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Kellen has always had a very intense personality but right around his thirteenth birthday, things took a difficult turn. At work, I finally understood what those desperate phone calls from parents of teens with disabilities were all about.
It seemed like he was in a bad mood 50% of the time, a manic mood about 25% of the time and we were lucky if he would cooperate with us 10% of the time. It was exasperating. He needed 10-12 hours of sleep a night and if he wasn't able to get this, he was even more uncooperative. Unfortunately he started to really fight going to bed at night, and fight getting up in the morning. Of course, in middle school the bus came at 7:30am instead of 9:00am as he was used in sixth grade.
To top it off, he started to exhibit a lot of anxiety when at school or otherwise out in public. Oh...and a couple of other things: We weren't allowed to hug him or kiss him. We weren't allowed to take his picture (in fact, for a whole year the only decent picture I could take of him was when he fell asleep on the couch). At school he was slapping other students on the behind and practicing his four letter words. It stresses me out to type this, so you can imagine how stressful it was for our family to live through!
Over the last three years we have made several changes in order to support Kellen through this transition. I'll share some of those in upcoming posts.
1 comment:
Do share! Vic is going to be there in the fall. Middle school registration is this week. We are meeting with teachers and observing in the classroom next week. My other kids had miserable experiences in middle school. It is like 3 years of daily full-moon craziness.
Chris and Vic
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