Managing Autism - A Personal View

What a week!

We had a lovely night away - the kids coped really well away from their normal routine (although at sleep time Anna kept telling us she wanted to go home now!).  The return home was a little more of a challenge though, it was almost as though they crashed after making it through the 24 hours of ‘new’ things.  The kids were both a little unsettled getting back into the normal swing of things, but luckily enough today they have woken fresh and settled.

Jack’s first day of school transition happened this time last week, and was a roaring success - better than we could ever have anticipated.  As do most children with autism, Jack struggles with change, and often finds it difficult meeting new people and getting used to new settings and environments.  Thankfully our months of preparation leading up to the official transition program paid off.

I think I have mentioned before that we had been taking Jack to school regularly for short visits - starting with simply walking around the outside of the school grounds out of school hours, slowly working up to walking through the buildings and classrooms during lesson time, to the ‘big one’ where Steve spent a lunchtime with him sitting in the playground when it was full of kids (and of course, loud, busy, and extremely stimulating!!!).

On arrival at the school for the transition day Jack was very ‘hyped’.  Before we entered the school building I had to grab his hand to slow him down and sure enough this resulted in a ‘minor’ meltdown, but a short time later we were on our way in, and Jack settled very quickly whilst joining the other children in the classroom.

I was very anxious about leaving Jack on his own in the new surroundings, and Steve and I had discussed prior to the day that if he showed any anxiety at all about us leaving we would stay in the room with him for the duration of the session.  But within about 10 minutes he happily said goodbye, knowing that we would be having morning tea with the other parents in the hall across the other side of the playground.  I was absolutely amazed at the way he settled in - perhaps the couple of familiar faces of other children from Kindergarten helped!

I watched the clock for the entire 1 1/2 hours that he was without us, wondering if he was okay, and hoping that if something went wrong the teacher would be able to manage.  But when we arrived back at the classroom, his teacher told us that he had managed extremely well, and hadn’t shown any major signs of being overwhelmed with any of the activities or other people.  Things couldn’t have gone better!  On leaving the school Jack wanted to know if he could go back again the next day, so we also took that as a really good sign!

The next official transition day is in a week’s time, so we will be keeping up our preparation - but so far all is looking well for another good day to come.

Elissa.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 5:07 am and is filed under 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.