*hides behind the couch*

I've been SUCH a slacker! Uggh! In my defense, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. Let's take a quick look here, shall we?

So, I get a letter from our daycare director about boy-child. He has been having these "fits" lately, for lack of a better term, where he will scream/cry and nothing will stop it. He's done this for over a year, at home at least, and the only thing that we've been able to do for him is have him go to his room until he can calm himself down. No hugging, attention, etc. works when gets like that. Heck, even giving in to what he originally wanted doesn't work once he gets all worked up. He just has to go off on his own until he can figure out how to calm himself. It's not a punishment - and I think he knows that. Unfortunately, they don't really have the ability to put him in a separate room alone when he's at school.

Anyway, so we got this letter and all it said was that we needed to discuss him because he is severely disrupting the classroom dynamics. The way it was worded, I was terrified that they were going to ask us to find somewhere else for him to go. I was all paranoid and didn't sleep the entire weekend (we got the letter on Friday and had our appointment to discuss matters with her the following Monday).

Here's the thing with him: he is delayed in a few areas, most likely because of the circumstances surrounding his birth (I ruptured and he went without oxygen for a short time). We were warned about this possibility and I've kept a very keen eye out for symptoms and such. His main area of delay right now is speech. I know that the majority of his "fits" are caused by the fact that he can't communicate what he wants. I was told that he couldn't be evaluated by the school district with an IEP until he was 3 (they never told me that there were other state-funded programs that I could have used for him under 3, but I digress) and when I brought our concerns to our pediatrician, he rather blew me off. I let it slide more than I should have because of our commute, so I will own that responsibility.

At any rate, we had our meeting and it went completely differently than I'd expected. The thought had apparently never crossed her mind to have us find another school for him - in fact, it was the opposite. She wanted to know what they could do to help us out and get the needed services for him! She recommended a pediatrician down in the Denver area (since we're planning on moving down there soon, we figured that would be the best bet) and gave us a bunch of resource numbers for things. The pedi that we saw specializes in special needs children and therapy and we were able to get in with him the same day I called. I was shocked, given that we were new patients. He was awesome! He agreed that Matthew's speech is the first thing we should be looking into and I've set up an appointment with our local school district for the 31st of March for his initial evaluation. Now that he's 3 we can go through them (and we're forced to go through our local school district which is 2 hours away from his school and our places of employment, but ya do what ya gotta do). The pedi office also did a quick hearing test thing on him and one ear showed fine and the other suggested a referral to an audiologist, so there's a possibility that there's something with his hearing that is off and that could be contributing to his speech issues. We have an audiologist appointment set up, also through the school district, for this coming Tuesday, so hopefully we'll have a few answers on that front.

One thing that is a possibility where boy-child is concerned is a diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome (TS). He has a majority of the symptoms, including all of the symptoms that are considered symptoms but not diagnostic criteria. He doesn't have any vocal tics, but he does have what appear to be occasional tics. I'd been very concerned about Aspergers or other autism spectrum disorders, but he didn't match one of the main criteria for those - the lack of emotional response. He's extremely lovey-dovey, loves to snuggle, has no problems making eye contact, etc. But what we're now seeing as a possible tic I had thought was a kind of stimming. The pedi is pretty much 100% sure that he is not on the autism spectrum and that, if anything, it is TS. He won't run any real diagnostics or anything until he is older - closer to 5 or so. I guess we'll see what happens. For now we're focusing on getting him some speech therapy and possibly a little occupational therapy and then go from there.

Ok, so, enough about boy-child. Let's talk about girl-child for a few minutes. I swear this child is 5 going on 16. I know I had an attitude as a child but good hell, this child gets a bit cuh-razy! We are very adamant anti-spankers but she likes to push those boundaries! *twitch* Just last week DH asked her to do something and she said "No! And you can't make me!" all snotty-like. *faint* He looked at me and I was torn between cracking up at the absurdity and wanting to yell at her for the sheer disrespect. DH responded pretty well, though, he said "I'm sorry... WHAT did you say?" She responded in a much more meek tone with "Umm, I said no?" To which he responded, "Oh, well in that case I say no to dessert for tonight and no to you being able to stay down here and be civil with your family. I suggest you go to your room before I carry you there." It was classic!

Other than some of the attitude issues, she's doing very well and I'm quite proud of her. Kindergarten agrees with her quite well! She's actually interested in reading now! Ever since she was a baby she's hated books - she never allowed me to read to her no matter how much I tried. She'd either grab the book and throw it on the floor or try to eat it (you should see all the literally half-eaten books we have... oy vey!). Now she's finally getting interested in it! Yay! She can sound out most of the words, though she has some trouble with "th" and "sh" and "wr." Those compound consonants are tricky! But she's at least trying and that's the good thing. Her math skills are, as always, bloody amazing. In fact, she's currently in the other room playing one of her math skills computer games.

The other major thing going on has been getting the house ready to put on the market. We've been so lackadaisical about keeping the clutter at bay that it's been a lot more work than we'd originally anticipated. *paranoid look* We've packed up a bunch of stuff that we're not using and we've rented a storage unit to get it out of the house, along with some small furniture items, so that we can open it up a bit more. My good friend Linda is going to be borrowing my treadmill for a few months (really, I didn't want to put it in some storage unit and she's been thinking about buying one so I figured, the best thing would be to let her try one out for a few months and if she still wants one, she can buy one - best of both worlds, really, I get free storage and good care and she gets the use of a treadmill for a few months). We sign the paperwork with our realtor on Monday - it was supposed to be today but all sorts of crap came up. It's all good, though. The house is looking great, though, almost as good as when it was finished being built - with the exception of the carpet. We may just have to rip it out and put some new stuff in if the shampooing doesn't work. I hope it doesn't come to that, though... it's so bloody expensive.

Ok, so there's my novel of a post for today. Hope all is well in your worlds. Wish us luck with the house selling so we can finally get rid of this horrid commute!