Reading By Colour

Tuesday 5 January 2010

How Dannie's Dilemma Got Started

Hi all who are out there I just thought I would start this blog with an introduction on how Dannie's Dilemmas came about.
I am a parent of an aspergers child (now a teenager). I fought for many years just to get her diagnosed.
When at the age of seven she was finally diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome and ADHD, I was relieved, but my relief was short lived. I basically was told, your daughter is autistic and goodbye.
So that was the end of that, well they did give me a lovely leaflet on the medical jargon of what autism was but that was the end of the conversation.
I searched the web, bookstores, you name it I tried it to get more info on what to expect but all I could find was more mind boggling medical terms and nothing but terms of what autism was.
All I was looking for was some examples of what to expect, what part of her behaviour was autistic related and what wasn't.
But all I could find was the same info wherever I looked, sure they explained that autistic kids take things literally and that they have no expressions and so on and so forth. But I was looking for examples, like what would they take literally, show me an example.
Anyway that is how Dannie's Dilemmas was born. We decided to write a book about the day in the life of Dannie from Dannie's point of veiw, exactly what she did and how she did it.
So then we started to think about the kids, how can we get across to the kids that there is another way of doing things without sounding as if we are nagging them and always critisising how they react to things, thats where the interactive section came into the books, give the kids two different endings.
One which I know from experience that Dannie has done and the other which is what I would have liked her to do. So from there Dannie's Dilemmas was born and continues, we are currently writing Book three and are trying to get at least three to four books a year out there.
The series will cover different subjects from friendships to bullying, literal thinking to social interaction, idioms to facial expressions, reading between the lines and puberty the list is endless.
The books start from when Dannie was ten, she is now fifteen and still surprising me every day, so you can imagine how many more books are yet to come.
In an ideal world, i would have enough money to hand these books out to every asperger child free of charge but unfortunatly this is no ideal world.
This may be my first blog but rest assured it wont be my last, feel free to ask me anything I can help you with and if I dont know then Dannie is always close to hand to help on any subject you need help with. I will sign off now but will return tomorrow, again anything I can help with just blog or email me anytime
Lennie (my friends all call me Lennie).

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