hmm

Kyle is back in school and keeping up but, a month into it, he's having more and more problems with his sleep schedule. I think the kid has some kind of circadian sleep disorder - more that the average teenage thing. When he was being home schooled, his normal sleep cycle was 4am-noon, and he was pretty regular with that. In late August, he started to make himself go to bed earlier and get up earlier and it looked like it was going to work, but now he's having trouble falling to sleep. Carl and Sam can fall asleep by 11p or 12a, but Kyle is staring at the ceiling until 3am or so. They have to be in school by 7:40am.

He ends up walking through the school day like a zombie, and his work is beginning to suffer. It's increasing his stress, and I think that the his irritable bowl might be flaring up.

The whole situation just makes me want to punch a wall. The kid is trying so hard to be just a normal guy.

I don't know if it would be better to try to move his circadian "clock" or just work with it. All the stuff I've read about it says that it should be treated (if one wants to live a 'normal' life), but my gut tells me that trying to screw with it is going to take over his life.

There is an Alternative High School in Marquette, but he doesn't want to go - most of the kids who attend are there because of behavior/social issues, and Kyle's comment was "I don't feel like having the goths, the stoners and the neo-nazi's take turns at me."

I was looking at an online high school, and that made me think that perhaps I could work with the local Alternative school to develop a program. The problem with the home schooling was accountability; working full time and going to school full time doesn't leave me enough time or energy to hound Kyle about doing his work - we were sporadic, at best.

Any comments would be appreciated.