Week 4

OK. So I skipped a few. Shoot me.

Overall, things are very uneventful though. We are not having the crying of last year at all. I also am spending so little time with him that I can't say if any improvements have been seen. Sigh. The life of a full time working mother.

The CDs for the past two weeks were working on the sensory integration spectrum. So we should have been seeing less of the fingernail clipping behavior of a previous post. We should also be seeing more comfort with touching, hearing, smelling, etc. I can't tell you if any of this is going on because he spends 8 hours a day with someone else and only 4 awake hours with me. Most of those hours are rushing through tasks to get him out of the house on time or get him to bed on time.

What I have seen is that he is very tired at the end of his days. Too tired. But camp is very busy. He is also somewhat oppositional. He thinks that having an attitude shows that he is grown up. Reports from camp also label him as a bit uncooperative. We have talked to them about his fear of looking bad and his inability to understand verbal directions. So hopefully, he will improve there.

He has been doing lots of reading. He was picking up piano very quickly this spring, but we had to drop lessons because we can't get him home from camp in time. So we will begin those again in the fall.

He is also getting much more serious about Karate now that he is preparing for his black belt test. We have seen lots of improvement in his ability to move. He still seems stiff, but he's making progress.

The bike? Maybe we will actually get him on the bike again this summer.

Sensory issues

Today, we had to cut Firstborn's finger and toenails for him. We encourage him to take this task on himself, but he is hit or miss with it. He would rather wait 6 weeks between trims, we would rather wait two.

So after fighting with him for a few moments, DH finally asked why it was such an issue.

Firstborn: I don't like getting my nails short. When I touch fabric like my clothes, I get all tingly when my nails are short.

What can you say to that. He clearly experiences the world differently. I know I feel different when my nails are freshly cut. Like I can feel things I was not able to feel before. In reality, a different part of my finger is sensing the input and my brain is not used to getting input of that sort from that part of my fingers. It does surprise me. Maybe it even feels weird for an hour or two. But tingly? Not the way I would describe it.

I like when he describes his sensations. It helps me understand why his reactions seem to be so out of phase with what I think he should be experiencing.

Week 1 report

Week one saw the completion of CD 1. Conveniently, DH and Firstborn have a 1/2 hour commute to work/camp. So it is easy for DH to instruct Firstborn to turn on the CD player. The handy Sony stereo remembers where you turned it off last time and starts from there for the next turn, so Firstborn doesn't even need to know how to start at song 6 for his second and 4th day of listening.

This is a warm-up type of CD with no severe or consistent changes to the music, so we expected no changes in Firstborn. We did get some crying fits by Thursday, but camp has been very tiring and somewhat draining since he is making new friends and figuring out new rules. We will not associate the crying and defiant behavior to the listening. Yet.