There is just so much paperwork that one family can take and we’re only dealing with one kid here! I can’t imagine what parents of multiple kids deal with.
Right now we have a spreadsheet in the hall outside Monkey’s door tracking his sleep habits. What time he goes to bed, what time(s) he wakes up during the night and what time he gets up for the day. We have a place for notes as well to include information like “no melatonin” or “had to be woken up”, etc.
We have a spreadsheet on the dining room table that tracks his transition difficulties. We have to rate his anxiety level on a scale of 1-10 for each of the 10 or so steps that we go through each morning to get him to school.
We just recently completed, yet ANOTHER, developmental assessment that pretty much tells Monkey’s entire developmental history from birth through now. It also included a bunch of information about the developmental history of both Duhdee and myself and anyone in our families who had delays or health issues as well. We fill out one of these every couple of months and can I say it’s getting really old? They’re a total PITA and it’s really emotionally draining to have to cover all this stuff over and over again.
We also recently completed a spreadsheet that tracked the “ABC’s” of Monkey’s behaviors during transition. This is when we outlined each of the different steps of the transition that Monkey has issues with and talked about A (antecedent – what happened just before he began to act out) B (behavior – how he acted out) and C (consequence – the consequence for both Monkey and for us …typically, we reassured him or praised him and he either settled down or just kept going.)
I know the professionals need this information to best help him but sometimes it would just be nice to just feel like a parent and not a reporter, amature behaviorist and (at times) psychic (OK, what just set him off, he was FINE a second ago!)