her tone.
I really like the nursery and the boys absolutely love it there (recently we sent DT2 and kept DT1 home and he cried his eyes out when he realised he wasn’t going). I don’t want to cause a fuss or be difficult or make complaints. I want them to tell us if there are problems, but I honestly dread talking to her about the day in case something negative has happened. For example, recently she told me that his nappy and trousers fell down and there was poo all down his legs / trousers - the tone she said it in made me apologise to her about it, I felt like she was telling me off about it. I would think it was just me being overly sensitive (which I know I can be), but I know it’s not just me because I don’t have this issue with DT2’s key worker, and because DH feels it too and he has the hide of a rhino!
We are starting to look at specialist provisions but I haven’t had a chance to organise visits yet. I think there’s a good chance they’ll end up in a specialist setting next year, but I want to keep things pleasant in the mean time.
How do I deal with this? If they do ask us to stop him from taking food, how do I respond? Just feeling overwhelmed (also had a nightmare getting home from the hospital today, I just hate the fact that even simple things are so difficult!)