Marinating

I'm starting to feel calmer about this spectrum thing; after some marathon googling and discovery of several good blogs, I'm realizing that really, this is all mild and what it simply comes down to is for us to find him the best therapies we can and support and love him.  There is a lot of hysteria out there about autism, and apparently there are lots of opportunists who make an awful lot of money because of it.  And because the law requires schools to provide the needed services, and because the schools fight tooth and nail to provide them, there is a lot of gamesmanship all around encouraging exaggerated diagnostics so that the child will receive at least some of the needed treatments.  One can only suppose that our good doctor knows this game all too well and perhaps our report sounds a tad alarmist for the simple sake of Smacky getting better attention.  Whatever the case, what's been working thus far has been working well, and my reasoning tells me we just need more of it.  The urgency now is that because mildly autistic children tend to have such fantastic outcomes with proper treatment, we need to act quickly to ensure he gets what he needs before he slips (as will typically happen with these kids) into full-blown autism.

On the side here is the seemingly quieter diagnosis of dyspraxia, whose symptoms are remarkably similar to autism.  This has led to me to question the accuracy of the pdd-nos diagnosis and I'm currently exploring its relation to all this...I need more time to get my thoughts together on that, but a big part of me (perhaps the denial part?!) is hoping that Smacky's more dyspraxic than autistic, and that time will resolve this issue.  And then I think, what's the difference?  Whatever the label, he's still Smacky.

Whatever the case, at the end of the day, whatever neurological deficits remain, there's always hope.  

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Now for the open house tomorrow (LOTS of interest there!  Fingers crossed that we sell soon!!).