School update

This is the second week of school, and the first full 5 day week. Its been going okay from what I’ve been told (and from me comparing to what I know Alpine was like in June and July).

I did get an email on Tuesday that the SPED and Social Worker have decided to forgo the 30 days they were going to wait before doing a FBA (functional behavior assessment, basically a tool to determine why Dominic’s behaviors occur) and start that now. When I asked why, his SPED told me that she thinks it will be better to get the behavior plan in place for consistency (which is what I asked for before school started… go figure)

So I answered a bunch of questions about his behaviors at home. I called the social worker this morning to see if she had any questions, and she hadn’t read the thing I wrote yet. I will be interested to see if other parents go into the detail I went into. I split out behaviors at home in 4 categories as follows”


Self Stimulatory Behavior / Stims (growling, spitting, screaming, waving arms)
Self Injuirious Behavior / SIB’s (biting himself, banging head on wall, poking throat/other body parts, pulling hair)
Aggressive Behavior - (kicking, hitting, biting others)
Non Compliant Behavior / NC: (Ignoring request, saying “no” to request, doing opposite of what is requested)

And then I talked about timing, frequency, and severity of each behavior type as well as what we do in response and what triggers them.

It looks worse than it is at home when I write it out like that. We see almost no SIB’s at home anymore, they’re just occasional. And aggression is only if he’s really frustrated. NC comes and goes in waves, in general he’s doing better with using his words instead of just being non compliant. Stims seem to be correlated to full moon cycles (this week he’s been REALLY stimmy) which goes along with the theory we’re working on right now re parasites. (parasites get active around the full moon – releasing lots of bacteria / toxins, which are the chemicals he’s reacting to with the stimming). Everything is made worse with sleep cycle interruptions. Sometimes food violations make him more stimmy – seems to be a threshold (like this weekend… We had leftover pizza in the fridge from guests Sat evening. I was in the kitchen cooking most of Sunday, but when Rod got home from work in the afternoon we were both outside doing yard work. Monday morning, Rod said – he’s acting like he got glutened. Monday at lunch, Rod went to have leftover pizza and realized a large portion of it was gone, and another piece had the toppings eaten. So he had been glutened in a big way.). We’ll see how my list compares to the schools.

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In Other news, we’ve started a parasite protocol, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s already passed a very digested worm. I about fell over. This is the first month of a 12 month cycle on this protocol. Our family doc is in the loop (she prescriped the anti-helminth) and we’re doing regular blood work to make sure we’re not stressing his liver / kidneys.

Its extremely interesting to me that austistic kids (and moms) globally are all pooping out the same looking stuff – mucus, worms, etc (we are taking pictures and comparing the pics with each other). The families doing this protocol on neurotypical kids and dads are NOT seeing the same. I wish there was a way to get the message to those who could fund a proper study. I don’t get excited about protocols, you all know that, but there’s something big here conceptually.