NobbyNobbs

ahh, yet another 'system' that penalises the intelligent and responsible. if you always do your work properly you should always achieve your predicted grades and no higher... and why should someone who is predicted A* and gets it get less of a reward than someone who messed around in class and was predicted a D, who then bothers to pay attention in the test and does better. i think i'd have been paying money back to the school. after missing most of year 11 i *only* got As and Bs

a lot of adults become lactose intolerant as they grow older as the body naturally reduces its production of lactase (which processes lactose) in adulthood. there is a brand of lactose free dairy products available in supermarkets now that are fab. they do milk, yogurts, cheese, cream cheese so far, so it shouldn't be too hard to substitute things in your diet. small amounts of lactose shouldn't pose you a problem as people who are lactose intolerant can usually tolerate very small doses of lactose (its in a lot of snacks including crisps) as it is an intolerance rather than allergy

somewhere, somewhen someone gave me a link to a resource of step-by-step guides to drawing basic pictures (house etc) does anyone know of the link? K has moved on to drawing pictures of things, but only faces. i want to help her to progress past faces, but she wont listen to me, so the guide needs to be on paper so she can 'do it for herself'

your Disability advisor should have put all the details of what you can/cant do into your jobseekers agreement, for example mine says things like distance of search X miles - reason for reduction disability, and also states quiet and no crowds as requirements. i think youre required to apply for any job that meets your agreement if they choose to push it. its in my agreement that i dont have to talk to potential employers, so if someone asks me why i haven't spoken to anyone or called companies i say they need to speak to the disability advisor if they have a problem with my job search. last fortnight i had an advisor that got very agressive with me because i refused to consider applying for a work-trial at mcdonalds, then when i said i had asked around about a different type of work he insisted i list everywhere i had asked, then demanded why i hadn't asked at a different place. if he calls me tomorrow i will ask to speak to the manager and refuse to deal with him. as for the looking for work log, i fill it in on the bus on the way to the jobcentre, and i put where i looked, what i found and what happened (usually look again or fill in application). i dont put dates because i dont fill it in when i do the stuff. ive got used to just putting set things in now, mostly looked in X, nothing suitable, check again. ive never had any hassle from doing that

with K (4) if we know it is a lie we very calmly say 'i dont think that is true' and if she insists we then say 'you can keep saying it if you like, but i know it is not true' then refuse to talk about it any more. if we find out after the event she was lying we tell her that we know she was lying and that lying makes us very sad. she was completely oblivious of her impact on anyone else before this, but now responds when we tell her something she has done has made us sad and we do the same with angry. we do a lot of emotion talking in general. a social worker once told us that society expects parents to be perfect, but if a child never sees you angry, how do they know how to deal with their own anger? so we will say things like 'you doing X has made me very angry. i want to go and sit quietly for a minute while i calm down' and then walk off which works very well. kids gradually learn to predict the emotional response to their actions and hopefully decide not to do it!

K was incredibly agressive and violent at her old nursery attacking the other children and systematically bullying a child with learning difficulties but i think she didn't realise it could be any other way. we're really worried about her starting school because we have to get it right or she'll be right back to square 1 and she'll be expelled (she was almost expelled from nursery which i didn't even know was possible!). she is already in line to get support in some form as shes on early years action plus, and the people involved with that are aware she will need help with the transition and managing her behaviour. we asked about a dx, its a no-go until shes started school apparently, so we just have to hang on and carry on 'evidence gathering'. shes under child developement too, so i think we're doing everything we can. the one thing i dont want to do is get so used to her behaviour that i stop seeing these problems. things like this help with that because i write the list and realise that some of the things we think are normal and progress aren't.

can you contact the uni and ask them how they suggest you get the GCSE in such a short time. if they have to work it out they might just realise how silly it is and say you dont have to do it or can do it another time. they have a duty to support you and if they say they can't help, contact the student union and speak to them as i'm pretty sure it would be not be popular for them to prevent you taking up your place because you started out in a different country. remember that all universities now accept vast numbers of international students, and none of them have GCSEs. you could try contacting the international office at our uni too. they might be a really good bet as they'll know all the procedures. its unlikely you're the first person to go to the uni from your country and they should know what happened with the last person.

i was going to post an update before, but had to edit what i wrote and didn't have time to fix it so here i go again... things are very very different now. Ks been at a new nursery for a term and is a completely different child. developmentally shes come on so fast you wouldn't believe. - she can now talk in proper sentences (when the mood suits her). - she has friends - she even got invited round to play the other day. - she will ask a question if forced, but has to be prompted 'that is not a question, think what you want and then ask me a question' - her physical development is much improved, shes put on weight, grown 3cms and can now run (very slow, on tiptoes) and can use a 3 wheeled scooter. she cant ride a bike with stabilizers (pedals) as this results in her sitting on it sobbing because its too hard, but is learning to use a balance bike. she can use a computer mouse accurately. - she is drawing pictures that have a purpose when before she would only scribble on a page not understanding drawings are meant to be of something - intellectually shes still obviously off the charts smart. the nursery are talking gifted child register. she can spell 3 letter words, and identify the starting letter of any common word, including those with soft sounds (flag etc), spots 3 letter words in writing and reads them behaviourally shes still an absolute nightmare, we get an average of 1.5 good days per 2 weeks which is exhausting. good days are days when she only needs time outs to manage her behaviour. on bad days she has to be put in her room for her own safety. she still flaps constantly. we're wavering on the edge of not knowing what to do now. if she carries on progressing then there can't be much wrong with her, but there are still an awful lot of worries. nursery give away the leftover cartons of milk on a friday and k loves to pick them up but when we get home she point blank refuses to drink it because it is nursery milk not home milk. we wind up hiding the cartons and putting it on her cereal when shes not looking! shes still incredibly sensitive to light and sound, she wears sunglasses almost all the time. nursery see nothing wrong with her beyond that they can't get her to do things as and when they ask, but acknowlege this must be a problem at home and will be a massive problem at school.

oops

it really does depend on area. west sussex has an adult HFA/AS unit which does assessments and that is NHS, hampshire also have a centre. it all depends on area. also dont underestimate that although the psychologist might not know the deeper details of AS, but they should be more than capable of telling if something is abnormal (deviations from the social norm are a core part of psychiatry/psychology). i was first seen by a psychologist who backed my need for an assessment, and that was just a 40 minute session where i talked. its very easy to dismiss things when you dont get the answer you wanted/expected but at the end of the day that person had to go through X years of training and has Y years of experience so they're not ignorant.

a lot of areas wont consider assessing until the child has started school as until then developmental milestones are too fluid for the higher functioning end of the autistic spectrum. friendship patterns also aren't developed until this point which can impact social functioning assessments. i think they use school as a standardising thing. from that point on all children are exposed to the same influences/opportunities etc, so they can truly see when there are problems. before then a child who had been kept at home will have far less social skills than a child who has been in toddler groups/nurseries for example so its harder to tell what is a dysfunction and what is simply something underdeveloped through 'neglect' we can't get an assessment for K until shes started school, but we make sure the Health Visitor is told of her antics regularly so that when the time comes all the information is on file. (we have at last count 5 social workers who have all independently said that she seems to be autistic, so we're pretty sure we're on the right track!)

i second the stomach bug thing. its a vicious beast and lingers for a very long time! i was crying in so much pain for 4 hours before i finally was sick (but then i have some serious stomach/abdominal issues that seemed to be making it worse) and i'm still not over it and its been a week now. K got it on sunday - she threw up in church! and my sister got it the same day but they weren't as bad as me. you should be able to see a doctor straight away as a visitor. it takes a 1 page form with your usual details filled in at the time of the appointment. you can then register in your own time. this happens all the time round here as its a big tourist area. here, you just go into the doctors, say you need to see a doctor that day as an emergency patient, and that you're not registered there.

thanks. i've put my medication in my room in a tissue box next to my bed, hopefully K wont find it as all medications are meant to be kept in a locked box according to social services rules the Mind advocate was great, went through my forms and told me i had answered all the questions well . ive got to update the answers and transfer it all to both change of circumstance and renewal forms (arrived at the same time), then gather up a load of evidence letters. she said it'll probably still go to tribunal again, but she'll go with me and deal with it. she thinks that the tribunal pannel i had before had no knowledge of ASDs and so couldn't understand the implications of it and couldn't get past the high Iq meaning i must be fine. off to reprint that fab NAS aditional information form now and actually feeling positive about it all.

ive worn glasses since i was 13, and every year my prescription changes. sometimes one eye gets better and the other worse, then they'll swap the next year, and some years they both get worse! last year i was sent away with a new lens strength and started getting awful headaches every time i wore the glasses (which i'm meant to do all the time), so i stopped wearing them. obviously this isn't ideal as i can't see properly without them, so i took them back to the opticians and explained i thought there must be something wrong... they checked the lenses were the ones they prescribed and sent me on my way telling me to put up with it until my eyes got used to it. my eyes didn't, so after a year i went back and demanded a new test as something obviously wasn't right. they did a test... and my prescription strength needed to be increased even further, but instead they reverted back to the last lens strength that hadn't given me headaches and said that was the best they could do, i'd have to put up with it being blurry because they didn't know why i was getting the headaches and since i didn't want to put up with them this was the best they could do. the only thing i can think of that is causing a problem with the testing (apart from me never being able to remember what A looks like when we switch to is the circle of little black dots where they ask which is clearer. my problem is the black dots dance all over the place while i'm looking at them, so neither is in focus! i know i have Irlen syndrome and was given blue overlays, but the opticians just ignored that and kept demanding i tell her which one was clearer until i just picked one. i assume the dots dancing is something to do with having ASD as i asked my family and none of them have this problem does anyone know what that test is for, and if that can be affecting my test results? i'm not happy with having a pair of glasses that dont actually fix my vision problems but dont know what to do as they said they didn't want to see me back for 2 years! they also did the pressure test on me 14 times in one eye on that visit, because they couldn't get it right, the next day i looked like i'd been punched in the face with two massive black eyes! they also referred me back to the doctor because my eye balls either swell or are pushed out with pressure behind which becomes very painful as they push against my eye socket, but the doctor said she didn't know and unless i could come in when it was happening there wasn't a lot she could do as she'd never heard of it happening before. its not just my imagination, it really panics my mom because she can see my eyeballs pushing further and further out until i can't blink properly and am in agony is this service correct?

that's really helpful. mine went to tribunal and the letter of reasons came back saying i should use all sorts of alarms to remind me to do an endless list of things (cooking, medication move from activity to activity etc) but the problem is i just wouldn't remember to set them in the first place! if i dont remember to look at the clock when i put something in the oven why would i remember to set an alarm? our house is large and i'm not always in the same place. an alarm in the kitchen wouldn't be heard in the living room/upstairs anyway and if it was in the same room i would panic until it went off as i hate noises like that. they also stated i should leave my medication out on the kitchen counter to remind me. we have a 3 year old in the house so thats just not an option! i'm redoing my forms with the help of a Mind advocate tomorrow, they're even coming to my house more ammo to get the level i should have

perhaps try to bring about a compromise with your ex by agreeing on some key points if you think it will be a problem. the biggest i would think is that even if your son does have AS he also HAS to learn to control his temper, as what he did is totally unacceptable even in those strange circumstances. i know a lot of people who fear labelling a child because it creates an environment of excuse where they can do whatever they like because they have X.

mine doesn't expire until 2011 so i dont know about renewing it, but to get it in the first place i took a letter from an educational psychologist into the council offices and highlighted the parts i thought relevant in front of them. i got it with no hassle and have no 'proper' learning difficulties and at that point had no diagnosis, only a statement on the report that said she felt i needed testing for it. i said i couldn't drive because of my problems. if i had been able to drive i would not have qualified as its meant for people who can't use their own transport.

i'm surprised they left them in her, my dentist seems to think his main job is to try and convince me i need my wisdom teeth out (mine do the same as mumbles, but so far have eventually dropped into place and straightened out... means months of very nasty ulcers though!). removal of wisdom teeth because they're causing other teeth to move is pretty common i think so this might be what your dentist will come back with

i wouldn't advise a rescue dog for anyone with children unless they're completely trained. we got a rescue dog who was supposedly just in need of some training (which we did), but wound up having to send him back to the rescue centre after he started pulling the kids off the climbing frame by biting their ankles! he stole everything and chewed it and although he was a lovely dog he just wasn't suitable for a family home. our other dog we had from a puppy and he was always well behaved because he was used to the way we do things. i think the most important thing to remember is you've got to be able to give up time to walk him, give up money to pay for food and vets and you've got to be willing to put him into a dog training class as soon as possible (or devote many many hours to doing it yourself)

as some of you might be aware i've had a lot of trouble with my local dotors surgery and have seen every single doctor while trying to get referred for my diagnosis - one of whom flatly denied autism existed and another who told me to go out and make some friends and then i'd be fine. i finally found a GP who listened, referred me (and of course i was positively dx'd) but now she is on maternity leave. this leaves me with the choice of the above two doctors. there are no other doctors surgeries within 10 miles, so i can't transfer to another one and i dont know what to do. the service at the surgery is pretty rubbish and i need to make an appointment to chase up two referrals that have been promised but not put through as well as a medication review, but there is absolutely no way i am going to see either of those doctors. does anyone know what i can do? i think i'm pretty justified in my refusal of both of them (the good GP even put in a formal complaint about the making friends comment) but with only a weeks medicine left i dont have a lot of time to work out my options if i even have any.

we give k liquid vitamin stuff, but only after she has been ill to boost her back up. she gets a reasonably mixed diet and doesn't need them every day, they can be very bad for you in excess. we do however give her omega 3 every day the chewy capsule kind as we know she doesn't get much of this in her diet and at her age its important for brain development. i would be very wary of giving him lots of different singular vitamins, as they tend to all be 100% RDA and he will already be getting him some naturally leading to an overdose which makes extra work for the kidneys/liver. you'd be better off giving him a childs vitamin as although this would be a reduced dose it is more than likely enough to top up what he already has.

i think you could be talking about K in your original post (shes 4yrs 1mth), the flapping being almost constant when she is stressed/excited. she's also under the child development team for speech/development problems. both the health visitor and camhs say they wont even consider looking towards any diagnosis until she has been in school for a term, as until that point it is hard to seperate unusual behaviours from autistic behaviours. if your son is doing ok in general i would mention it in passing to hv, but accept that you'll have to wait a while before any assessment can be considered. for k with food the thing that worked in the end was social eating with no pressure. if she refused to eat they just shut up her lunch box and left her, but she had to sit at the table until the other children had finished eating. gradually she started taking bites out of things, and we've gone from her taking one bite out of everything in her lunch box 3 weeks ago to eating everything in her lunch box 2 days running this week! of course i fully expect that next week she'll refuse it all again because that would just be too easy, but even a short burst of progress is something

she doesn't qualify for a CEA card unfortunately (i do, but i think i'd have a hard time convincing them she was my carer!) so saturday morning pictures is really the only option financially - a regular child ticket is £4.60 and an adult is £6 something so its just not viable to pay that if you might need to leave after a couple of minutes. i might go in and speak to the cinema manager about whether we can reserve a couple of seats in the front row because of disability as our cinema doesn't have assigned seating and saturdays are packed. that way we could skip the adverts and go straight into a nice calm film.

i have some experience with situations similar to this, and i agree with tally that it sounds like contact with his nan needs to be removed or restricted to visits when you are all in the room and she cannot talk to him unsupervised. reading between the lines i would think that he has been fed infomation which has manipulated his view of the family. it may not be intentional but if you ask a child 'has he hit you' or encourage them to tell you if there is ever a problem enough times they will start to answer yes just to please you as they start to think that this is the answer you are looking for. likewise if you suggest a person is no-good and bad often enough the child will start to parrot this belief (it happens so often in bad divorces). he may also have been told that if your husband hits him he can go live with his nan, and he is now at the point where he is delibrately creating an environment where this is more likely to happen to get what he wants. it will be difficult as i imagine you will have to take away his mobile phone, and he will need emotional support as well as he might genuinely fear his stepfather at the moment depending on how far this manipulation has gone. i would strongly urge you to contact SS to fill them in on the story and that you are following CAMHS advice in cutting contact before you do so, as it is likely she will contact SS straight away to claim all sorts of things. the one redeeming thing with SS is that they aren't stupid (understaffed, underfunded and sometimes uninterested for sure), and are VERY experienced in the type of manipulation going on here. in my experience (10+ foster placements) grandparents manipulation is the biggest risk for children after they come into care as it can become emotionally abusive. i draw the parallel to children in care because Marcus' nan is putting him in the same situation children in care are often in, playing one side of the family off as all to blame against the supposedly innocent side.

the problem with this is it is impossible to seperate events. jordansmums child obviously had a serious reaction to the vaccine, but it may well be that the prolonged fever and not the vaccine itself that caused the problem. i didn't have the MMR until i was 5 as it hadn't come in until then, and i was showing signs of autism long before that, so i think if it has any relationship it is a very loose one. it may be a catalyst for a kind of extended fever which can cause damage, but then any vaccination can do that. some children become ill after other vaccines, but because of this false report it is assumed that MMR is the big bad when i bet if they did a proper study of children who have severe reactions to early childhood vaccines a large number of them go on to be diagnosed with medical conditions/ learning difficulties etc. (i had a severe allergic raction to a hepatitis B vaccine a couple of years ago which would have been life threatening except it happened so fast i was still in the chair and the nurse started piling all sorts of drugs into me straight away, but it didn't do anything except make me ill)