Aspergers in and outs, and Parenthood

It is the end of the year so i must be glad that we survived another one! It has been a very crazy year and as January approaches i always remember that it also symbolizes the month that we found out that Dom had Aspergers Syndrome. January 2009, 2 years ago. It is crazy to think that it has been two years of therapy, doctors appointments and school already, where does the time go. Although Dom has made enormous progress and accomplishments from first being diagnosed, the every day to day challenges are still draining. As you may know AS kids or people do like to obsess about certain things. Dom has always been fascinated about letters and numbers. At age 4 1/2 he knows his abc's, the sounds the make, what letter starts almost every word, can count to one hundred and backwards from 20. Along with these strengths he is also obsessed with every abc/number game or puzzle in our house and likes to do them over and over and over again. While this week does fall on Christmas break from school, if i do one more abc puzzle i think i will lose my mind. The days seem to go by very slowly and I myself can not wait to get back to work!

This past month I also took Dom to the eye doctors, i was noticing that he has been crossing his right eye. I thought that it was due to him stymming on toys but i was completely dumbfounded when the doc told me that Dom was actually far sighted. So it wasnt due to his disability at all! OOPS Now we have the challenge of wearing glasses. He doesn't like to keep them on for more than an hour at a time, but we are working on it. One step at a time! It is just one more thing to add to the list!

During this break I have also been catching up on television online of course and have caught up on the show Parenthood. For those of you who do not know this show, it is about a complex extended family and how they deal with life's challenges. One of the families in the show's challenges are living with a 9 yr old son who has Aspergers. At first i was hesitant to watch this show, but as the episodes went by i got hooked. The acting on this show is excellent and their emotions in dealing with AS is so real that it makes my heart break and is a real true testament to how a parent feels having a child with AS. It is really nice to have this story be told and see how the parents react to certain situations. One would think that watching this show would be depressing, which it is, but it also helps to see some of the feelings that i may have being displayed on the television screen and knowing that I am not alone.