Where do I go next?

[katkick]

Thanks everyone - I did not hear back from my pediatrician yesterday - if I don't hear today I will connect with someone on my own. We have a very good teaching hospital near us, they have alot of options that we can access. When she came home yesterday she was so happy, just like nothing happened. I sat her down and in a very calm voice told her that we have to find help - she became very remorseful and once again told me she wouldn't do it again. Bottom line is she will and I need to find a way to help her deal with her feelings and managing them when things are not going her way. She asked if we could create a chart (I did this when both of my girls were small) to show good days and bad days - She wrote out the things that I said would not be acceptable behavior and knows tha those actions get a sad face for the day. I told her to focus on how many good days she could have - her birthday is in June, if she has shown significant improvement by her birthday she gets her big birthday wish - if not she doesn't. I also asked her to write down things that she could do if she starts to feel angry. My suggestion was that if she starts to feel it coming on, she needs to do one of these calming things to change gears. Not sure that any of this helps, I feel that I'm just doing the same things over and over.

The good thing is we got up this morning, no issues, good breakfast, review of homework for school today, out the door on time - today has been a good day. Like I said in my post these are really more frequent than the bad days but the bad days take over and control everything we do.

 

[JJJ]

Not all insurance companies cover neuropsychologist testing. We ended up cobbling together a team.

Pediatric neurologist -- sleep-deprived EEG and 24-hour EEG (found out Tigger was having 100s of mini-seizures per night which was causing the morning meltdowns; anti-seizure medications and he is doing much better)

Psychologist (psychiatric hospital) -- did reality and personality testing on Kanga

Psychologist (autism center) -- BEST evaluation ever, they can catch many other things besides Autism, but they approach it with the attitude of where can we help this child develop (rather than how do we fix this kid)

Try this online assessment.

http://www.childbrain.com/pddassess.html

You can click on any of the highlighted areas for more info (click on "how to rate" at the start of each section for the directions for that section).

 

[keista]

This new plan sounds good. DD1 had a "grumo-o-meter" a few years ago. It was primarily used in school to let one of her teachers (she was only having problems in this class) know when things were getting dicey.

Visuals like that are great for difficult children AND us. No matter how attentive we are, there are times our kids come to us and we blow them off or put them off because we're "too busy". When they show us a physical sign, it cues us that this is serious.