Doctor, Doctor!

We saw our pediatrician today for the second time. He had us fill in an evaluation that I now cannot remember the name of! Gr! Something about identifying developmental delays I suppose. So he looked at that while we were there but did not comment much. I am hoping he will CC us the letter he sends to our GP as he did last time. We also showed him the results of E's speech assessment, which said she did not test his receptive language ability (only expressive) due to time constraints and non-compliance, so he said that may be worth revisiting further down the track.
He seemed concerned mainly with E's sleep. He has nightmares, night terrors and terrible separation anxiety throughout the night. We told him that we had followed up on his advice to contact Redbank House who I have mentioned before. They deal with child and adolescent mental health "stuff." They can't see us until March, but he says that is actually quite a short wait so that's good. He said they should be able to help more with the sleep stuff.
He said obviously we should just keep treating it as "high functioning autism" and follow the recommended guidelines for early intervention which we are doing.
He bought up medication again but agreed with us that it is not 100% in E's best interest to go down that path (yet.)
He also asked if we wanted to do blood tests for genetic testing, looking for abnormalities on the genome that may show that there it is a genetic factor. He said it is helpful from an academic point of view, but considering E's anxiety, would likely cause him extreme stress (yes indeed it would!!!!!!), and it isn't going to help us in treating him. So we have that on the back burner for now. Autism is in my family so there probably is a genetic factor, but like he said, not worth the stress of looking at that now.

So that was that and we see him again in 6 months. I think husbandface was slightly disheartened, but I didn't expect much more than what we got out of the appointment. E was less distressed than he was during the initial consultation so if nothing else, we have at least proven to him that it wasn't as bad as he had been imagining for 2 months.

In other news, E is back on the sticker chart wagon! Hooray! He placed the last sticker last night and after careful consideration, decided he would like an alarm clock for his reward. Just what every 4 year old wants?
I thought we would be looking for ages, but he spotted one he loved in the first shop we went to. To be fair, it is kind of awesome!