We’re in February! Not only has another year come and gone but the new one has decided to steam roller on, dragging me along whether I feel like it or not. 

We’ve had a lot happen over the last few months, so I want to get back into the blogging world through a “brief” recap.

November 2015 – we had a lovely family holiday, followed by the explosiveness of a PANS flare for BuddyBoy. Life sucks.

December 2015 – still hanging on for dear life during the PANS flare. School finishes so Buddy Boy is home 24/7. Add to that an extremely infectious bug which knocked most of our family out for a few days, and me out for two weeks completely. Christmas. Yep, could have skipped that one. If it hadn’t been for the wonderful support of local ASD parents and online friends, we would have missed it altogether.

January 2016 – I’m still sick, this time adding on bronchitis, and strained rib muscles from massive coughing fits. The house looks like it should be condemned. The children are moaning about the impending start of homeschool, and a few of them are having minor breakdowns for various reasons. BuddyBoy is bored, absconding on an almost daily basis, while we’re trying to keep up with his destruction of our house and garden. Thankfully I have a wonderful friend who provides me with a place to stay so I can have a short break before I have yet another nervous breakdown. School starts – yipee! 

February 2016 – Homeschool is back in session to moans and groans. This year, SuperBoy is also starting schooling – something I’m actually enjoying as he’s an inquisitive child who enjoys learning (at the moment). He’s also toilet training – something we are over the moon about as at nearly 6 and after a whole heap of work, we were wondering if it was ever going to happen. Go SuperBoy!

One of my girls (Miss Just-Turned-16) is doing something new this year – studying for her VCE through Distance Ed Victoria. She’s also trying to fit in her singing lessons and weekly rehearsals with the Bendigo Youth Choir (with performances already booked in for most of this year). She has been volunteering at Bendigo’s Discovery Centre for the last few years and will keep it up this year, and recently completed a stint working at the Post Office Mail sorting centre (her first ever paid job and judging by how many shifts she was called in for, they were very happy with her). This week she also started a job at McDonald’s – I have no idea where she gets the energy from!

BuddyBoy has settled into his new school routine very well. Nearly all his friends from last year moved into the same class with him, so there were a lot of familiar faces. He has a great group of classmates – one of the (very) little girls mothers him and gets excited when he does something well and cheers him on. One of the boys is a very happy and outgoing child, who gets into BuddyBoy’s face and makes sure he doesn’t spend all his time in his own little world. He’s taking notice of what the other children do, which is huge progress for him.

Unfortunately, since the last PANS episode, we’ve had some behaviours ‘stick’. Things like a very quick fuse leading to aggression (and he’s now discovered that biting other people gets a reaction as well), and not wanting to eat. He would rather starve than eat food that he doesn’t feel like eating, and for about three days his entire diet consisted of rice crackers and GF biscuits, until I finally caved in and gave him French Fries. He’s not supposed to have potato – it came up on his list of food intolerances when we tested, and you can tell when he’s had it! So we face a choice of having a little boy who is hungry and having meltdowns because of it, or feeding him potato and watching him get aggressive, scream and weep, and smash his head into a wall (all of those are his reactions to potato).

We hadn’t kept up with our footbath schedule either, but got back into it a couple of weeks ago. Since then, BuddyBoy’s language has once again exploded, and he’s become much more ‘cuddly’ and engaged. This happened straight after we started with the footbaths initially, but we lost a lot of that progress when we stopped the footbaths. He obviously has a lot of toxins he needs to clear out, which his body is unable to do by itself, so I’m very glad we have the footbath to help him.

So that’s pretty much where we’re at. Still crazy, still eating far too much chocolate, and just trying to live one day at a time.