Managing Autism - A Personal View

We posted a couple of weeks ago about the fact that we had had a meeting with our local organisation that facilitates respite care for families in our area.  We were hopeful that a carer would be organised for Jack, giving us a couple of hours break a week.  We were looking forward to being able to have some one on one time with Anna, and a break from the intensity of life that comes with parenting a child with an autism spectrum disorder.

Well, we ’struck gold’ with a fabulous carer who will have Jack for 2 hours a week.  The organisation had suggested a male carer for Jack (to give him another strong male role model - obviously he has Steve, but all the other adults in his normal day to day life are female), and so we met the suggested carer for the first time last week, when he visited us at home.

Jack took to the carer really well (it helped that the carer had children at home with a Playstation, so he was able to ‘talk Playstation talk’ with Jack), and Jack was more than happy when we suggested that the carer might take him out for an afternoon play.

As we approached the afternoon outing this week, we were a little nervous as to how it would all go - Jack agreeing during a ‘play session at home’ to have an outing with the carer was very different to actually ‘going’ with carer when he arrived to collect him.  But thankfully all went well.  We breathed a sigh of relief at the successful pickup, and an even greater sigh of relief when he arrived home happy and quite relaxed.

Jack now has a 2 hour weekly session scheduled with the carer, and within the next couple of months we will be looking at joining him into a program for school aged children - the group meets for 1 hour a week to take part in activities where they work on their social skills. 

It will be a matter of choosing the right time for him to join this group as they only take new children when the group is ready to cope with an additional person (and they have to ensure they don’t have personality clashes within the group).

So for the meantime, we’re all looking forward to our 2 hours a week - Jack’s excited about his outings (even if it’s only to play Playstation elsewhere) and we’re excited about having some down time.  We should all be feeling more relaxed as a result!

Please also take a look at Jack’s Post below!!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 6:24 am and is filed under Respite, 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.