A lot of parents complain that their children watch too many cartoon shows. It almost seems to be a cultural thing of the modern day whereby cartoons and video games have truly taken over. But, do children truly spend too much time watching cartoons?
I got the boys off to school and went walking. When I got home, I was sitting in the living room with Lizze and Gavin. After a few minutes, Gavin jumped up out of his chair, picked up an invisible phone, said it was an emergency and ran into the kitchen to take a call. He had a very brief, but loud conversation before coming back into the living room and informing us that Ash (from Pokemon) was in trouble and needed his help. So to recap, he had an emergency call from an invisible, fictional person, on an invisible phone, sending him on a dangerous, imaginary mission. Did you get all that? He was pretty worked up by all this and had a sense of urgency in his voice.…
It’s difficult to explain the reasoning behind it, but the fact remains that our protective instinct kicks in when children are involved – even if you’re not a parent yourself. Most of the successful charities are to do with children. In fact, 53% of the public admit they would rather give money to a charity that looks after people – against 34% for charities that support animals.
Tonight's therapy was focused on Emmett and his struggles with frustration. There are a ton of moving parts to this situation and to further complicate things; we can likely add puberty to the mix as well. We think that we may have to adjust his ADHD meds as well. He's so incredibly impulsive, with excessive amounts of energy and it's becoming a bigger problem. It's not uncommon to require medication adjustments, especially during puberty. It's something we have to talk to his doctor about. What I want to do for the moment is to tighten things up at home. Emmett does so well in school, and I suspect, like many kids with Autism, the structure school provides a big help. We can mimic some of that at home. Perhaps that…
The boys had a great day at school today and that great day day quickly went downhill after arriving home. Lately, Emmett has been struggling in the coping with frustration area of his life. He goes from zero to full-on rage in nothing flat. While he has legitimate reasons to be frustrated, the issue at heart is his inability to cope with said frustration. I think part of the problem is that while he loves school and does remarkably well, it's also very taxing on him. When he gets home from school, he sorta crumbles. What we have to do is find a way for him to more constructively manage these emotions. We have some tools at our disposal and we need to get him back into using them on…
We had to get Ruby into the vet because we were concerned about her stitches and what looked like recent bleeding. This is what we were looking at. Turns out she's actually okay. That's a big relief. ☺ She did mess up one of the stitches but the incision is still closed and she's not bleeding. She's a very, very, very, very high energy dog and even sedated, she's too active. That causes the muscles to tighten and fluid to seep out a little bit. That's my takeaway from our appointment. She's in good shape but she needs to be inactive. Unfortunately for her, that means she's going to continue living in her kennel until next Monday. She needs her rest because she needs to heal. We're going to put…
The boys got off to school after a rough start to the day. They were at each other's throats before they were even dressed for the day. That said, they made it to school, albeit a bit later than normal but in a good mood. I got my morning walk done and was just settling in to get some writing when Lizze noticed a problem with Ruby. Ruby was fixed about a week ago and has been sedated and living in her kennel, with her cone of shame because she's just too crazy. Unless she's physically in our lap, she's too hyper and she's not allowed to be until next week. It appears that she's popped at least several stiches and there's been some recent bleeding. It also looks like…
One of the things Autism parents have to frequently deal with is bad days. Good lord, I have plenty of those and I'm sure many of you can relate to that as well. If you can't, please share your secrets to life because I could definitely use them. 😉 While I won't go into my day, mostly cause I've already written about (see here), I do think it's important that share how I'm cooing with it. Some bad days are worse than others. Today was somewhere in the middle but it really got under my skin and I feel like I wasn't coping well. I was just sorta festering and that's never a good thing. I don't think I noticed it as much at first because I was going nonstop,…