Our Life With An Autistic Child: Week 130

We had a good week with Ryan. He seems to be settling in with the bus and we have received nothing but good reports from school. He had a spelling test this week and he spelled 9 out of 10 words correctly. For one of the words he wrote a q instead of a p. We are still seeing some fairly wild behavior at home but it appears that he is keeping it all in at school and letting us have it at night!

Homework is something that we are doing but it is still a struggle. He gets frustrated quickly and wants to throw the pencil down and leave the kitchen table. He eventually completes the work but he wastes more time complaining about doing the assignment than it takes to complete the assignment. Writing is still something that he tries to avoid but we are working on it both here and at school. It is getting better but it is something that we have to carefully plan and make sure he does when he is in a good mood. We are getting better. We were watching Julia's soccer practice and waiting for Ryan's to begin and he got a big kick out of doing his homework on a clip board outside. Not sure if that will work again, but it worked on a busy night.

We had another crazy Saturday morning with Religion ending at 10:30 and soccer beginning at the same time. We thought that Ryan would have a difficult time coming to soccer late but he has taken it in stride. He is perfectly fine coming in late to the game and it is not effecting him at Religion. He is even taking to the Religion classes extremely well. We thought that we would have to convince/drag him to class every Saturday morning but he is excited to go. We were also worried that he would not be able to make it for the 90 minutes. We keep getting good reports from the two volunteer parents that are teaching the class. And on the soccer front now Ryan only wants to play on the field that I am coaching on. If you recall last year, he did not want to play on the field that I was coaching on and it took a great deal of convincing to get him on my field. This past weekend the other coach and I decided that we are going to switch fields at half time to work with all of our players. Ryan did not want to switch to the other coach and insisted that he stay with me. Luckily another player also did not want to switch and insisted that he stay with the other coach. It made it easy but it also reminds me that for even simple changes of schedule I still have to prep Ryan.

Ryan has made such progress from when we started this blog that I sometimes forget how difficult it was in the beginning. We have been very lucky with Ryan and all of the progress that has made over the past few years. The forgetting to prep him for the coaching change was one thing and another was at a Birthday party this weekend. We have been letting Ryan cheat when he goes to birthday parties. When it came time for cupcakes one of the young girls handed Ryan a plain cupcake! The other cupcakes were all decorated and he was upset because the girls were asking the other party guests which one they wanted and Ryan did not get a choice. He got upset and ran out of the room. Dawn had to go get him, calm him down, and ask him why he was upset. Luckily he was able to tell Dawn why he was upset and was able to return to the room and get another cupcake.

Below are some pictures of this week's events.