Jo, your son sounds alot like mine who is now 15. I don't know how old yours is. Mine was diagnosed at 12. He was really struggling with bullying and grades at that time. Once we figured out why he was different it made alot of difference. I took him to private counseling for 2 yrs and eventually put him on medication which is night and day difference. He also decided himself to gain respect due him from his peers by studying hard and getting good grades. He started working out and got stronger and even tho having NEVER done sports has managed to participate some. Alot of this came from within him which I'm very proud of. We told him what was going on and explained to him what AS is all about, since he was so intelligent, felt he should understand why certain things are hard for him to understand. He qualified for speech and language help and they have worked with him on social skills and idioms etc, social language so he sounds less like an adult in a young body. His peers have now kinda embraced his eccentric behavior as the way he is and the other kids who say things to him he just ignores. Someone told me once to have the kids think of a duck and their feathers and just let the bullying words roll right off and not soak in and for some reason this analogy seemed to work with him. His confidence 3 yrs later is much better. I'm not pushing medication, we put off doing it until we had worked with him as much as we could, but it was tremendous for him. He was working so hard to concentrate etc. My son also kinda has the blinking eye thing, worse when he's stressed. It's only a mild tic. We tell him to work on eye contact so its improving. For the fire thing, with your other son, I would get all lighters and matches etc. absolutely out of the house to at limit his opportunity to play with fire. I know there is some medication for obsessive behavior also that some kids are taking. My son's obsessions like music and game boys are socially appropriate so they haven't really been a problem. We monitor how much he uses them of course. Good luck. Sorry this got so long!!

Thank you Carol, sorry its took me so long to reply. Nathan has now been diagnosed with Aspergers and we feel so relieved. The doctors aren't going to put him on medication though and i don't think i'd like another son on tablets. Daniel has now been put on Concerta because the Equasym wasn't doing nothing for him. The fire obsession is getting easier to deal with as i had moved everything out of his way, but school is awful. Every day he ends up getting a detention and he will be getting his first exclusion from this school soon. At juniors he was getting excluded every few weeks. I thought that maybe he would learn how to control his temper a bit better at this school, but he hasn't. On a different note though, Nathan has started doing his maths and english lessons again. Hopefully he will be back in full time school soon. He has also found that he has a gift for algebra, this is something i can't give any help in as i don't understand it at all.
Hope everything goes well for you and your son. please let me know soon.
Love Jo