Brian’s Journal

I was so impressed with Brian’s notebook, I took photos of every page, through today’s entries.  He made a cool viking ship, a cool bumblebee (with pretty darn accurate description of what bees do!) and then a diagram showing the bees visiting flowers, bringing nectar back to the hive, making honey/honeycombs, and even showing the bee larvae.  Then, lots of pages he made all about the caterpillars.  (Sometimes he sounded out “Crepe Myrtles” instead of “caterpillars” and labeled them as such–poor kid just got so stuck on that!)  I helped him print out some photos of the Yellow-striped Oakworms and their life cycle, and he pasted those in his notebook as well.

Brian began taking medication for ADD midway through the first week of school (the same medication that Brandon has been taking since February), and his first day on it was the day he made the bee pictures.  We were so amazed at the detail in his journal, but more so in his description of it to us.  He could tell us the whole narrative, in order, without getting sidetracked or speaking only in pronouns.  In fact, Brian has been more talkative than we’ve ever seen him, particularly the first day on the medicine–it was a wall of words, from pickup until after lights out.  But, we found it very interesting, that he was telling us about his day more than he ever had been able to, and was able to stay on topic (maybe even a bit too long!)  I’ll be honest, I’m a little ambivalent about medicating Brian, but Brandon thinks it is the right thing to do, as being diagnosed with ADD and taking medication has been very helpful for him, and explained a lot of his struggles.  He doesn’t want Brian to have to fight against his particular brain configuration until he’s an adult, and wants to help as much as he can now.  I’m struggling a bit to reconcile Brian having ADD in addition to being on the autism spectrum, and since both conditions have a lot of similarities, it’s hard (maybe impossible) to know what is causing a specific challenge.  So, overall, we’re taking a “let’s see how it goes” approach with the medication.  We’ve seen marked improvements in Brian being able to sequence his thoughts and maintain focus, and my goodness, just look at that kid’s science journal.  Amazing!  We haven’t notice any personality changes, Brian is still Brian. 😉  However, his disfluency in his speech seems so much worse to me.  Maybe because he’s talking more, so I notice it more, or maybe it’s something else affecting that.  In any case..  We’ll see how it goes.