June 9, 2015

The Diagnoses Are In

The end of May was full of specialists appointments for the Boy, and today starts us back from vacation and into the swing of summer school!  Since we homeschool anyway, the new recommendations of continuing his learning throughout the year is easy enough to accommodate - we just continue on with our usual curriculum, lightening up on less important skills to allow time at the pool.  This is our first year getting a season pass to the local water park, and I'm excited to let him burn off energy and get lots of sensory needs met that way.


I won't list all the diagnoses here, but I will say that it was not "simply" Sensory Processing Disorder, which we have been dealing with for several years.   His sensory issues are now considered part of the Autism Spectrum Disorder, and we are told he is on the "very high-functioning" end, with corresponding attention difficulties and anxieties.  Also confirmed was dysgraphia, although it was given a more technical name.  We discovered his IQ and named the learning difficulties through a licensed psychologist, and the autism part of things through a specialty pediatrician.

Both of the evaluations were long, but worthwhile, and I'm glad we went through it.  We were given quite a few recommendations and official reports which should come in handy in the future.

In addition to the above, we also looked further into the vision issue, and will start vision therapy this summer.  I have hope that the vision therapy will make reading easier on him, and have heard that it may improve his ease of writing as well.  Crossing my fingers!!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a sensory guest post for The Jenny Evolution.  Check out Sensory Writing: Vertical Writing Builds Core Muscles for some summer sensory fun!

Welcome to the Sensory Blog Hop -- a monthly gathering of posts from sensory bloggers hosted by The Sensory Spectrum and The Jenny Evolution. Click on the links below to read stories from other bloggers about what it's like to have Sensory Processing Disorder and to raise a sensory kiddo!Want to join in on next month's Sensory Blog Hop? Click here!



5 comments:

  1. I'm just about to attend my gazillionth IEP meeting. It can be helpful, but also a LOT, when those diagnoses come in...We've got such a jumble of labels and acronyms to juggle - here's hoping for some plain old sweet summer fun ;)

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  2. I am in awe of that pool. Ok, I'm jealous :) Can you tell me more about the vision therapy? I am curious as I had a "lazy eye" and an eye patch when I was little, and had to do some eye-muscle strengthening. My boys with autism do not have that, but my older son has "convergence interference" which can cause difficulty with tracking words across a page, and sometimes the letters can start "jumping around", etc. Very frustrating for a kid that has comprehension issues anyway! The doctors solution was glasses, and possibly some kind of therapy but he was not a doc. I really had a lot of confidence in so we haven't followed up.

    Enjoy your homeschooling summer! That was my favorite part of homeschooling. We switched to "unschooling" in style and followed the interests of my son, and then helped him branch out from them into the different "subjects". It is what my kids remember most about the homeschool days!

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    1. That "aquatic center" was new last summer and its pretty great. :) Vision therapy is done in-office at certain developmental opthamologist offices. He needed the referral from his regular eye doctor, and so far we have done the initial consult. The end of June he goes to see the vision therapist at the specialists office, then we, the parents, are going to be offered options of some sort... my Boy has convergence insufficiency, and he wouldn't wear the prism glasses he was given, and yes, the letters jumping around is a thing after a few minutes of focus, so do look into it some more. In-office therapy is the way to go as other methods (software and at home therapy) aren't proven yet. We will have a 3 hour round trip on vision days. Yikes.

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  3. Your post makes me wonder what future diagnoses my son will be labeled with. I have a few brewing in the back of my mind already!

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  4. It's great that the new diagnoses also came with recommendations for new therapies and activities to try, that's not always the case. I hope you continue to find things that work for your unique kid!

    and I love this time of year when we can finally add swimming back into our routine, my boy's favorite thing! :)

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