I will email you regarding this Rhonda. We do have an organization PLUK, Parents lets unite for kids that helps in these matters but they are overwhelmed. Getting the IEP to work is not as easy here as it may seem, I have had to involve other things to get things to work. parents out here seem to curl up and let the school ship their child off to the "academy" where youths with emotional problems are sent. They tried it with mine. I went and had a tour of the place to be fair but I said no. My son does not have emotional baggage. He is not victim of abuse or neglect nor did we wrench him out of a gang and disarm him, like most youths at the "academy" were. Most are from out of state. I am in Montana. A good ol' boy state if there ever was one. You wouldn't believe how cracker jack the schools are run here!
As far as the TS goes, like Mulan said, it is quite odd to see it for the first time. My son's tics currently (they change over time) are a forced cough every three seconds, a "mum" sound in the back of this throat in between coughs, hopping(but that can be from the autism as well), and blinking, head jerking. Sometimes he'll enter a room with a loud clap of the hands (LOVE that one on a nice quiet morning!). Recently, my daughters were at a slumber party together. My son never gets invited anywhere by anyone, only harrassed by his peers (yet girls are very attracted to him until they realize how not like the other boys he is). He is very quiet really. He can talk for hours about a subject he finds facinating (like license plate collecting) and give you a quick run down of all the states that emboss rather than deboss....this can go on and on. :-) So while the girls were out, my husband and I went out to a pub in Billings and took him with us. He ordered rootbeer (that he'd drink forever) while we talked. I noticed that while he played with spilled salt on the table, (being aspergers at that time) he would repeat words said by people passing by our table, (the TS side of him). He heard nothing we were discussing. He looks normal. He really acts normal. Okay but there are times we think he is having a "rain man" day.
Here is a really nice story I have about him that occured last summer. If you have a kid like this, you'll love it. We took all of our kids to the baseball game, it was highschool baseball. My son was more interested in the fact that we got him a taffy bar to eat. There were lots of beatiful teenage girls prancing about showing off their bellybutton rings and sparkly skin. They walked very gracefully in front of my son several times and would stop there and talk a LOT louder and giggled trying to get him to notice their very pretty little selves. Me and the husband thought it was cute. But he was still shaping the taffy bar, totally unaware that he is cute as hell. His hair is a bit long and we highlight it. He has taken on a mature build and is finally no longer that skinny thing he used to be. He has big green eyes too. Finally, the girls gave up and went on to where they'd be noticed, after all, why else were they there? Then our son turned to my husband and said, "Did you see that?" My husband chuckled and said "well, yes I did. But I didn't think that you did!" then my son said, "Well yeah! That wasp has been trying to get my candy for like the last half hour and I finally swat it in mid air!"
We got a laugh out of it.
