Re: Getting ready for school and bed

[Guest guest]

Speaking of.....having problems at the moment. He's pitching a fit cause dad wasn't paying attention to the time and decided to give him a frozen treat at 945pm at night.

Anyway, Well basically My ten year old is an Aspie on the hyper end of the spectrum. We have a schedule etc. It's still a problem no matter reward/punishment system. Its still a fight. Like always you never know how the day is going to start and sometimes end. Well, we only have him and our newest lil' one..he's 7 1/2 months old now. We don't really plan on having any more children cause of the problems we have with Caleb. We have to give him so much attention and time and effort. We feel it would be unfair to our other children. But getting back to the subject.

At night for sleep. bath time we pretty much have no consistency with him. He says he only takes a bath every three nights. The only way we can get him to take a bath is throwing him in ourselves, unless he's really dirty then he'll usually agree & went outside and sweated (which is rare), or he still has problems wiping still even with those flushable ones he gets the itchy butt. so we get him to bathe cause we tell him he can get an infection blah blah cause of the bacteria etc. he gets really grossed out and jumps in the bath himself. Bed time is sometimes a fight for two plus hours. I refuse to drug him with benadryl unless he complains of having problems sleeping and he wants to take it to help him sleep, but generally we have quiet time start at around 730 - 8 ish, put away toys, brush teeth, and we have satillite and they have the xm radio channels one is like a spa music channel he is only allowed to listen to during the week to sleep with. The weekends if we don't have problems he can fall asleep to cartoons but he has to be in bed by a certain time. There's times when we go check in on him and he's fake sleeping and you hear him change the channels right before you go into the room. So then we resort to changing the channel ourselves and confiscate the remote.

We have to remind him to eat, brush his teeth, he still can not tie his shoe laces, dress him. Eating, ha! He usually goes straight for the Ramein noodles or spaghetti o's. Unless we have plates made. And then he is so picky about certain foods.....So I think we all go through and have problems with our aspies. It's always a trial and error... What works one day doesn't necessarily work on another. For bedtime allow a cool down time. The same way we do for infants and small children. Dim the lights etc. at a certain time.

Morning, well we have a natural boar's hair soft brush we use to brush him in the morning to get him dressed. We try to allow him time by waking him up at 0630 sometimes he's already up. I usually catch him playing his video game. And I have to fuss cause he has a schedule on the wall saying he has to get dressed and eat before he can have free time, but again we still have problems with that. I guess its just a matter of staying on him and giving positive reinforcement when warranted and taking away privledges away as needed. Its a constent struggle for him and us. My husband had a bout of high blood pressure for a couple of years when he was 31. He lost about 20 pounds and finally I got him to calm down, slow down, and get back into sports again and he officially off his BP meds.

So I feel for everyone with autistic children cause we are all in the same predicament. So If anyone finds something that works please post. As a matter of fact maybe we can start a thread specifically for ideas for different situations.

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