This is just a vent.

[PeterPan]

1. Ds has been in a foul mood for days and I'm not sure why. I've tried everything I know. All that's left is maybe he's *angry* about this shut down and things he's missing and can't verbalize. Sigh. I don't know.

2. Adjectives suck. Ds doesn't have sensible adjectives connected to nouns for things. If he can SEE the thing, he does better. Like ask for adjectives about his t-shirt, boom lots of answers. Ask for adjectives about the ocean or a monster, you're toast. I'm like come on, you play Zelda and there are monsters in there. Nope, I still get bizarre answers.

So that's all. There's so much good. But as always, we get stuck on the bad. He's doing really well with a non-verbal check-in sheet Kelly Mahler developed. I made an independent work station in his office AND a hidden/calming area, which I had never managed to make happen all in one space. He now has 6 distinct work zones. I ordered some more things to work on reading comprehension and I *think* he might be able to do one of them as independent work. I'm getting ready to set him up a memory notebook as independent work. He's been memorizing data/names/content lately. We just started learning the states and capitals. He's learning the bones of the body. (Today we did distal phalanges, woo, woo!) I'm going to print off birds, mammals, sportfish, etc. for our state and have him memorize them a page a week. 

So much good, just that bit of bad. And I call up my dd and she's like WOW YOU'RE STRESSED. And i'm like of course I'm stressed! When he's not feeling right, spends the whole day grumpy, and has to be worked with a page at a time, that's infuriating. Short fuse, the whole nine yards. And I don't know why. Oh, and I tried pulling him off the anxiety med to see if *that* was the problem. Nope, then I just had an agitated, anxious kid on top of this. I think it's something in his head, I don't know. Maybe it's part of his growing and not really a clinical/disability thing at all? I'm putting more limits on him, tightening down youtube a bit, that kind of thing. 

I'm going to go lift weights. Maybe that will help. I should have bought a slam ball and I didn't. I need some intensity like the steam room.

[PeterPan]

Well I think we may have found a solution. I had been giving him more niacin, but dd pointed out to me, what I apparently didn't realize or had forgotten, that niacin was ultimately going to pull down serotonin levels leading to even higher dopamine. So we ditched the added niacin and upped the 5HTP. So far so good, with a jolly boy for 1 ½ days. I don't know if it's perfect, but he's better than he's ever been. So not a sign of aggression, able to tolerate some frustration. He had a great session with his SLP, talked the whole time, and was able to say he needed a break when we were doing a hard worksheet. (That's pretty wow for him.)

I think the stress of this killed my system, because my temps were 1 ½ degrees low this morning, oops. But if he stays well and I can bounce back, then we're really good. 

We had a picnic lunch on a blanket, which he enjoyed, and I sinned about bought store made cookies, something I never do, lol.

This is two good sessions that he's had with this particular SLP. She's relatively local, so if the shut down ends and we have to go to in person services he could actually go there and do sessions with her. If we build his stamina and pair him with some more people there before the tele option ends, then I could drop him off for a longer block which could be really cool. Or crazy, haha. But it's fun to think about. I always try to work toward goals like that, even if they flop. Before when we tried blocks with a drop off he'd get stressed and flip out. So a lot would have to come together to make that a good idea. 

Anyways, things are a little better. I just wish it hadn't zapped me. My memory was going, everything. 

On the plus side, we started watching the Sound of Music last night and he enjoyed it. We got through the first half before bed, so we'll try to watch the rest tonight I guess.

[Kanin]

How are things this week? 🙂

 

[PeterPan]

1 hour ago, Mainer said:

How are things this week? 🙂

 

That's so sweet of you to ask! Today was a good day! It was the last day with one of our SLPs, the one we've been with for a year, and ds went out with a bang. She was so sweet and easy to work with, sigh. She had been teaching him to do random acts of kindness, so today he came up and gave me a hug and then gave me a sweet note he had written. (It said "hi mom" in nicely written big letters.) 

We've been working our butts off trying to figure out how to balance the side effects from the anxiety med. Too much of the thing to drop the dopamine drops the attention, and it was hard to get a balance with how much anxiety much (which also ups dopamine) and then how much of another thing to take that down. Ugh. But we *may* have it right for now. And the timing, what time to do each thing. 

So actually it's going better and really looking up! We're going through great amounts of speech material and he has been doing 8 sessions a week with therapists online. Even if he was throwing some or parts of some, that's still a lot. And our bar has really been going up on walk in the room, just do it. So that has been really good.

I'm doing pretty well. I'm lifting a dab, taking the anxiety med, trying to stay out of trouble. It's kind of a quandry for me because I think it may have some side effects like affecting my thyroid. I'm not sleeping as well, so I'm up late not tired and then rising in the morning not rested. So I don't feel like I want to feel, but he's doing better. I had kind of hoped I would work out extra during this time and lose weight, and instead I either sit dead or eat chocolate, oops.

The language push is going really well. I think after we get through the Spotlight series we'll start the HELP book. It had always been way too hard for him, but I think he'll be ready for it. And after we get through that or as we balance that out, I want to start working on reading comprehension. I'm collecting new workbooks and open to more options, hehe. It's always sort of the elephant in the room. But I figure hey let's amp language and see what that allows us to take up with reading. Meanwhile I have social stuff from Timberdoodle. I'm reading a sort of involved article right now on emotional language development https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/102/Supplement_E1/1272  It seems to me that we're not systematic enough or targeting developmental progressions for emotional language the way we are narrative, social thinking, etc. We just plop terms at them. So I'm trying to dig in and see if there's anything I can figure out, anything useful about how to do this better or get more click or even just why it doesn't click. He's *starting* to use emotional language. The article is kind of interesting. It's suggesting we use a limited range of terms and then stretch to elaborate or explain discrepancy. This idea of discrepancy is interesting. He also points out what hadn't hit me, that emotion words that lead to problem solving are typically NEGATIVE. I thought that was a really profound point. 

So I need to finish looking into it, but that idea of discrepancy (no, I don't feel that way I feel this way), the power of the language, the cognition and the wanting to use it to connect with social, these are all important components. So then how could we use them to teach better. Cuz frankly lots of people have tried lots of ways, so I need a better way, lol. And if there's a developmental progression for narrative, why not emotional language? Just makes sense to me.

[PeterPan]

Oh, I guess I could explain. We pulled back on the niacin and upped his 5HTP instead. It seems to be working better and is more stable than using the niacin. So then the trick was finding the right dose on the 5HTP. Adding in morning and evening 100mg time release left him hyper. Then we tried only the 100 mg at night and he was too grouchy during the day to work with. So now we're doing an extra 100mg at night and 50mg (not time release) in the morning. It's an obscene total amount, but he's now really zen and calm and can comply and be worked with pretty much all day.

So that's why it was such a mess, because we were trying to combat the dopamine to keep him on the anxiety med. It's worth the effort, because he's SO much easier to live with now. And he's taking a really stupid tiny dose on the med btw. Like I think the lowest pediatric dose of his med is 5mg and we cut that tablet in half and administer twice a day. Many kids his age/size would be taking a much higher dose. I think it shows how very close we were. But it's also astonishing how little it takes to make the aggression go off the charts. Just the dopamine bump from that tiny amount and he's dangerous.

[Kanin]

On 5/12/2020 at 5:07 PM, PeterPan said:

That's so sweet of you to ask! Today was a good day! It was the last day with one of our SLPs, the one we've been with for a year, and ds went out with a bang. She was so sweet and easy to work with, sigh. She had been teaching him to do random acts of kindness, so today he came up and gave me a hug and then gave me a sweet note he had written. (It said "hi mom" in nicely written big letters.) 

We've been working our butts off trying to figure out how to balance the side effects from the anxiety med. Too much of the thing to drop the dopamine drops the attention, and it was hard to get a balance with how much anxiety much (which also ups dopamine) and then how much of another thing to take that down. Ugh. But we *may* have it right for now. And the timing, what time to do each thing. 

Despite losing your great SLP, it sounds like things are going better! That's wonderful. I like the random acts of kindness 🙂.