Some days I wonder if all the effort that goes into making the life of my son more predictable stable and routine actually pays off. Is it actually worth it, what actually happens if I don't do what I do. Over the Holidays I conducted a holiday experiment (please read this blog post) to see what happens if I put some more structure routine and stayed home more, boy did it make a difference.
At this point in time I am not even sure that I could pinpoint what triggers my son when we go out. Oh can I see that when I don't do simple things it does trigger meltdowns things such as; making sure he is not hungry or thirsty, picking a good time of the day, not knowing where and when we are going somewhere (this is by far the biggest), how long do I take him out for and where and how many people will be there. For example the other day we had a stressful situation and we were sitting in the car trying to figure out how to address it, Josiah wanted to know where we were going and at that point we didn't know for sure so we couldn't tell him. This simple fact meant for the next hour his behaviour was not great, he had more than one meltdown in a short space of time. Information is key.
Currently I am 36 weeks pregnant and expecting bub in the very near future. As you can imagine my son's life is about to be turned upside down. I am not thinking this is going to be an easy experience to say the least. Because I am having surgery it will mean that I need to stay in longer. At the moment I am also able to do less of looking after the kids, I find it hard to do all kinds of things, making life a little tricky.
So after some discussion with the Psychologist, she did feel that Josiah is at risk at the moment of being overwhelmed by the situation, so the transition of change needs to be as planned as possible. Which means that I will be doing up routines, after school activity books, weekly type schedules and what to take to school things as well. I have had to think of the things that are important in the area of rules when he stays with relatives and we are aiming to have him stay at home on the school nights and do what we can to help life feel ok for both my boys really. So I have quite a bit of work ahead of me.. will post soon with pics of the routines I am doing up in boardmaker so you can see what I am doing.
If anyone has an sensory ideas that can help in reducing stress, calming that type of thing that I can throw into his backpack to give him some extra help please feel free to comment I would love to hear from you!!!
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