Swimaversary Part Three

SLEEP

The title is almost all I need. Swimming has helped us with sleep. That is almost all I have to say as sleep is such a crucial thing that not all of us get what we need and it is even hard to come by with an autistic child. For the sake of this blog post being longer and just to give more detail I will share more.

Josiah started swimming and therapy at the sometime so like all things it is hard to piece out what is the cause to the effect. We have been to a sleep Dr. and know that his sleep issues are purely behavioral or at least there is no medical thing such as sleep apnea or swollen glands or anything like that causing it.

 Well, what has helped us sort out the sleep thing is that he has not had swimming while still doing therapy and had not had therapy while doing swimming. When he has therapy and no swimming his sleep is still bad. He takes forever to fall asleep and he wakes up several times at night. We have gone almost a month without swimming and he has bad sleep whole time. Now while swimming and therapy we did start hylands sleep aid (after swimming started) in disovables for young kids. That helped increase his staying asleep, but as soon as swimming stopped we had issues. When we started swimming back up with the other two the sleep aid and therapy we were good and getting enough sleep even if it is still not the normal amount.

Then we took off of therapy for almost the whole week and instead was doing swimming with this sleep increased again. We have tried baths, staying outside for long periods of time and all kinds of other things to replace swimming and there just seems to not be a good replacement for swimming with him. Swimming is Josiah's thing, so I am happy it makes him happy and helps with so much. We have since stopped hylands sleep aid and have switched to essential oils for sleep. That is for another blog post and will have to share about that soon. Our hopes with the oils is that if we can't go swimming daily that he can still sleep. I still will plan on doing lots of swimming with him as it helps him in so many other areas other then sleep.

Here is part one which was on self control and part two which was on cognitive development encase you missed them.