2016: A Year in the Rear View Mirror that can eat my dust

I have not blogged much at all in the past year. 2016 turned into The Year of Testing. The same day we had Lady Bug screened and found out she was autistic (level 3) some stuff came out about Builder Boy and Early Bird that had been happening at AWANAS and no one ever said anything about it to me until everything came to a horrible climax and Early Bird's anxiety was expressing as aggression and he was no longer welcome at a friend's house for a time. Oh yeah, it was A Year. In August (September?) Builder Boy was identified as being autistic level 1 (what used to be known as Asperger's and then HFA/High Functioning Autism) with a Pragmatic Language Disorder, a very smart Visual Spacial Reasoning brain (remember all my posts about kinetic learning?) but not enough to qualify as gifted. Which of course had me questioning almost every single parenting and teaching choice I had made in the past 5 years. In January Early Bird was also identified as autistic level 1 and qualified as 2E/twice exceptional/gifted plus "disability." And he was diagnosed in early 2016 as having anxiety. And he fits all the signs of SPD/Sensory Processing Disorder as sensory defensive (everything feels like more than what "normal" people perceive it as.)

When Builder Boy was identified as being ASD, by that time I knew there was no way that Early Bird wasn't, since he was having more severe problems at the time. So over the course of one day I went from having one special needs toddler and two older kids that I thought I had a handle on, to an ALL Special Needs House.

So what does that mean for my blog? I started this with the intention on sharing how we homeschool; that has not changed. I don't intend for this to become an All About Autism blog, because what we're doing isn't necessarily autism specific, and can be used by regular neurotypical families just fine. Of course now I feel the need to re-read everything I've ever written to see if it needs a qualifier added to it. But Blogger is being sucky and isn't letting me edit any old posts anymore so I can't even fix broken pictures. Which sucks. I have a bunch of things I want to write about, things we've been using (because we are actually getting stuff done for one in our journey!) and things we've done a bit differently that I think people would like to hear. Time to myself has been precious and not likely to be spent on the computer in full view of children. But reading some of my old posts helped me realize that I miss this. So I'm going to try to get back on the writing wagon. And despite the occasional autism specific post, I'm intending to keep it homeschool focused. Thanks for sticking around.

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