A Kamden Update

I'm not even going to apologize for the lack of posting this time.  I think I'll just explain myself instead.

The last time I posted here was sometime around early to mid-June.  I had an eight week summer class in Child Developmental Psychology which was a lot of fun, but was also very intense.  I also started taking on extra cleaning clients to help with the expense of Kamden's occupational and behavioral therapies, so time was short on hand.

First day of hydro-therapy

We started working toward getting Kamden ready for Kindergarten and had him assessed by the school for special needs assistance for his autism.  A very long story short, the determination made by the assessment team was that Kamden is "not autistic" and does not need or qualify for special need help through the public school system.  Normally, this would be a wonderful thing to hear and most parents would feel a sense of relief.  I was terrified.  It is HARD to get a diagnosis of autism.  It's not one that is just quickly thrown around as a possible solution.  Once the diagnosis is given, it's hard to accept.  Granted, I did suspect that Kamden was autistic long before we had a professional assessment with a psychiatrist, but still, to have that label put in place as a definite is a lot to swallow.  To then be told by a team who has spent one hour with your child that their doctor "must have misdiagnosed" is a shock and is maddening.  We found out all of this a little more than 3 weeks before school was scheduled to begin.  What was suggested was to enroll him in public school and just let the school evaluate him for ADHD "in a few years".  While Kamden's medication and therapies have been helping him quite a lot, he's in no way ready for a regular school environment.  For one, he's not been able to fully potty train.  It is something we work on hard and we work on tirelessly, but something just does not click.  For another, we take him regularly to socialize with other kids his age, but he's extremely overwhelmed by a typical "5-year-old environment".  People comment a lot of the time that they wouldn't suspect he is autistic.  If they were to see his one on one interaction with kids vs his one on one interaction with adults, however, it would be obvious there was something going on there.  Ultimately, we opted to work with him at home for another year.  In the state of Texas, children are not legally required to be enrolled in some type of formal education until the age of 6, so we have some time to work on those things that need to improve and hopefully can get things lined up for him next year.

Working in occupational therapy with Ms. Marcia

 Kamden started hydro-therapy this last week and absolutely loves it!  One of his big issues is basic core strength, so the goal with the hydro-therapy is to give him close to an hour a week of having to readjust his weight as the water moves and hits him and to do some lateral coordination exercises to build up his eye to hand coordination.  We were also blessed to receive a grant from the Children's Miracle Network that is going to fully fund his therapy for the next 5 months!