ASPERGER'S AND THE GOLDEN ARCHES



Does anyone really like clowns?



Jacob's behaviour at school, has been more unacceptable since the Easter holiday.  So today, we had a school meeting with the principal and his teachers, and there was a specialist from Chedoke Hospital there also.  She was very nice and after a brief interview, she seemed to be as baffled by Jacob's behaviour as we were.  It's so hard when Jacob's behaviour at home and at school are totally different.

We told her the story of Jacob's dog, which was still difficult for us to talk about.  So the specialist mentioned some form of grief counselling for Jacob at the school.  We've thought about counselling before today, but Jacob has a hard time expressing his feelings with words, which is also part of the problem at school.  Jacob didn't really speak about Max until long after his death.  But this Easter his repressed feelings began to come through, which is likely why he's misbehaving so much these past few weeks.



Honestly though, noticing Jacob's triggers is the easy part, believe it or not.  The hard part for us and his teachers is, getting him to calm down when he's having a meltdown.  At home we are much better able to help him down from an emotional high.  Unfortunately, while at school the coming down can take much longer.  So we're going to get Jacob some counselling and we're also going to look into further diagnoses involving OCD and ODD.  We're not sure if he has either of these conditions, but we're willing to speak to someone about them.

These meetings won't be any time soon, but "we're on the list" for them.  Hopefully we'll get the dates before Christmas next year when Jacob's in grade 3 so at least we'll be moving forward.  It doesn't help with the next six weeks of this school year though.  So we've decided to just freestyle it like we always do until further notice.  This seems to be the most effective way of helping Jacob because there's no way of predicting what will cause a meltdown.  Hopefully next year he'll improve more, he has every year so we're remaining positive.

On a positive note, we took Jacob to McDonalds for the first time in his life.  And he actually ate the Danino yogurt, which was also a first.  So we're quite pleased with how the day turned out.  And as usual, all the anticipation of a school meeting was for not.  Because it wasn't really that bad as we've been to so many.  It's just hard to hear other people talk about our son, even though we know what they're saying is true.