Managing Autism - A Personal View

“Stick by rules and we can’t go wrong”….. famous last words…..

Last week was the Kindergarten Christmas Party - the much anticipated event of the year at the Preschool, and of course, Jack was excitedly anticipating it as much as any other child at the Preschool.

As many of you would remember from a recent post, we had made the decision this year to ‘re-structure’ our holiday social gatherings around the needs of an ‘autism spectrum disorder’ - translating to; be a little more ‘low key’ with our celebrations, and better plan and structure our outings.  However, with the Kindergarten Party being so high up on the ’social’ calendar for Jack, we relented on the ‘low key’ thing, and made the decision to face it head on.

So the afternoon of the Kindergarten Christmas Party arrives, and we sit down to review our plan for the occasion:

• We have been informed that Jack’s dietary needs (which are similar to some other children at the preschool) will be catered for, so we cross that off our list.
• We are very familiar with the layout of the Kindergarten yard (where the party will be held) so potential exit points are under control - cross this off the list.
• We have a schedule well organised - what time the party guests will arrive, what time food will be served, what time Santa will arrive, and what time we can leave - cross this off the list.
• We are familiar with many of the children at Kindergarten, so the guest list seems fairly manageable (as far as being a ’safe’ crowd) - cross this off the list.
• We have the yard marked out for supervision points - where we will position ourselves in order to have full view of every part of the yard so that if Jack is running (faster than we can keep up) we will still be able to fully supervise him and be by his side in a split second if needed, so we cross this off the list.
• Drinks and chairs are packed up next to Annie’s stroller (the preschool is within walking distance so we decide this will be a better option - takes out the extra issues that come with getting in and out of the car) and we are quietly confident all will go well.

Watching the clock closely, we plan our departure from home precisely to allow for the 5 minutes walking time to Kindergarten (allowing to arrive 15 minutes before the Party kicks off so that we can be settled in place before too many people arrive).

Sparing all the gory details of the Party, 1 1/2 hours later we arrived home, completely worn out and exhausted.  Have we learned our lesson?… hopefully yes (although how often do we forget again over time???).

According to Jack he had had a wonderful time at the party, but with the sensory overload of it all he had become totally hyper, had run nonstop to the point of causing himself nose-bleeds, and we had struggled to get any verbal instuctions though or have him make any form of eye contact.

We saw Santa briefly………. and did we eat?… well if you consider a sausage in bread (an Australian tradition to those of you wondering) on the run….. that was about it before we finally made our ‘well executed’ (considering the mayhem around us) exit, dragging 2 exhausted children home.

Now what was that about “low key”?….. famous last words!!!

Steve

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 12:41 am and is filed under Christmas, Dad's View, Personal Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.