Took this one this morning during the walking around part of his breakfast.
Say Cheese Toast!
God, he looks more and more like Mary.
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From the monthly archives:
June 2008
Awesome Baby!
Pepaw (my dad) gets the award for helping J-Man make one of his best achievements this week. He got him some flash cards at the dollar store. One of the packs was for ABCs, with one letter and a picture under it per card.
He put A-F out on the coffee table and said, “Can you point to the ‘A’?” And by God, J-Man went over and pointed to the A. Then showed off and did it for the B too after being asked. Oh, and to add a degree of difficulty to it, he did the B from the backside of the coffee table, which meant the B was upside-down from where he was looking.
Woo hoo!
His letter recognition has suddenly become a source of a potential foothold into speech with him. The speech therapist is starting to think some combination of a more robust picture system and letter-based communication (potentially with assistive technology of some sort if it really takes off) might be a short and medium-term solution to our communication issues.
The more technological resources are obviously for down the road, but we’re pondering ways to improvise a low-tech version (pictures and cards) for where he is now. Our hope is to come up with something that will work until his speech can have time to grow to a point where he can use it relatively comfortably and effectively, which may still be a much longer-term goal. We just don’t know.
In any case, those details are for tomorrow. Now we celebrate!
This post was brought to you by the letters A and B, and also K, which is still my favorite letter. - J-Man
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J-Man had his appointment with the audiologist today. No one really thought he had any hearing issues; this is just part of the process for getting into the county school system. All this is for preschool and therapy services and completing the umpteen steps required before we have his IEP meeting in August.
The audiologist couldn’t find any problems, said from what she could determine (he didn’t exactly cooperate with some of the tests) that he was within or near normal ranges for hearing at the various frequencies, and cleared him to continue with the next round of evaluation processes. I’m assuming that if they had found anything that they would want to address any hearing issues first before doing other evaluations, which would make sense.
They were very nice and understanding that this wasn’t something he was going to particularly care for. Closing us up in this small, cramped, acoustically-calibrated vault (there were three adults and him in there…) on a 95 degree day wasn’t exactly our idea of a good time. It was at least in the 80s in that room. We were all sweaty and grumpy by the end of it.
We figured they were going to say he was deaf because he pretty much ignored them most of the time, but that would be normal for him during evals. Since he doesn’t really sign or give any readily understandable cue that he understands what you say unless he can go point to a picture or perform some limited action, it wasn’t all that clear what he was doing.
I was prepared for the usual conversation that objective data doesn’t paint the entire picture, blah, blah, that we normally do. As a pre-emptive strike and for good measure, we showed them that he could fill in the blanks for parts of “Old MacDonald” and the ABCs. That perked them up a lot. I think it helped. They realized he does understand stuff.
They couldn’t do a full workup since he was uncooperative at times, but they said his hearing of voices and music were fine (no shock there) and she was good to clear him to go to the next thing in the bureaucratic gauntlet, of which I’m starting to get immune to.
Unintentionally funny moment - She tried sticking the automatic measuring doodad (technical term) in his ear to get more data - more or less the same one they use on babies at the hospital - but that requires him to be both still and quiet. Heh. No chance in Helena of that ever happening when someone is messing with his ears.
We did manage to get enough of a reading for the thing that measures eardrum vibration and any fluid that might be in there. It doesn’t measure hearing, but it does measure that at least the eardrum is moving and fluid isn’t screwing anything up. It doesn’t require him to be quiet, and Mary and I basically sandwiched him into a hug long enough for them to measure both ears. No problems there! Yay!
In a long string of depressing evals, this was a bright spot. On to the next thing (whatever it is). W00t!
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Yesterday and today, J-man wore what we call “big boy shoes.” That means shoes with a sole that is NOT simply a piece of leather. Yes, shoes with rubber soles. Shoes that are made for running around outside. Shoes like big boys wear!
The first time, the OT put them on him. I understand it involved essentially sitting with him on the floor, and holding one of his legs down with her leg, while shoving the other foot into a shoe. (I’m imagining some sort of professional wrestling pretzel-type move.) I understand it wasn’t a pleasant experience, and I expected that to be the case when we tried it later. However, the Wonder Pets (best show ever) was on, and it was pretty darn simple. Today, on the other hand, the first time I tried it I ended up throwing one of the shoes across the rug in frustration! Then, something like 10 minutes later, I tried it again, and Voila! Easy peasy. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? (Only the Shadow knows…)
Also, the J-man slept for 13 straight hours last night. I think that has happened once before in his entire life, and I think he was recovering from an illness then. Since he hadn’t napped in forever, I guess last night was a catch-up night. I was totally for it.
Tomorrow we have Speech Therapy, and we have the appointment at the audiologist. The appointment is right when we normally put the J-man down for his nap. Good times. Good times.
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As we develop this hybrid of therapy work for us to do at home in between J-Man’s work with his therapists and his time at school, we have been drawing a big blank on one critically important piece of the puzzle. I call it ‘reward pellets’.
The concept comes basically from how they train animals. They do something right, they get some sort of reward. Often, it’s a food pellet.
This may sound completely silly in a conversation about autistic kids, but it’s an important part of the structure and motivational processes needed to keep moving forward. The more you talk about this stuff, the more it sounds like training a schnauzer. But, it is what it is, and you get over it eventually.
If you have an autistic child, this probably isn’t news to you. In certain instances, if your child completes a new task, responds to your question, names an object for the first time, or something along those lines, you’ll give them a special treat or reward of some kind. We tend not to do this quite as often as some therapies lean toward, but we do have “you’ve worked hard, you’ve earned X” as part of the equation.
As part of the home classroom work we’re devising, we’re coming up with a system of ‘picture scheduling’, a way of using visual cues of some sort to illustrate how we’re going to sequence something, whether it be daily activities or the classroom tasks we’ll be doing for that ’session’.
For example, on his desk, we now have three (or four for lengthier sessions) colored shapes (red heart, green square, blue circle, plus yellow star for the fourth) in a row across the top of the desk. Next to him (on his left) is a bookshelf with three (or four) open-top plastic bins with those same shapes in the same order.
Our goal will be to get him to remove the first shape from his desk (red heart) and match it with (stick it on) the red heart on the bin (it’ll stick on with the velcro), do the activity in the bin, put it back in the bin, put the whole thing in the ‘done basket’ (a large clothes basket on the floor), then move on to the next shape and activity, and so on until we’re done.
[I'll get around to posting a picture of this soon.]
Here’s the missing link. At the end of the row of shapes is (or should be in our case) a picture of the ‘reward’ (also known as a ‘reinforcer’ or ‘reinforcing object’ I think). For some kids it might be a picture of an M&M or a favorite toy or something. The idea is that it should be something special and not otherwise part of the classroom routine.
Our main problem? J-Man isn’t really attached to any toy, food, or anything else for that matter. He’s really attached to us, but it’s not like we’re going to reserve hugs for rewards or something.
Our partial solution is to use pictures of his favorite TV shows. When he completes all the tasks, he gets five minutes of a show. This means we have to cue up the DVR to the right place beforehand so that it will just show five minutes and not abruptly end mid-show. Easy enough, though. The hope is that this whole cycle will take about 15 minutes - 10 for the activities and 5 for the ‘reward’ - with the goal of completing four cycles in a row (or an hour total, however that works out). I’m not real jazzed about using TV for this purpose, but we’ve been low on options.
If the end of those activities mean the end of the classroom time for a while (i.e., we’re off for a couple of hours), the picture could be of his swing set, which is NOT something we could do for five minutes without inciting a riot. Plus it’s getting so hot that our ability to use it will get limited soon.
That brings us to our latest discovery, which may very well be the reward we were looking for.
Going on the “keyboards are the best things since cheese toast” revelation, we discovered the LeapFrog ClickStart My First Computer
He thinks it’s so great he’s almost beside himself.
Yay!
To make sure he doesn’t just use it to zone out, we sit there and ask him to type a particular letter (he may or may not), encourage him to try various parts of the keyboard (he’s pretty fixated on ‘K’ because he recognizes it and he can say it), and generally be there to be interactive. He also was getting very excited, which results in lots of hand flapping and general overload, so we’re there to do the normal stuff we do to help him stay centered (deep pressure, massage, singing, etc.)
The obvious question is, if it makes him do that and you have to center him, why do it? Mostly because his best learning takes place in a certain zone (we call it the ’sweet spot’) where he’s not too over or under-stimulated. Under-stimulation is just as stifling to his ability to do anything as the overload is. He can zone out or get overloaded in just about any activity. The ones he’s really excited about do make it hard for him to settle down, but that’s part of the process of things he needs to learn. By being there and being interactive (and not letting him drop out or go into his own world with it), we turn it into a quality activity.
Anyway, looks like Leap Frog has provided our ‘reward pellet’ for now.
Question for the masses, particularly those whose kids are attached to very few things - how do you handle the reward thing?
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