I was sitting in a required department seminar where the speaker started talking about one of the largest medical concerns of parents with autistic kids is that the child's sleep is really messed up, which of course puts even more strain on the parents. She then talked about how similar this was to kids with epilepsy. Of course my ears pricked up at this. She talked about how these kids are sleep resistant, take a long time (1-2 hrs) to go to sleep, often wake up in the night with some anxiety, wake early in the morning, and just generally have a difficult time with sleep. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that ME's strange sleep habits (she is fully awake and actively running around the house as I write at 10:30 pm, and often wakes up once or twice in the middle of the night and then tries to sneak into our bedroom around 5 am) were related to her epilepsy.
The lecturer talked quite a bit about their studies using sleep behavioral therapy rather than using drugs to treat sleep disorders in these kids. We have not done a very good job of keeping constant bedtime routines, which apparently is extremely important. I am going to try to get more info from her to see what we can do.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
More soccer
JP's middle school soccer team has won their last two games, both 5-0. One was against his old middle school. This last game he moved to midfielder and saw more playing time and got more touches. I will try to post some video soon.