climbing out of my hole?

Life's been pretty awful recently. I don't really want to go into it here, but I've had better days/weeks/months :'(

But I'm feeling that perhaps I'm not a complete failure after this morning.....

we attended the first session of the National Autistic Society Early birds course today. this is a course for parents of 5-7yr old children with ASD's. Mstr A's just turned 8, so is a tad old (although most there were 7/8) but because it took a while to get the diagnosis for various reasons, this was the first course available.

I was a bit worried, cos Aspergers isn't "real" Autism - Mstr A talks, walks, interacts with the world, attends mainstream school, has not got a police record yet..... It's hard to tell how different he is, because he's our eldest - there is little to compare him to. I have been told by family members that "he's not that bad - its very mild Aspergers if it's there at all", which makes me feel a) that I'm being an unecessarily pushy parent by making a fuss about it, and b) being a crap parent because we have many moments when we don't manage as well as I want to. I thought the course would be full of horror stories of blank faced non-verbals, and have no relevance to us.

I've really pissed work off by taking 10 Fridays off to attend, so the whole thing was a bit unnerving. Also, it was held in the chldren's centre, and no money offered for childcare, or specifications regarding bringing younger children with on either the letter, or mentioned when Aggie took LMD to the initial meeting, so we had her with us again today. As we walked in, the leader said that she shouldn't be there! Then proceeded to repeat that a few times during the introduction>:(

So I'm feling slightly smug. LMD behaved perfectly - she drew pictures, read books, slipped quietly around the adults whenever she needed to get something, and generally behaved so perfectly we hardly knew she was there - showing us to be fantastic parents:)

And, as we went through the details of what is Autism/ASD, Mstr A proved to have rather a lot of ASD behaviours - putting him well within the ASD spectrum and nowhere near the very mild edge of it. It appears that we have just been fantastically good at managing him to keep him as "normal" as possible.

Both we and the school assistant there came away with some good ideas - i asked Mstr A about one of the communication things mentioned and have discovered something new already, which hopefully we can work on. And on top of that, the school held their special needs meeting today with all the professionals in the area, and we recieved a phone call this afternoon to book an appointment to start the whole statementing thing off properly, so the school may eventually get some funding to help them provide that assistant they have in his class most of the time anyway:) Obviously the professionals all also agreed that he does need the help, and I'm not just making it up too.

I have also come to the conclusion that i have to stop lieing to myself, forget the career that really isn't happening - mostly because that is not really what I want, it's what i think i ought to want!, and look for a menial job round the corner to home so that I can be available to Aggie & the kids when they need me, without getting stressed out & without putting up with snipy comments from idiot personnel officers in the city.

Now I just need to find said job:)