July 13, 2015….and I’m back from sabbatical.  I took a bit of a break from the blog, partly due to work and schedule, and partly self-imposed.  I felt like I got into a rut….and the rut was about the bad things when raising an autistic child.  The 'challenges' in autismchallenges.com became tales of woe.  I…

Deb has been gone with Kiley and Sean since Saturday.  That left Dayna and I at home, and multiple days for me to sit and think about things…..everything.   All in all, it has been a pretty uneventful weekend.  But my mind has been racing the entire time, more so by the time Monday hit than…

March 29th, 2015. My 44th birthday has arrived. I woke up this morning and wondered if I could have any present what would it be? The answer….to sit down and be able to have a conversation with Dayna. I was 29 when she was born and since that day the only words Dayna has used…

So everyone knows now of our struggles with Dayna not wanting to go to school, what we've gone through many mornings dealing with that and the issues dealing with the school system.  That all still exists, but we are learning to live with it.  I don’t want to say we've given up, but in a…

So I took some time off from writing the blog.  Back in mid-December we met with an attorney to discuss the issues we were having with Dayna and the school district.  He seemed to imply the blog wasn't such a great idea and it could hurt us in the end.  Well, that's probably true.  But…

So last week I posted a letter that I sent to the superintendent of schools, some of his subordinates, as well as some members of the board of education.  I poured my heart out, pleaded for help and looked to have them intervene after our IEP meeting at Dayna's school proved to be a failure.  We were looking to…

We had our IEP meeting today at Dayna's school....we went in hopeful, came out hopeless.  IEP is short for Individualized Education Program, and the IEP team is made up of many educators from the school, school administration, parents and sometimes legal representation on both sides.  We needed the meeting, we have been dealing with so much this…

This is a lazy post for me, since I'm just posting what I wrote to our lawyer today.  She represents us when we meet with the school system. Here is yet another side of autism. Actually this side isn't exclusive to just having an autistic child, but any child that need special accommodations.  Normally when you…

I'm tired.  I started my new job this week and I really like it.  Unfortunately I can't enjoy it or concentrate on it as much as I would like to right now.  My mind is going in twenty directions, and we have been in the hardest period yet with Dayna.  For the past few weeks she won't…

Recently, our mornings have been....well, a crap shoot for lack of better terms.  We don't know how the morning is going to go when we get Dayna up.  One day she can not wait to get to school, and the next day she screams and fights us like we were torturing her.  Why? No one…