Joy's Autism Blog

On Wednesday morning I had my first meeting with Lincoln’s new teacher. I had him in a good mood and I had him fully clothed which is a rare occurrence when he is at home. When they got here it was his new teacher whom we only met at the open house the night before and the teacher aide who he had in his classroom last year. He was excited to see her. She asked him if she could have a hug and he jumped right up on her lap and gave her the sweetest hug.

Ok, I was happy because Lincoln doesn’t usually like people coming in the house, we’ve had some major meltdowns when teachers come to the house.

It was all going well until the teacher aide asked Lincoln “Did you go swimming this summer?” I bought the kids a little kiddie pool and it was on our patio. They swam a lot this summer and Lincoln loved swimming. When the teacher asked “Did you go swimming this summer?” Lincoln heard “Lincoln do you want to go swimming right now?!” And he started tearing his clothes off excitedly ready to go swimming. He took off ALL of his clothes and started looking around for his swim trunks. You’d think I’d be embarrassed, I wasn’t at all. I figure they’re used to seeing toddlers strip down and I wasn’t concerned.

I convinced him to at least put his boxer shorts back on but he was mad at that point and was beating on the patio door trying to get out.

His teacher seems nice and I’m hoping it will be a good school year for him. He starts on Monday.

Adrian has a new teacher this year too. It’s been really good so far. I’m still feeling out how it’s going to go but I feel good about it right now.

Adrian did so awesome with his tooth extraction yesterday. He was so calm and held so still while they did his work. It was amazing.

Adrian started summer school this week. He was so happy to get back to school. His nightly routine when I say it’s bedtime is to ask “school tomorrow?” and the couple weeks he had off were kind of confusing for him. Summer school doesn’t last long though so we’ll see how he handles it when we’re back to summer break.

Our first year of homeschooling the girls went really well and I’m glad we did it. We are going to continue on with the girls at least for next year. I would love to bring the boys home and homeschool them but with the special needs involved I’m just not sure I have the energy. At least for right now that’s not in the cards.

Lincoln has really come along speech wise. I think we’ll still end up with some kind of autism diagnosis for him, probably PDD-NOS I’m guessing but I’m impressed with him. His new thing is asking “Where’s Daddy?” or “Where’s Nevaeh?”, this is especially impressive because for quite a while I could get him to repeat basically anything but as far as him coming up with his own stuff to say it was slow going. Asking questions like that is pretty awesome to me.

And Glen and I have some news, we’re expecting baby number 5. We are absolutely thrilled!

Lincoln only has a few days left of preschool and this is his first year of preschool. Lincoln has an IEP and is in a special needs preschool classroom but he hasn’t been formally diagnosed with anything yet although I suspect he’ll also be on the autism spectrum. 3 of my 4 kids on the spectrum, I think we can make a case for genetics in our family.

I got an update on how Lincoln’s doing on his IEP goals and he’s done really great this year. He’s made progress on everything.

I decided I’m keeping him home from summer school this year even though he qualifies. Firstly, he’s little, he’s only 3 years old and I want him home with me. They’re only little for so long. Secondly, he needs potty trained. I’ve taken a run at potty training with him a couple times but it turned out he wasn’t ready. When school is out this child is getting potty trained and it’s just easier to do it when he’s home with me the majority of the time. Lincoln did pee in the potty at school today though woohoo!!

I don’t worry about Lincoln the way I’ve worried about Adrian but we’ll see how he does with time. He reminds me a lot of Sanura and she’s doing really really well now so I guess no sense worrying about the future too much. We’re doing everything we can to move him along development wise.

Here is Lincoln at school, they were having a picnic:

and here he is going down the slide at school:

My friend shared this on facebook this morning and I spent the last 20 minutes telling me husband about it and crying. This dad has some serious class for not going to that school and hurting somebody because that would be hard to swallow. Only one aide from this video has been fired. The rest are still working with children. That’s absolutely unbelievable and horrifying. Please go sign this petition so teachers can’t get away with bullying students and keeping their jobs. Our children deserve better!

I had Adrian’s IEP meeting this afternoon and it went really well. They kept a lot of his goals from last year because honestly, he still needs to work on those things. They did add a couple new things that I’m really happy with.

I got to know his teacher a bit better, I’ve met with her a few times but I think IEP meetings really help you figure out what the teacher is all about. I can’t believe it but we have lucked out once again and have another great teacher for Adrian. He’s had so many amazing teachers in his life all these years and it’s just a really special and amazing thing. Praise God for good teachers, nothing beats a great teacher when you have a child who is struggling in so many areas like Adrian.

So the deal is, I was worried because Adrian’s teacher was really having trouble getting him to work and I was worried that she was just letting him kind of do what he wanted (play on the computer and draw) but as it turns out Adrian was really having trouble adjusting to the new environment and teachers and now that he has adjusted he is making more strides with everything.

As always Adrian is a ladies man. He sits with a little girl at lunch everyday and tries to share his lunch with her and apparently he kissed a little girl at lunch today. Adrian has always loved the ladies ever since he was a little tike.

I will share more about his goals in case you need ideas for your IEP goals when I get the completed copy. I have a draft that needs to be edited a bit.

One thing I was surprised about is Adrian is reading at a late 1st grade level. Adrian is only in the 2nd grade. How amazing is that?

His teacher explained that they were really working on their months and days of the week and I had noticed that because Nevaeh asked one night if we could get out the Halloween costumes and play dress up and when Adrian heard this to my surprise he said, “It’s not Halloween! It’s January!” It’s already come in handy because Adrian happens to know that there is a new Spiderman movie and he was asking about it every.single.day (note misery) and now we can say “Spiderman comes out in July. It’s not July! It’s January!”

Adrian’s school was only having a half day today and then all the kids are off for Christmas break. Adrian’s old school had early dismissal every Wednesday and a few other times through the year and it was never an issue so I never thought to have a talk with him about it. I was pretty surprised when the teacher called me this afternoon saying she couldn’t put him on the bus because he was kicking, screaming, and crying because he did not want to get on the bus.

I went to pick him up and he was totally fine. Apparently after all the kids left he understood and started saying “I missed my bus!”. When I picked him up he asked me “Are we done with school today?” and I said “Yes we’re all done with school today” and he said “Ok, I want to go to the store” So we did!

I let Adrian get a candy bar from the checkout and he saved a bit of it and teased his siblings and dad when he got home. Pretending to offer them a bite and then telling them no! He said to Glen “You want some?” and Glen said “yeah” and reached his hand out and Adrian said “No! Don’t touch it!” The girls took the teasing in stride but Lincoln was really mad. I brought Adrian over and said “Look at your baby brother. He’s sad. Maybe you should share your candy bar with him.” And he broke it in half and gave it to Lincoln. Proud mommy moment not only for the sweetness but the teasing is also a pretty cool thing for him to understand so I’m just proud of him even if I could have considered this a “rough” day for him I actually see a lot of silver lining.

This is a printable activity from Child Care Land and it is an ABC recognition activity. Nevaeh has her ABCs down but every now and again she mixes up J’s and I’s and also Q’s and U’s so we’re just working away on ABCs still each day. Here is one of the things she did today, you call out each letter kind of like BINGO but every letter in the alphabet is on there and they place their little marker on the correct letter:

This next activity I used some of the art from Lesson Pix and I used the tree we already had that we used for one of the activities that I talked about on this post. So we just printed our 5 monkeys and Mr. Alligator and we sang the 5 Little Monkeys Swinging in a Tree song. Here are the lyrics in case you don’t know the song:

Five little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Four little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Three little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Two little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

One little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

No more monkeys swinging in the tree!

Here is the pictures (sorry my lighting is bad for the photo but you get the idea) we printed out and one by one Nevaeh removed the monkeys from the tree, she really enjoyed it:

And…Lincoln rode the bus for the first time today. I was so nervous and when they dropped him off at home they drove right by me and all the way down the road and I had to go chase it down…yikes.

Anyway, here he is waiting for the bus:

And here he is with the bus driver and the helper on the bus:

So cute I could just eat him up!

Lincoln had his first day of school today. Actually he’s still there. His teacher seemed really nice and he didn’t mind being left at the school. I took him this afternoon and I’m going to go pick him up in about 10 minutes here. I miss him. It’s weird being home without him. I keep feeling like I need to check on him but he’s not here, I’m sure I’ll get used to it. It was hard to get pictures of him because he wasn’t happy about his new shoes but I got a couple:

And he had to wait in the office for a few minutes before we went down to meet the teacher so here he is waiting:

I also wanted to share the alphabet recognition activity that Nevaeh did this morning. This is also from Child Care Land You write the letters on paper plates in capital and lowercase letters and you can do lots of activities with these. Today I laid out all the paper plates and had Nevaeh match the lowercase letter plate with the uppercase letter plate. One piece of advice if you want to try this is to draw something showing which way is up for the plate so the child doesn’t confuse the M’s and W’s or Z’s and N’s:

First I have to update about Lincoln and our school situation. I went in this past Wednesday to drop off his enrollment packet and the lady in the office said she’d call me to let me know about when I can come tour the school and meet the teacher before he starts school this Monday. Of course nobody called me. I have never dealt with a school that tells you time and time and time again that they will call you back and only one time out of the half dozen times they said they’d call me have they done so. I’m almost speechless about it because it’s so absurd. There is no way I would send my kid on a bus to a place that #1 has been terrible to deal with #2 that I’ve only seen the front office and none of the other areas in the school and #3 to people I’ve never met.

I’ve heard great things about the school from Adrian’s current teacher and the lady from Parents as Teachers so I’m hoping it will all work out but I have my doubts. I guess I’m going to show up with Lincoln at the usual time he’s supposed to go to school on Monday and see if I feel comfortable leaving him there or not. *INSERT HUGE EYE ROLL HERE* Can you tell I’m frustrated?

I went to the store today and picked up all of his supplies he needs. He’s not diggin’ the new shoes or the bike helmet I got him. I’m hoping he’ll adjust to them.

On to the number recognition activities that I wanted to share. Nevaeh can count to 100 with minimal help but I noticed if I pointed to a number and asked her what it was she didn’t know so I started to think about ways I could teach her how to recognize numbers without sitting in front of worksheets all day. Here is what I found:

Who doesn’t like a good ol’ game of BINGO? I made the board myself…made a few different ones and some squares with the call numbers. The circle discs I printed from Childcareland.com which has to be one of the most useful sites I’ve ever come across for homeschooling:

And this game has a little tooth fairy towards the bottom and teeth up above, the child counts the number of teeth and pins the clothes pin on the correct number (this activity is also from childcareland.com):

So along with our other math work we’re going to be adding in these this week for Neveah, hopefully it will be fun and she can learn number recognition at the same time.

My mom came to visit for a couple days this week. It was good to see her and the kids loved it. She got a little lost when she got here because she hasn’t been here before so I went to get her. When we got back to my house I hopped out of the van excited to see my mom and spend some time with her but I stopped short when I heard a hissing sound and looked down to see my rear drivers side tire going flat. I’m just thankful I made it home and didn’t break down on the side of the road. Glen put on the donut tire and we loaded up and went to the zoo. My mom was only staying for a day and a half so we wanted to spend the time with her. I did go and get it changed the next morning and it took forever but I’m just relieved that it’s done! Adrian was so so upset when he realized that his grandma had gone home. He cried for about an hour and not much I tried would comfort him at all. He seems ok now.

Adrian has been doing good in school. No issues. I’m so happy that his teacher seems so nice and that things are going well…huge relief for me.

The girls have been doing awesome with homeschool. It’s so much fun. It’s a lot of work to prepare everything but it’s a lot of fun too. Here are a couple things we’ve done:

This is our behavior tracker-green=good behavior, yellow=so so behavior, red= not good behavior:

There are clothes pins with their names written on them and you just clip it to the plate that corresponds with the behavior. It’s a little babyish for Sanura but she played along since I was going to be using it for Nevaeh. If they stay on green all week then we but something new for art class on Fridays, last week they picked out a bead set to make necklaces.

Yesterday we did a little science project. I took the girls outside and had them think about how birds make nests and how hard they must have to work to do that. Nevaeh has been studying habitats so this was more for her but I figured Sanura would have fun getting her hands dirty too. So the girls made their own bird nest and it is holding up really well:

And this is the inside of the nest:

As for Lincoln, I finally have an update. I dropped off his enrollment packet on Tuesday and he’s going to be starting school on Monday. I need to take a tour of the school and meet the teacher before I’ll let him start. The lady was supposed to call me back and I haven’t heard anything. The communication with parents by the office at this school is absolutely rotten. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. The good thing is I have only heard good things about the teachers at this school so we will see how it goes. I’m not going to hesitate pulling him out if I’m not comfortable with anything because the experience has not been good at all so far for our family.

There is a program here called parents as teachers and they come to your house monthly to give you ideas on how to work with your kids and hook you up with resources you may need and I had an appointment with the lady from there today. She gave me some names of doctors in the area which I was grateful for because I don’t know any and she gave me some handouts about how Lincoln is supposed to be developing at his age. She also played with him some and he was such a good boy while she was here.

So that’s my update, there’s been so much going on around here lately. I’m looking forward to another busy day tomorrow!