Hi there, I'm new to this forum. I have a 4 1/2 year old who has autism and ADHD. I realized early on that he is intelligent, but I wasn't really grasping the kind of child that I'm dealing with here. He started reading shortly after his second birthday, but I just sort of regarded this as some kind of phenomenon that is related to his autism. After that he began becoming obsessed with the human body, and he would memorize fairly complex details of how various systems within it work. Again, I was still sort of chalking this up to autism, and focusing more on therapy and issues that we were trying to work through. I did note that he was able to comprehend some first grade level math around age 3, but I thought that maybe it just wasn't very difficult in general. I didn't really have any concept of what other children his age understood. This all continued and intensified over the last year, and I still wasn't quite getting it. Then the "light bulb" moment happened for me at his annual therapy meeting when his teacher explained to us that he not only scored in the "very advanced" range on his school readiness test, but he also got the highest score that she has ever seen. The next day, his Kindergarten curriculum arrived in the mail. (I've been planning to homeschool him for quite some time, for various reasons.) Looking at this curriculum is making me very nervous. I'm pretty sure he learned some of this material before he could even talk. I would just skip it entirely, but his writing/cutting/related skills are at the Kindergarten level, and he still has a short attention span when he's not hyper focusing on something of interest. Does anyone have any advice on how I should plan to go about our first year homeschooling?
Also, my son has always had fairly intense behavioral problems in the area of non-compliance. Basically, he's always been very self directed and intense. He is constantly in something that he's not allowed to play with, opening a window when it's cold out, getting water all over the bathroom, playing with the lamps, taking everything apart that he can get his hands on (he took his chair apart while sitting in time out!). He has never really been interested in toys, and when he does play with them, he uses them for something other than their intended purpose. It's been really exhausting to try to keep up with, because most of the things that he does are not harmless. Many of them destroy our property, or are just plain annoying due to noise or messes. I'm realizing now, more than ever, that he's probably just BORED out of his mind. I have tried to find things to stimulate him, but most are some combination of being too expensive and too mature for him. When I do find something, he obsesses over it and grows tired of it within hours/days and then we're back where we started. I just don't even know what to do with him, to be honest. I feel so incompetent when it comes to raising him. Has anyone been through this? Does anyone know what I can do?
Also, is there anything else that you feel I should know? I think I'm feeling more nervous than anything at this time. There are really not a lot of resources out there to help me, and I haven't come across any professionals that I feel really have any true understanding of my son (we've worked with MANY) - not to suggest that I fully understand him either.
Thank you
