Our Life With An Autistic Child: Week 149

Week 149

Over the past few weeks, we have commented about how Ryan has been losing his patience. A perfect example of this is when he was on Raz-Kids this afternoon. This is an online reading program that his elementary school uses to promote reading. The program lets you select a book, listen to it, read it aloud, (but if you get stuck on a word, you can sometimes click on it and have it read that word back to you) and then take a quiz. The better you do on the quiz, the more stars you get. You can then trade in those stars to build a space ship. Ryan usually loves this program but today was not the case. He got so frustrated not knowing the word that he stormed out of the room, screaming that he quits Raz-kids and started slamming different objects with his fists in the living room. We had to send him to his room to calm down.

Last week, we spoke to his counselor at school and she is noticing an increase level of frustration on Ryan's part, and said that she noticed his anxiety level is much higher this year than last. She gave us a recommendation of a therapist that works with children to see Ryan outside of school. We called on Friday and hopefully they will call us back early next week.

We have also noticed that Ryan seems to be bouncing from one thing to the next more frequently. He will come to me to download a game on the IPhone or IPad then 5 minutes later come back to download a different game. But on the flip side, he sat this weekend with Dawn's mom and made 24 craft crosses that say God/Love, and also watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 7 times. He was obsessed with it. The moments of repetitiveness verse moments of ADD is all so confusing to us and hopefully we can get Ryan to see someone soon.

However, it was not all bad news this week. A few times this week, Ryan came home from school only to play school with Julia. He made up several math problems for Julia to do "in class". He was very good at teaching and congratulating Julia when she got the answers correct.