May is here.  Mental Health Awareness month.  A little known fact, but Nixi was supposed to be a May Day baby.  She was scheduled for delivery via c-section on May 1st but had to come earlier due to my blood pressure.  I recall dryly joking on the day that she was formally diagnosed with Autism about the irony that she ended up being an April baby just like sister...Autism Awareness Month...had we only known then what we know now.  Not that any other this matters, its just something that sticks with me.

Anyhow, we began the week with me commenting to my friends that I felt we got the meds just right because Nixi was the most "stable enough" that's she's been in awhile.  Without fail, whenever I do this she goes to pot....and she did.  My Wednesday she was very "off" after school, lots of crying and misinterpreting kids at the water fountains.  Continued to escalate the rest of the evening so I finally asked, "What are the people doing today?"......"Saying, 'Let's cook Nixi' while I was at school!"  An hour later, as she continued to be very emotional and irritable I asked her what they were doing at that moment...."They're eating breakfast.  That's weird because its night."  Up until then, this is what Nixi says when the "People" (voices) are quiet.  But this night she then covered her ears and said, "And its so loud because they're eating with their mouths open."  I asked her what that sounded like and she made this horrid crunching noise.  Back down the rabbit hole our little Alice began to slip.  Thursday morning she asked me if I knew of "Dismis".  I thought it was something from a show they watch and told her no, asking what it was.  She then told me that its a land where there is a farm and lots of houses on it that her dad had told her about.  I, of course, texted Mike to see if he had mentioned anything of a farm, land, anything that she could be confusing to which he replied he had not.  A month or so ago when Nixi had said that she was going to live with me forever I had told her that I had a better idea.  That one day I would buy a farm with lots of land and build houses on it so she could live in a house right next to me and help me work with kids like her and her sister...and she could help raise and take care of the animals.  She said she would take responsibility for caring for a pink unicorn.  That was that.  Never spoken of again.  So, it was clear by the end of this week that she her thinking was disorganized and delusional...as when I told her that I texted her dad and he said he had not spoken to her about that she became irate and didn't believe me.  Par for the course with disorganized thinking.  I did remind her that her and I had talked about such a thing, though it was not a land named Dismis, which she flatly rejected.

They had a nice weekend with dad.  Nixi being the "lifeguard" at the pool in his complex which consists of her not leaving the stairs...and Safi dog paddled from one side of the pool to the other!!!!  HUGE accomplishment.

They rode their bikes and had a grand time.  Mike reported that Nix was "always fidgety and wanting to eat" the whole weekend and earlier this evening he could tell that she was having auditory hallucinations (hearing/listening to something) but when he asked her about it she denied it.  The ebb and flow, waxing and waning of schizophrenia.  Sometimes, no matter how perfect the med dosage or circumstances, she's just gonna crash a little.  Nature of the beast.

I'm tired tonight so I'll leave it at that.  Next week I'll share my new, radical, out of the box idea to help us break Nixi's increases from psychotic baseline without increasing or changing meds and also talk about her most important IEP goal that isn't even in her IEP yet....talking to someone other than me and a select few about her symptoms.  Until then, we gear up for a really exciting week of nice weather and Safi's first track meet!  She will be competing in the dash (sprint) and standing long jump!  Shall be interesting!!!!

Sarah