Second Day of school and Meet the teacher, so far so good

Today was the second day of school, and after school was "Meet the teacher" in which we were in attendance.  This year the students exchange classrooms and during registration we requested that David not be placed in class with his cousin.  The school did comply with that request but they informed us that the students have their own schedules so they may have a class together.  They didn't change any classes yesterday but they did today.  The first thing that David said when he got off the bus was "guess what class I had today?"  We made a few guesses then he excitedly exclaimed "Science!"  The way the schedule works they alternate between Social Studies and Science on Mondays, then they have Social Studies on Tuesday and Thursday and Science on Wednesday and Friday.  We asked him if he had any homework and then he said "no, but you guys have some" and then we asked him if he had any classes with his cousin and he told us that she was in all of them except home room.  They don't do anything in homeroom except for wait for the first class to start so the attempt to keep them separated so David wouldn't be tempted to talk and be distracted during class sort of failed.  They said that if we wanted to we could call the school and try to have the schedules changed but David really likes his science/social studies teacher and if we have him change schedules he may get put in a different class so we are just going to not worry about it unless things get out of hand.  He should be fine.  He told us that they sat on completely different sides of the classroom so the separation should be good enough.  During meet the teacher David showed around and introduced us to the teachers that he had today.  He was most excited to introduce us to Mrs. Bollinger, the science teacher, however we already knew her from when we were in school as she coached my wife in basketball and I just seen her in the halls.  I really hope that she takes a liking to him since science is David's favorite subject and she should because David is a really likeable boy, however she also teaches social studies which David shows less interest in but it is still one of his strong subjects.  When he introduced us to her she said "I know David pretty good, I asked everyone to tell me what made them think of science and David gave me a lot of examples then at the end he said 'I could go on but I don't think we have enough time left for that.'"  She told us that story with a smile on her face and I think that first impression was a good start for David and I hope the rest of the school year is just as good.  David's second favorite room was the Language arts room, mainly because of the little reading nook in the back of the room with a bean bag chair and a few other chairs, David really loves to read.  We informed her about David's reading levels but also explained a section of his IEP in which he may need extra time to write out his answers.  He has great answers when he has to recite them but when it comes to putting the words from his brain to the paper it is hard on him because of his lack of fine and gross motor skills and his processing delay, both results of his asperger's.  She seemed to be very understanding of that and she also seemed to enjoy the presence of David in her class.  I am really glad that he has already made a positive impression on the teachers in just the two short days that he has been there.  It is going to be a great year.  We are very supportive of David and I believe the teachers have noticed that already.

First day at a new school went pretty well.

Well, today was David's first day at his new school.  It seemed like he had a hard time sleeping last night, either because he was excited or nervous or a little of both.  He didn't get into his bed until around 10:00 PM last night, we usually put him in bed by 9, and instead of going straight to sleep he decided to read a book until a little after 11 PM then around 11:30 he got up to go to the bathroom and he didn't actually all asleep until midnight.  My wife and me had the alarm set to wake him at at 7:00 AM, however he woke himself up at a quarter til seven, got dressed and came downstairs and put on "Star Trek" on Netflix.  David usually never wakes up that early for school, and for the most part it is usually a struggle for us to get him out of bed in the morning so I was surprised about this morning's routine.  I think he wanted to get in an episode "Star Trek" before school, as he started watching the old episodes since he found out they were on Netflix, but there may have been other reasons.  He seemed excited about starting the year at a new school.  I'm sure he'll miss his friends from his old school but he didn't show it.  I know when I started at a new school in second grade I was extremely nervous especially since it was part way into the school year.  David has two cousins that go to that school, the one is in high school now but the other one is in his grade and they've been close since they were born and I think that's why David was excited about the new school because he would get to see his cousin.  He also got to see some of the kids that he already met and befriended from the baseball and soccer seasons, so I think his transition was probably easier than mine because he knew people whereas I didn't.  My wife was nervous all day and anxious for him to get home to find out how his day was and I assured her that LaBrae is a great school and everything will be fine.  David got off the bus a little after 4:00 PM, which I'm hoping was a first day thing because that is late to get home, and we asked him how his day was.  He said that he had a good day and that he read a Goosebumps book.  My wife asked if he went to library today, which he has been excited about since he seen the size and number of books available, and he told us "no, that's what the teacher had available, if we went to library I would have gotten something bigger and better than that."  David loves to read.  Today was his first day of fourth grade and last school year during an assessment toward the end of the year his reading level was at 7.2 which is equivalent to seventh grade second month.  Although he is in a different classroom than his cousin he did get to see her during recess and he said that she made him a little leery of a boy named Dalton even though he thought Dalton was a good kid.  He told us "I think she was just mad at him because he broke up with her."  David really seemed to enjoy his fist day of school and we were glad.  Hopefully tomorrow and the rest of the school year goes just as good.  Tomorrow is the school open house so maybe we will get the chance to speak with his teacher.  Naturally there is no homework on the first day of school, except for the parents, but I'm a little anxious to see how the homework issue goes down this year as it has been a real struggle in the past.  Overall David had a good day at school and we were able to get him in bed by 9:00 tonight.

School starting in a few days.

Another school year is about to start on Tuesday however this year will be a little different.  We have moved school districts and although we decided to let David stay at his former school for the remainder of last year we have also decided that he would be going to his new school at the beginning of this school year.  My wife and me are both graduates of the school that he is going into so that makes me a little more comfortable with it because I know the organization and I know they are a great school.  Change is hard on aspies however, hopefully, we have made that change easier.  When baseball came around David knew that he was going to be changing schools so he wanted to play for the new school's team to meet people that he will be going to school with, his cousin also goes to this school so he knows a few of the kids already.  One change that we may have not been able to adapt to is the class size, at his former school they averaged 40-50 kids per grade and in the new school at least 100 per grade.  They do have more teachers to accommodate the larger number of students so the class sizes are the same.  This year they will be exchanging classes and each kid has their own schedule they are supposed to follow and this is something that David has not had to do before, they did exchange classes for a couple of subjects at his old school but they did it as an entire class so this means that their will be different kids in each different class that he goes to so hopefully he can adapt to that.  We have met the fourth grade special education teacher and took him for a tour of the school to get him used to it because we felt this would be better to do now rather than when school starts that way he won't be too overwhelmed.  The teacher that he has this year is a first year teacher, my wife had a little concern about it but I told her that he will be fine because I feel since she is a first year teacher then she has to establish and prove herself so she would probably work extra hard to achieve that status, hopefully I'm right.  The only other concern that I have is with the events that unraveled at the end of the last baseball season, hopefully not many of the kids from the team will remember the incident and I don't think many of them even knew what happened.  David was still included and involved with those children and they welcomed him and played with him so hopefully they will treat him the same way at school.  I know that David likes friends, as most aspies do, but the reason why we seem that we don't care is because it's hard for us to make friends and usually takes a while to warm up to someone before opening up to them, or at least that's how I feel when it comes to making friends.  Overall I believe that we have took all the precautions to make the change easier on David and we are hoping for support from the school and looking forward to another great school year.

Aspies generally have high pain tolerance, or total disregard to pain

I've noticed that high pain tolerance, or just total disregard to pain is a common thing amongst aspie and autistic people and this may be a scary thing.  David and myself both have high tolerance to pain and have disregarded many things however the reason I am bringing this up now is because David, who is nine, had an incident a few days ago that should have received more treatment reminded me of an incident that I had when I was eight years old.  David stayed the night at (great) grandma and grandpa's house and we didn't pick him up until later on the next day so we were not there when he got hurt we only heard about it.  David fell and got a gash in his leg and then he told grandma about it and then told her that he was going to bandage it up.  Grandma said that she only got a quick glance at it and it didn't look too bad and she thought that it was just a small scratch but when we took off the bandaging later on there was a huge gash in his leg about 1/4" wide and 2" long and it looked deep but he handled it and said he was fine.  The incident that happened to me when I was eight actually happened during my eight, and final, birthday party as this was the first party at the new house all of my cousins and aunts and uncles were there and since I knew the landscape I thought that everything was so cool and had to show my cousins around.  There are two ponds on the property separated by a two foot strip of land so I decided that I would walk them between the narrow strip of land and halfway through I slipped and fell and landed onto a broken piece of glass about an inch deep and across however I just stood right back up and instead of instinct telling me to take the glass out common knowledge told me to leave it in for if I had taken it out it would have started to bleed and then would have mostly caused panic and drew attention on me and probably got me a hospital visit.  The last thing that I wanted was to have to go to the hospital because my parents agreed to let my aunt and uncle take me back home with them and stay for a couple of days and I was excited about that since we moved quite a distance away I haven't seen them for about six month before that and I was used to seeing them at least once a week.  Nobody was able to notice the glass in my ankle as I was able to keep it fairly concealed and the only way that someone found out was when I was at my cousins house my aunt made me take a bath, after about twenty minutes she came in to give me a towel and tell me to get out when she my ankle and asked what was in it and I told her nothing and that's when she proceeded to take out the glass and blood came spewing out so we had to gauze it up and of course she had to call my mom to tell her about it, they were both panicky and furious about the situation and all I could remember thinking is what's the problem, it's no big deal, it doesn't hurt and it's bandaged up now just let me hang out with my cousins.  I ended up staying that night and one extra night with them before coming home when my parents actually seen the  wound and thought it needed more treatment when I convinced them that it only needed clean band-aids and some neosporin.  That is the story of me and why I didn't tell anyone, as far as David's reasoning I'm not sure about other than I'm guessing that he just wanted to keep playing and wanted to go swimming and we may have not let him if we knew exactly how bad it was.  Those are just a couple of examples of the more severe pain tolerance that we have overcome however there have been many more instances in which in most cases would have ended up in emergency room visits but not in ours.  This may be a scary situation for parents of autistic children because of our total disregard to pain and injury you never know how bad something truly is because we don't know how bad it truly is and can't answer truthfully on the pain scale, and although we've had many minor incidents there could have been more severe ones.  The other issue is that most aspie and autistic children crave impact as a form of release and I have burnt myself a few times to let out some pressure because I actually like the pain, I have not seen David doing anything that severe yet other than just throwing himself on the ground however he is still only nine and I haven't started doing anything more severe until my teenage years.  I have never done any cutting or anything more severe than burning however all people are different in ways of releasing their tensions so I am going to say it would be best to find alternate measures of stimming at a young age before having to deal with it during the adolescent years as many studies indicate that those are the most critical years as far as rage, violence and self inflicted pain.  I don't want to scare anyone however I also don't want anyone to be surprised if your aspie or autistic child goes through these phases.

which activity is best for your aspie?

As many of you are aware from previous postings David is not the greatest baseball player and this year was a little different being on a new team with a new coaching staff.  The coaching staff that he had at Lordstown was great and was more about having fun rather than winning and David enjoyed being on that team a lot better because there was less pressure and more fun being on the team however that was not the case this past season and midway through the season he started to lose interest in the game thusfore making his performance worse.  I'm not sure if that is because of the  coaching or the change in atmosphere but at this time I am thinking it was the  coaching.  Midway through the baseball season they had soccer sign-ups in which David requested that we sign him up for so we immediately did so as he generally doesn't make requests like that however he always had more fun playing soccer than baseball.  Since the end of the baseball season David took a liking to two different sports in which he has been excelling in which include soccer and archery.  This year during summer fun days at Lordstown they offered a course in archery and this was David's first try at it, he immediately took a liking to it that during the second half of fun days he begged to drop the course that replaced archery to get back into it.  During the Trumbull County fair this year they had a station set up with targets and people set up with bows and arrows to teach the kids how to shoot and David spent a good 45 minutes there shooting at the targets until he got tired, and even once he was tired he kept wanting to go on however we made him take a break.  He was explaining to us all the parts of the bow and how to shoot and we were very surprised at how much he enjoyed this sport so we told grandma and grandpa about it.  Of course, with grandpa having everything you can think of, he went out to the barn and pulled out and old re-curve bow and an old compound bow and all we had to do was clean them up and wax the strings and buy a few arrows and some targets and David has been practicing ever since, however he is very particular about who he lets touch his re-curve and watching you like a hawk to make sure you are handling it properly when he lets you touch it.  That's about it for the archery, now at this time we are three weeks into the soccer season having only conducted practices so far and one scrimmage game with the season starting on Monday.  The coach seems a lot more fun and very kid oriented and quite helpful and David has taken a great liking to him so far and loves playing soccer.  He is a lot more team focused and participating a lot better than he ever did playing baseball and this could either be due to the coach making fun of the game or the fact that there is a lot less surprises when he's playing soccer.  In baseball there is a lot of guess work as to where the pitcher is going to put the ball, where a hitter is going to hit the ball and how the runners are moving on each play, in soccer there is a lot less guess work and more of going after the ball and getting the job done and I think that is more relaxing for David and makes it that much easier to get into the game.  So far David has been complimented many times on his defensive blocks and ball movement and that is something that never happened in baseball and that positive reinforcement helps him achieve more and keep getting better.  As for now David said he wants to stick to soccer and archery and doesn't want to do baseball anymore and we are fine with that as long as he is doing one sport to keep him busy it might as well be something that he enjoys doing however we will also let him make the final decision about playing baseball next year whether he wants to play or not.  The hardest choice for him is that he likes to be on a team and wants to hang out with friends however he doesn't want to play the sport anymore because he doesn't think he is that good and a lot of that was in part on how his coach treated him in the post season.  In closing what I am trying to say is if your aspie is not good, or just doesn't like one sport don't push him and force him to play it because that will not do them any good as they will not try if they are not interested or don't want to be there however don't let them give up on sports all together, just have them try out new sports or activities.  Even if there are no sports they want to participate in it is always good to have them focus on something they enjoy or love, in our case with David he loves archery so we will let him stick with that.  Maybe sports aren't something good for your aspie because of developmental levels they still may be good at art or music, and it is good to encourage them to strive in their strong suit because they need that outlet.  The more outlets they have the better off they are but don't choose their outlets for them as they are the only ones that know what they want to do so when they say "I want to do archery" or "I want to play soccer" or "I don't really want to play baseball or football I would rather be in the band" just listen to them and let them make that decision.  Thank you everyone for reading and I hope you have enjoyed the rest of my postings.