I have a lot that I want to talk about but The Beast is currently dominating our domestic scene. Mira is really struggling. It began a few weeks ago, around the time they switched her to eating lunch with the mainstream kindergarten class, and has rolled down hill from there mowing every single one of us down.

It started with complaints of stomach aches, back pains and her telling us “my body feels like something is wrong!” Given her predisposition towards obsessing on the unpleasant, we figured that it was fall out from Levi’s illness and hospital trip, but it raged on. Soon she was stepping off the afternoon bus so jacked up on her tiptoes that she had the appearance of a ballerina up on pointe. Friendly greetings were replaced by beastly snarls, her speech began sinking back into repetitive phrases, and there was much flapping of the hands. Crying became a full time sport and I caught her biting her nails- something she rarely does. ENOUGH! Nothing we were doing was diffusing the situation and the rest of us were rolling headlong down that hill into bad-mood-ville.

Friday I went in to make adjustments to her IEP and had the opportunity to speak with her teacher about how things are going. Amazingly, while falling apart at home, Mira is simultaneously opening up in her mainstream class. Last week she actually started speaking in class without prodding- a definite sign of comfort- and she nearly had a melt down in her mainstream class- another huge sign of feeling relaxed. But even with these positive growth steps, she’s regressing as soon as she is at home in her safest zone so the autism teacher and I brain stormed about what exactly is going on.

We came to several conclusions and are going to work through the list hoping that one will be the solution to our problem. First we are adding an afternoon snack. When she switched from eating lunch in her autism classroom to going into mainstream lunch, her meal time was bumped up an hour. This leaves her going over 4 hours with anything to eat and considering her metabolism, 4 hours can seem like 3 days to her. If the problem persists, we will try cutting down the number of days she is going to regular lunch to 1-3 days instead of all 5. It IS extremely noisy and overwhelming in the cafeteria. Not being able to eat in peace and being overly stimulated for 30 minutes a day then being expected to learn after that may just be too much. If the issues still persist we will take mainstream lunch completely off of the table and instead opt to send her to her regular classroom’s snack time and allow her to eat lunch in her autism classroom.

I was just starting to feel accomplished and hopeful that we could start working past this bump when Friday afternoon happened. On the school bus home, Mira witnessed a pretty nasty traffic accident. A car plowed into a motorcyclist who was thrown form him bike onto the pavement- he was not wearing a helmet. Mira saw every bit of what happened and came home totally pale and shaking. Her greeting to me was “Something HORRIBLE happened on the bus today mama. We go home and go in my room for some privacy so I can tell you about it please”

She did her level best expressing to met what had happened. There were some parts where words completely failed her and she could only jerkily gesture while making weird noises- it was entirely too intense for her to articulate. Near the end of her tale, she broke into tears begging me to reassure her that no one would hit her Papaw, Uncle, or Aunt when they ride their motorcycle and to tell them to wear their helmets so “their brains don’t burst.”

Poor kid. I really wish she had not seen that.

Friday night, everything proved to be simply too much. At bed time Mira had a full blown panic attack. It took 2 hours to get her calm and to sleep. It was very hard to see her like that. I know every single sensation she felt while it raged on. I know how she felt off kilter, her hearing was wrong and her breath felt caught in her chest. I know how her head swam, her body shook and her stomach knotted… Anxiety is one hell of a nasty beast. I hope we can rein it in before it rears it’s ugly head again.