Speech Results and whatnot..

I have not been coping beautifully the last few days. I am trying so hard to be assertive and consistent with the kids, but in doing that, it is forcing me to look at why it is so difficult for me to do that in the first place. I have been googling things like "how to unspoil your child" and so on. I hate that I am responsible for having made things harder, but the self-awareness I have does not fix the problem. I recognise that I have problems saying "No" to the kids, but have no idea how to stop myself. Perhaps it seems self-indulgent to talk about myself so much here. I have read many blogs and heard stories from many people, and they talk about their child and their child's condition, and not so much about themselves. But I am right at the centre of his universe and my mood, my history, my personality, all impact upon his life. Perhaps this blog should be called "parenting with a mental illness" or something. Who knows.Moving on. We got our results from the speech assessment. E scored at least average or above on all of parts of the assessment, and she has not recommended further therapy. So there we go. We aren't going to pursue further speech therapy, and have actually made the decision to find a new occupational therapist. We are very happy with the psychologist for the time being. And as promised, I have some photos of the visual charts we made with E. We did a hand washing sequence, and have a poster of house rules as well, which is proving to be handy as we refer to them often, and go through all of them again with both kids whenever they forget what is expected of them. I tried to make a sequencing chart for going to the toilet, as we are trying to encourage E to wipe himself, but he thought the pictures were disgusting and go quite upset, so we ditched it.All of the pictures were downloaded from a free website - http://www.visualaidsforlearning.comI have plans to make a getting ready for school/getting ready to start the day sequence chart as well, but did not want to overload him at the beginning. We have almost given up on the reward chart as, as always, he completely lost interest after a few days. I will give it one last big shot tomorrow, though. Perhaps if we re not spoiling him so much then a sticker will become more significant for him. We are trying to develop a focus for the chart as well as I think that will help. At the moment, he gets stickers for random things like using nice manners, helping around the house, or being kind to his sister, but I'm not sure what to focus on exactly. NB we changed the "I do it myself" picture to a "listen" picture. I'm not really sure why I out. The do it myself one on there in the first place! Nb again - it won't work from the iPad, so will edit this later with my little pictures.