Vacation is over

Christmas was nice this year. We got a wonderful present for the whole family (our baby) and everyone had enough presents and food to satisfy but not enough to make people sick. :) I think the key to my happiness this year was chanting "Christmas is like any other day," over and over until I really didn't care if things were perfect or not. More on that on my other blog.

As for therapy, I'm starting it up again with Rachel and Sarah. I've already started work again on pronunciation with Rachel. She's doing really well with the "ng" sound. We had used popsicle (sp?) sticks to help her get her tongue in the right position. It's actually pretty neat... you put the stick on the tip of your tongue and push down and a little back. That little nudge puts the back of the tongue against the back of the mouth, closing it off. Between that and putting her awareness into her nose (I would pinch my nose to show her how the sound needed to only come through her nose) she started to get the hang of it.

My point with this long ramble is that when I did some therapy with her Friday, she didn't need to use the stick at all. She did the sound all by herself.

Yeah!!!

After she proves proficient in creating the isolated sound, we're on to syllables and then words. And then it will be integrated in her "regular" therapy, which right now includes using future tense.

As for Sarah, I've found a really neat RPG that I hope will help her with decisions. It could also make her dependent on rolling dice to make decisions and if it does that we'll stop the game. Anyway, it's called Shadows. Sarah's weakness is narrative. She tends to make lists instead of describing actions. My hope is that this game will help her create scenarios and especially help with "what if" questions and speculation. I'm also going to be stressing experiments more this year in school to create more "what if" opportunities. We will also continue our current "what if" generator: stories/books/movies.

Interaction is still a major weakness, though the girls have gotten a lot better at it over the past year. At the beginning of the year, I wouldn't have even tried an RPG in therapy because of the lack of interaction. And I'm no longer worried about major fits if I take them outside (though I do worry about the lack of privacy since we live on a very busy road just off the highway and a person can easily see through our fence... when I have no energy to keep an eye on the world outside that fence, the kids don't get to play outside... must move...). Oh, and they are doing very, very well in our church's children's group (Primary). They have been joining in the group activities and their teachers don't have to keep as close an eye on them as they did in the past.

I mean, if we're considering taking off the locks and putting a simple chime/alarm in place, that says a lot.

Gosh, I'm tempted to do a "year in review" but I'm not sure if I'll have the time. Therapy has been integrated quite a bit into our life because of the baby; however, it's still time consuming. We'll see. Actually writing down some of the progress makes me really, really want to just lay it all out though.

We'll see.