Pushing for Independence

Tonight I attended a support group at my daughter’s wrap around agency where they had a presenter who talked about a method called Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). The method seems really interesting but it requires the child to spell out what they are trying to communicate so I am not sure it is something my daughter at age 5 would be able to do. They start to work with children at age 4 so there may be a few things that start building on now. There are a few books available on this subject and I plan on shelling out the money for them and reading them in the precious little spare time that I have.

During this group and this presentation the topic of how much is actually going through the minds of our non-verbal kids came up and it was a reminder to me that I need to really start assuming my daughter is in there and understanding me. I really need to stop talking about her or treating her as if she does not have the ability to understand the things that I am saying. I need to start talking to her instead of at her even if she is not speaking back to me. This RPM method seems to have a lot of promise and I plan on researching it more, it is another method of giving your child a way to express themselves. I am not sure what method or system we will end up using but I will keep trying to work with Elizabeth to find a way to tell us how we can meet her needs. I know that she understands language, when I talk to her or ask her to do something she will listen and sometimes follow instructions so I know she has the ability to understand language.

My daughter just turned 5 last week and I really need to work on treating her more like a 5 year old and not babying her. I tend to just do things for her since it is how I have always done it instead of expecting her to do it herself. She has the ability to do so much more than I give her credit for. One of the things that she loves doing is taking all of her clothes off, she does this constantly but when I go to bathe her at night I still take off her clothes for her. I am not sure why I do this, I guess it is because I always have and she has never offered or attempted to do it on her own. Tonight for bath I asked her to take off her own clothes and she did it just like that. I really need to start pushing her more; she can do a lot of things that I just automatically do it for it. I really need to change my habits.

On another note I should probably buy stock in Lucky Charms, that has been Elizabeth’s food of choice lately. She mostly eats the marshmallows but every now and then she will eat a few of the cereal pieces as well. We make her use her spoon to eat it and here and there she gets a few cereal pieces on her spoon as she is attempting to pick out just the marshmallows, at this point with her picky eating I call that a win. Several times a day she takes my hand and leads me over to where the cereal is which her way of asking to have some.

Christmas time is almost upon us and I have already almost completed my shopping. My older daughter is hard to buy for because she really has very little interest in anything toy related anymore. My younger daughter is the opposite, she has a ton of different interests and the difficult part for her is narrowing down which toys to get her. For my older daughter I typically end up buying her a few toys that I hope she will like and a few sensory things. This year I bought a pair of noise reducing headphones and a sensory pillow for her, she will probably like these items much more than the toys. I love Amazon, I can find so many sensory things for her on there. I think that I probably do 90 percent of my shopping on there, it also helps to have Amazon Prime with the free two day shipping. I am very thankful for shopping websites like Amazon, prior to that I would have actually have to physically go to the mall and shop.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for any errors, I really hate proofreading.

Moving

So we have finally moved into the new house. My daughters have really taken everything in stride. It amazes me how well they adjust to living in a new house. This is our second move within the year since we had to move in with my grandfather for the summer while our house was being built. The kids have handled things way better than I have.

Currently we are still in the unpacking phase. We have a lot of things and really should go through all of those things and decide what to keep and what not to keep. The good part about this is that we are unpacking a lot of toys that we packed up when we were trying to sell our house. The girls are pretty excited seeing them again. I am pretty sure that after not seeing them for 6 months they forgot about them.

So while my older daughter is settling into the house well she is having some regression issues when it comes to her play skills. She has never really had great play skills but she at least had some interesting in toys. Lately she really only has a fleeting interest if any and its mostly stim related. I spoke to her teacher about this and luckily they can provide some developmental therapy for us to possibly work on that issue one on one with her. Most of her therapies are provided in a preschool setting so it is hard to address that particular issue there with so many other kids and things to focus on.

We have also been dealing with some aggression issues at school. I think this is possibly related to her inability to communicate her needs. We met with a behavioral specialist and he thought it was possibly her trying to have interaction with her peers or her sister but not knowing how. If that is the case I guess its sort of a good thing, at least she is wanting to interact. Now all we have to do is teach her how to interact properly, this is much easier said than done.

We are also going to look into getting her an iPad through school to just use for communication. Currently we are only working with PECS and that is going well. I think the biggest issue with using the PECS system is trying to remember to get out the picture book and making her use it. She seems to know how to use it but prefers to just lead me to the things that she wants instead.

So one way I got to escape the stress of moving was to go to an event that was put on by the Autism Connection of Pittsburgh. It was a nice event held at a whiskey bar. I was really hoping to have a nice glass of wine but they only had whiskey. My friend and I both tried some of the whiskey drinks, they were alright. I was not really a whiskey drinker before I attended this event and I cannot really say I will be a whiskey drinker after this event, but it was nice to try something new. The event was fun and it was nice to spend a night out with my friend. I get to see her all of the time but its not often that we actually get to go out and really spend time doing fun things.

Well that is all for now, time to get back to unpacking!