TAF Meeting,Tenerife and Terrific Talking!

After 4 weeks of being off school Reuben is back again and enjoying the routine! He goes in for the mornings and comes home in the afternoons, this has worked really well but from September in year 1 Reuben will be full time every day. We have recently had a TAF meeting (Team Around the Family) - as usual there was a room full of people! There are lots of different people who work with Reuben and they attend the meeting to see how he has progressed and the next steps forward. At the meetings there are us the parents, Teachers, Head Teacher, Senco, Teaching Assistant, Physiotherapist, Occupational therapist, Speech and Language Therapist, Educational Psychologist, Consultant Paediatrician and this time we were joined by the new TA for next year. He has recently had an assessment done by the educational psychologist and together with the reports from all the other departments and lots of form filling the application for his EHCP has been submitted (new version of the special needs statement). This now takes 20 weeks from submitting to receive the decision but everyone seems confident that it will go through for him.

Recently we went away for a holiday to Tenerife, Reuben loves holidays, airplanes, sunshine and discos and copes with the new routine amazingly well - at home if one thing changes he finds it difficult to cope and we rely on strategies to help him but on a holiday  because everything has changed all at once he doesn't mind, just gets on with things and enjoys himself! We had a lovely time, here are some photos

It was cloudy most days but we did see a little sunshine and it was warm. We had lovely views of the mountains behind us and the sea in front

Reuben's first experience of black volcanic sand!

Reuben loved sitting on the nets at the front of the boat to see the water below!

We saw lots of whales and dolphins out in the sea

The whales and dolphins came really close to the boat!

 

 

 

There has been a big change in Reuben's speech lately and his speech therapist has worked amazingly well at encouraging him and helping us with guidelines, plans and tips, all credit goes to her for how well he's doing! Because of Reuben's autism he finds it difficult to interact with others, respond appropriately and initiate dialogue, he prefers his own company and tends to ignore others around him but through modelling conversations and giving him appropriate responses to questions we have recently seen a big change, especially when he asked someone what their name was and then said hello to them and used their name without being prompted - for us it was a big step and we were amazed!

 

During Reuben's assessment from the educational psychologist last week they identified that he has islands of ability, he does struggle in a lot of social situations and the like but there are pockets of things which he is good at, mainly reading and writing, numbers and shapes - these photos are out of context but they did make me chuckle a little to read - officially 'off the scale' :) His reading age is 9 years 3 months which is really encouraging (Reuben is 5) a lot of the time we only seem to hear that he can't do this or he can't do that so it's nice to be able to say something that's really positive!

 

 

 

A few days ago we saw the dietician - Reuben has IBS, wheat and gluten allergy and an intolerance to citrus fruits but eats a healthy diet, mainly fish, vegetables and foods 5 year olds usually won't go near! He chooses his own fish from the fishmongers and will eat onions, broccoli, salad and things like that but doesn't go near a cake or biscuit! (some of the gluten free cakes are a bit sawdust in texture so I don't blame him!) She would like to see him gain a few extra pounds to match his height on the centile charts so has prescribed some special protein shakes and advised us to add peanut butter to his diet and to add ice cream or puddings to every meal, more cheese for snacks and an extra meal before bedtime, generally just as many calories as we can get him to eat! He has always been low on the weight charts but his weight dips when he has IBS episodes or goes for operations on his spine so we need to bulk him up a bit so if he loses any more weight it's not a big percentage. I think I'd like to be told to eat more puddings! :)

 

 

One more picture of Reuben to leave you with! Bedtime smiles :) See you soon x