NobbyNobbs

i dont know much about all of this but i would think the sticking point is that you took your son out of school and said that you could provide him with apropriate education. therefore other children who are in inapropriate education are higher priority than your son who is in theory getting the perfect education.

i would think if you continue to refuse to work with the job centre towards getting a job you will find your JSA stopped. they would be well within their rights if your agreement says that you will attend interviews, work full time etc. i fully understand how difficult these things are, and it may not be intentional but it does sound like you are being delibrately obstructive to the jobseeking process and not seeking to correct any misunderstandings about the work you are able to do. i would hate for you to lose the money you get so i think the best thing would be to go to your DEA and say you want a review of your agreement. i think they dont have to agree to things if they think you are capable of more though (i keep mine on my side by applying for lots of jobs... none of which i ever hear back from although thats not deliberate) if you use your academic commitments to refuse work they will also use that against you, as part of being entitled to JSA is that you are ready and willing to take up employment within your agreed hours/travel distance.

she's had her first assessment and we're looking at multiple developmental delays or disorders (speech and language, motor, emotional) plus severe social and behavioural difficulties and potential permanent disorders. they're drawing up a plan to massively increase her support (probably lots of 1-1) as well as speech therapy etc. i feel so sad for her. when she first came to us i posted in off topic about how clever she was and what sort of things should we be doing to nurture such a bright child. now all of that is slipping away and leaving behind an incredibly bright, incredibly frustrated little girl who will struggle her whole life. and the worst bit is she'd probably struggle less if she wasnt so clever now we're talking about statements and special schools and the shape of her whole life has changed.

we wont be adopting, we only foster and at the moment we dont know what her future looks like, its a very complicated case. i can't go into details of her case, but its safe to say all looked after childlren have significant mental health problems because of their situation. if there are some who aren't, ive not heard of them. we wont have access to mental health services for a good while yet, because it can do more harm than good. if we were to seek outside advice we would seriously annoy social services and thats never a good idea, so we'll follow the set path until that's exhausted, hopefully it'll work out. officially we can't do anything without her social workers consent anyway thanks for all the help everyone. apart from anything else i now have a pretty good list of concerns to take to her assessment.

noooo. LAC children are notoriously poorly treated by services. adoption pretty much runs along the lines of 'heres the child, off you go' and if they stay in care they generally are always refused access to CAMHS because they haven't been in placement long enough. then the placement breaks down because the kid isn't getting any help so they still can't access services. our current one has been refused CAMHS because she doesn't have the right kind of paperwork! the last ones were refused because 2 years in placement wasn't deemed 'stable' enough we were amazed we got the child development thing through so fast, we think probably because so many people agree something isn't right. if its just the foster carers saying the support is needed noone listens. a very sad situation, but there it is.

yes, this certainly is the case, but we're concerned that after 6 months in care shes making limited to no progress in areas that she should be progressing in. behaviourally, she is mostly as expected considering her previous life although she hasn't made any progress for about 3 months now. but developmentally she has made no progress at all, and although her previous life experiences would put her behind to start with after 6 months she should be making at least some progress. we fully expect to either be told they can't make any assessment yet because of the instability in her life, or that they can't do it because shes looked after, but hopefully they'll be able to give us some pointers at least on how to help her. thanks for all the help everyone. its given us some things to look at and more options with how to manage her/help her to learn

hyperlexia would fit. i played wii resort for the first time today. i was playing golf and after saying once that i got a bogey when it flashed up and once that i got a birdie to my mom K could then tell me each time whether i had got a bogey or birdie. she also sees signs in shop windows etc and will suddenly say 'thats X' and is almost always right. the only problem is they say they've only recoded it in males, although they have heard of a few females with it.

i was hoping any diagnosis would help because at the moment she is not doing well at nursery, refuses to play with most of the children, is violent towards them and if she were to start school tomorrow would probably be excluded within the first week. she clearly needs some sort of support/intervention if she is ever going to manage at school in september. she is incredibly intelligent, its hard to get a true picture of how much so as she has learnt everything herself, but even so she knows far more than any other kid her age i've met. i think this is part of the reason she is so violent and disobedient (shes not disobedient with us, but everyone else struggles with her). she gets so angry when you dont listen to her, and so frustrated when shes not being stimulated that she just lashes out. she will also be a walking target for bullies if we can't get the flapping under control, and if they call her names etc she'll just punch them! i suppose that could work both ways, they'll only pick on her once.

i have appealed. about 6 times. i've also been to tribunal and am now apealing to the upper tribunal. i'll get there eventually but for some reason they've decided to ignore all my evidence. ive now contacted the NAS and got my ASD support worker working on it because they just wont listen to me. they gave me a statement of reasons for the tribunal decision and they actually said in it that they didn't believe the report written by the NHS autism unit about my needs because i was clealy intelligent! i could apply for ESA but tbh i get all the support i would get on that from my DEA and with my track record with the DLA i'd be refused, as i can't live away from home i get enough money from the JSA, i just give the bulk of it to my mom to pay for food etc. my DEA is great and has listened to my needs, doesn't pressure me to apply for jobs i can't handle and has agreed to let me do volunteer work while i look for jobs that are suitable since it will take a while. so there are good oens out there! its just getting lucky i suppose. you can't get disableld students allowance unless you are on a full time course, which is rubbish for me as i'm doing a load (8+) part time courses

i would say she defintiely has echolalia, as she repeats all sorts of things with no way to understand what they are, but since this is probably how her speech was deveoped rather than with reciprocal encouragement its hard to know whether its just a habit. she gets her pronouns muddled up, she'll say 'we' referring to only herself, and him when she means her. she also muddles in/on/under. she has funny speech recall, she'll say 'there are farms on the roof' when it is birds on the roof, and she also uses nonsense phrases to buy time to come up with a response. she has now also taken to making clicking noises when she is thinking of things to say. she'll walk up to you, and click click click and then say whatever. she has an incredible memory and is obsessive. in the first week of the summer holidays she had a magazine and a character called burping herbet was missing in a quiz. we had to throw the magazine out after 3 days because she was telling us this at least 40 times a day. she will still come up to me and tell me that burping herbet was missing now, and its been months! the flapping seems to be linked to excitement. she does it when excited, and everytime she does something she thinks is good (like stacking a brick) she has to do it. it means she doesn't get very far with playing because it takes her so long to get up and flap each time. she does have as far as i can tell genuine imaginative play as well as the repeated play. she has a toy house and will play with little figures, talking and pretending they're doing things. i think the main things are the speech/communication, and her inability to learn certain things. a friends little boy is 17 months and the other day he was with us and being completely non-verbal still managed to tell us that he wanted to eat by climbing up onto a chair at the table and smacking his lips. that really made us realise how bad her communication is. her terrible social skills could be down to upbringing, but after 6 months theres been no improvement in play with children her own age, although she does hit the kids slightly less often .

thanks for the help! after having one foster child with ASD who was refused diagnosis because she had attachment disorder i want to get on top of this. she's seeing the child development team next week, which is why we were talking about it today. her nursery, an ASD support worker and another knowledgable person all said about the ASD today. before that i had been aware that a lot of her behaviours were like that, but they often are with kids in her situation and shes so chatty i ruled it out. she is under the inclusion team at nursery because she has so much trouble there, and is so much trouble there. i have also considered ADHD because she is very impulsive, can't sit still, doesn't listen (or understand is more likely) doesn't retain information etc. but then she is 3 and 3 year olds are a funny bunch in general! our biggest problem will be the attachment disorder issue, but the fact that she has things like flapping and speech issues suggests to me its not attachment (or could be both). if it is attachment disorder there is something else as well because attachment disorder doesn't cover all her issues. funny how we keep getting foster kids like this. makes me wonder if there is a massive population of undiagnosed ASD foster kids! (we've had plenty who are most definitely NT too)

Disability Living Allowance is about the care you need, not your ability to work. i get jobseekers and DLA. you also get an extra £25 or so each week on top of jobseekers and DLA for being a disabled jobseeker or something like that (you have to get DLA to get that). so i get £47 jobseekers + £25 disability payment, plus £17 DLA a week. it sounds like you've been put on a work trial. where you try the job for a fixed time before you say you want to do it/they say they want to keep you. you continue to get jobseekers and they dont pay you. your DEA should be discussing with you jobs that are apropriate for you to do (mine has on record limited customer interraction, no telephones, no busy places), and then you are allowed to say no to anything that doesn't fit that. if you were going to increase your hours at university to full time you wouldn't be allowed to claim jobseekers, although may well be entitled to a student loan.

i was wondering if anyone could tell me of the disorders that present as similar to HFA? i know attachment disorder gives some of the same behaviours, but wondered if theres anything else any of your kids have been diagnosed with before ASD was established. the behaviours are (in a 3 yr old) flapping when excited. if building a tower, has to stop, get up and flap every time they put a brick down massive vocabulary with no understanding of answering/asking questions and communicating only with fixed statements ie 'my cup is empty' to mean can i have a drink incredible intelligence (repeated knowledge and memory), but unable to learn basic concepts such as 'if you swing on the door it will hurt you' high level of frustration/anger inability to interract with children of their own age, with an ability to interract with older children through dominating 'rough' play only confusion over emotion - cannot understand that just because you're not smiling it doesn't mean you're not happy constant repetitive chatter to anyone and anything (has been caught talking to the toilet rim block!) inability to understand that animals aren't people (expects the chickens to throw back a ball thrown at them) good imaginative play based on repeated action (pretending to be a chef will ask 'what do you want for dinner?' to the same person repeatedly, and no matter what you say will answer 'we only have biscuits') obsessive interests (has memorised and recites every road sign on our usual journey) good enough eye contact seeks attention but doesn't know when to stop/can only do this in fixed ways (reciting knowledge, taking your hand and dragging you) i'm trying to establish what the issue could be and today 3 different people have told me shes 'very autistic'! obviously i know about AS, and to a lesser degree HFA and severe autism, but i know there are other things in the same areas and wondered if someone with more knowledge could fill me in

i dont know how sensitive to age labels he is, but the Leapster2 springs to mind. its hand held and is designed for i think 5-8 yr olds, the games are educational but feature well-known characters (disney, star wars, xmen, spongebob...) i haven't got experience with one, but looked at it for a child we had. because its designed for the younger age, it should be fairly simple and slow-moving

i had marioparty. i didn't like it, but that might've been my old tv. the writing on screen was really hard to read, which meant playing the games was very difficult. i've got it on DS now and much prefer that as i can actually see whats going on, but it gets a bit repetitive and predictable after a while. that said, i did have the wii version on our old tv, and we evenutallly binned that when we realised we couldn't see the ball during Wimbleldon!! i'm getting excited about super mario bros, since i dont like any of the wii mario games except mariokart so far. i couldn't deal with all the flipping upside down in mario galaxy, and i gave up on super paper mario as it was so slow moving (i much prefer the old platform versions you can play on DS). my top wii games for family are mariokart (hilarious at big family parties) and wii sports. i'm getting wii resort as soon as i get the small fortune together to buy it, as that looks like it'll be great fun christmas day, can just see us all sitting there doing a bit of canoeing after lunch.

oooh, i wondered about them. our very new, very flat screen TV only has one SCART hole, so your tv doesn't need the inferiority complex. and our also very new sky+ box is also rather clunky, as is our DVD player. but i think a cheap SCART adapter is going to be cheaper than replacing all the videos i now realise my mother told me she took to the charity shop today. d'oh! well, i can only hope she was referring to my complete VHS collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and not the bags of Disney cos that would be unfortunate timing.

i was just saying i need to get one of those this morning! i also dont do phones, but the idea of internet access anywhere is a mighty fine thing. i dont know if it really is anywhere or if there are restrictions, but it's certainly a lot more handy than carrying a laptop around and trying to find 'free wifi' signs.

we still have a VHS player, but i can't use it without unplugging the DVD player and Wii so it doesn't get used. our biggest issue is all our Disney films are on video, and they cost a fortune to replace onto DVD. all our Disney videos are pretty stretched out anyway, as they are all from when i was little about a million years ago

well, thats halloween done for us, apart from eating large amounts of pumpkin soup and pie. tomorrow is an all saints celebration up the church with fireworks and a bonfire (and a pink glow stick for K to keep her away from the sparklers!) round here there seems to have been the rule adopted 'if they have a pumpkin outside, you can trick or treat' which means that the elderly (or grumpy) dont get bothered and the kids still have places to go.

we're taking K trick or treating to my sisters. she lives with my cousin and aunt and Ks so little we're gonna let her trick or treat each person once she's in the house so she feels shes done it lots, rather than go to different family friends as we do with the older ones. we've invited the kids of our friends to trick our treat at ours, so they know they're knocking on a safe door. apart from that, i'll be eating leftover sweets and doing prep work for sunday school *yawn*

we watch miracle on 34th street (the version with Mara Wilson) just before christmas. that really messes with their heads if they're doubting because they just can't work out if he's really father christmas of it it was all coincidence. we'll watch it again this year even though K is too young to understand. i worked very hard when i was little to pretend i believed in father christmas for a very long time as i was worried if i let on i didn't believe we wouldn't get stockings anymore because there would be no need. sometimes i'm too practical for my own good. we've always had a full blown christmas. one year we moved house on december 22nd and had 15 people round on christmas day! now everyones older we cycle between a big family christmas and a quieter one. when i was little we weren't allowed to open our presents until after christmas dinner. me and my sister timed it one year and the adults were at the table for 4 hours!! pure torture when you're 6 years old, but it was still a great day because there was so much excitement. i always coped fine with the surprise/waiting, mostly i think because there was no choice. i knew if i threw a tantrum then i wouldn't get anything at all and was regularly informed if i so much as went looking for my presents before christmas they would go to charity and i would have nothing as my parents had a strict policy on us knowing nothing about what we were going to get. i hate opening presents in front of people because often its something i dont know what i'll do with (i'm a hard person to buy for) and found it hard to be very excited about things. one year i got 4 calendars!! but again, the family rule was everyone watched while each person opened their present, then the next person got one, so i had to open them nicely or i wouldn't get another one. tough, but it worked.

i've had SF, the three other people in the house (one heart probs + diabetes, one 3yrs old) didn't get it despite me being very ill for over a week with it. we're undecided about the vaccine. i'm having the regular flu vaccine on thursday as i have asthma, but so far our doctors say they have no information about it and none of the staff have had the vaccine yet - apparently we're not important down here!

is anyone else amazed at the fact that there wasn't a warning before all that flashing strobe/laser lighting during the westlife performance? it was terrible and i wound up running out of the room to avoid it.

i've had considerable stomach problems for a while now and am under a gastro consultant at my local hospital to try and work out what on earth is going on. (my stomach bloats to treble its normal size, goes absolutely solid, pushes into my lungs so i can't breathe and causes a lot of pain as well as burping literally every second because it appears to be filled with air. this them causes my stomach to 'hiccup' which is a very bizarre and painful sensation. it does this nearly every day at some point) there are a number of things that could be causing the problems, complicated by potential complications from surgery as a baby and i'm having a ton of tests done including biopsies, blood tests, gastroscopy... but he also said i should consider whether i have an intolerance that could be causing it. i was diagnosed lactose intolerant as a baby, but after about 4 months my mother decided to move me off soya formula onto normal (cows) milk and didn't notice any adverse effects. i can't drink milk or eat cream as both cause major reflux, but am ok with cheese and milk in sauces etc. i mentioned that i might have a problem with casein because that is common in people with ASD, but the consultant didn't comment either way. so what i want to know is if there is any difference to going casein free rather than lactose free or both at the same time? will i need to avoid aditional foods? is there any way to know whether its casein or lactose (or neither!) as they're both in the same foods. are there tests that can be done? i'm going to my GP to ask but find its better if i have the knowledge of options first to know that what i'm being offered is the best/correct option.

i got no choice, just the radio, but they hadn't tuned it properly so it was just static with the odd burst of music. but it didn't kick in until i was in the tube and then i couldn't tell them because i couldn't move so i got to listen to that for however long. my MRI was done at 7pm and the hospital was completely empty except for me. all in all a very odd experience. my MRI was for hearing loss not ASD, although they did say the only reason they were doing the scan was because i also had ASD (not sure why thats a reason) and i'm an adult. it was all clear anyway, they dont know why i can't hear in one ear and have put it down to an ASD sensory perception quirk