Five-Word Sentence

They were asking for more mashed potatoes. I gave some to Sarah and some to Rachel. Rachel asked for the salt. After she was finished salting her spuds comma she said to Sarah, "Here, Sarah. Here's the salt for you."

I was so excited that I leaned down and started hugging her and said, "You speak so well! That was so awesome!" She smiled and giggled.

***END TRANSMISSION

(cavamil's note: This is awesome! The best part of it, for me, is that she did this entirely spontaneously: a full paragraph, one five-word sentence and her intentions was to help her sister by anticipating her need. Too cool.

I would also like to point out Mr. Vinca's response: big and loud and sincere in its praise of what she should do. The flip-flop in action.

And I would also like to note that this is Mr. Metallic Vinca's first post here. What a way to start. :))

Conversations

The other day I was talking to Rachel. Or, rather, she came up to talk to me.

"What you gonna make?" she asked. It's her way of asking what the next meal is going to be and, though sporadic during the day, always shows up around bedtime. This happened to be near bedtime.

"I don't know. Probably oatmeal."

"No, Mom," she replied calmly. "No oatmeal."

"Hon--"

"I hate oatmeal. How about muffins?"

A little surprised since this is the first time she's offered an alternative, I say, "I don't have any wheat sprouted yet for muffins, so we can't have them tomorrow. But we will have them sometime this week, okay?"

"Muffins?" she asked, very happy and somewhat surprised as well.

"Sometime this week," I say. "But not for tomorrow's breakfast."

"Okay, mom. Well, I going to bed now."

I blink a couple of times and mentally start analyzing the conversation. She was very engaged, very attentive, eye contact was excellent, there was about four loops in that conversation (depending on how you count it), and, most importantly, she initiated making a deal. Up to now she's only accepted them.

It was the longest, true conversation we've ever had. And I'm thrilled!

***

This one was told to me by my husband. It seems that he found one of the puzzle pieces from the Valentine's day puzzles I had bought the girls on the floor. He picked it up and, since Sarah happened to be nearby, asked, "Is this yours?"

She said, "No. That's [insert sister's name]. I'll take it to her."

And she took it from my husband's hand, found her sister and gave it to her. Once again, involved, attentive, good eye contact.

***

They keep growing more and more each day. :)

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.

New Baby

Yup. We have a new little one in our house. If I haven't already contacted you, please email me for details. My life is more than a little chaotic at the moment... I don't mean to be rude.

Thank goodness for my priority list. I would be very overwhelmed right now if it weren't for that. That and routines. Priorities and routines. Very good things. :)

Posts will be rare for the next month. Rachel is sick right now (can you tell we ran out of echinacea and didn't resupply?) and Sarah is recovering from a nasty fever, so chances are good therapy won't happen this week, not to mention we're still getting used to having a newborn in the house again. However, this bout with severe illness has been a surprising mark of progress. Sarah's ability to reason and listen to reason (like when she tried to argue her way out of taking any medicine) has improved dramatically: she bargains now regarding how much she has to take. We've used bargaining in other situations, but she's never been willing to bargain when it comes to any sort of medicine... even the ones that taste like candy. Now, we were able to get her to take some of the medicine willingly (we hid what was left in juice... I know... we're sneaky).

Rachel, during this illness, has been using her words in spite of her lethargy. And her improved pronunciation has paid off this time around in that she's able to speak pretty clearly, even when she's completely exhausted. Not everything comes out clear, but we can hear she's doing much better than even a month ago.

What's really creepy about this illness is we aren't the first to get it this time around. There were people at Rob's job who had come down with this and several of our friends who have been fighting it off for a few weeks now. It's a nasty bug that seems to linger forever and I'm surprised it took as long as it did to come to our house. I had been hoping we would miss it entirely.

On a side note, all this work we've done with Rachel and Sarah has come in pretty handy recently... a close relative of mine was involved in a four-wheeler accident and cracked his skull (idiot didn't wear a helmet). As I've been talking to yet another relative about his condition, his progress, his recovery, etc. I find myself returning again and again to things I've learned working with Rachel and Sarah. For example, I was really happy when I found out that friends and relatives have been playing games with The Idiot Who Didn't Wear a Helmet. They were doing it to help him get his mind off his current predicament, but I learned several years ago that games are the best way to help the brain develop new pathways and heal. The person who was telling me this also knows how helpful games are so it's nice to have that level field as well. With the new baby, I haven't been able to visit The Idiot. I'm not too happy about that. But I can do Google searches here at home and relay what I find if it's useful. And thanks to my past experience with this, I have a better idea of what's useful and what isn't.

Anyway, enough rambling. Baby needs me and I still have to get the kitchen cleaned up from breakfast. Then, I rest. Lots of resting this week.

Something to celebrate

So, we've been working with Rachel on her speech, both structure and pronunciation. Yesterday, I realized in doing her pronunciation work that she has moved from one level (isolated sound) to another (syllables with sound).

This is only one sound ("K") and there are many, many more we'll be working on in the future, but still it shows progress.

As a side note, she has been asking "why" a LOT more often than before. Usually it appears when she's asked me to do something and I either say, "No," or "In a minute." And she stays and listens to the answers. :)

Goal for this week: work on eye contact. It will really help her pronunciation.

Where we are now

This past weekend, my husband watched a BBC DVD the Autism Treatment Center puts out called "I Want My Little Boy Back" and he was struck my how much things have changed. When we first got involved with the SR program two years ago, Rachel and Sarah threw fits much like the boy in the documentary. Just like the boy, it was impossible to take them anywhere because of the meltdowns that would inevitably occur.

Now?

They still have meltdowns on occasion, though for the past few months they've been more like true tantrums. We can take all the kids to friend's houses, the library, church, and the store (haven't tried the mall yet and we've only had them in the children's portion of our service... we're going to be working on the actual all-ages service next week). And the best part is that when Sarah gets upset, she tells you. She uses words to describe what she's feeling and, most of the time, why. Rachel has become better at using words as well but mostly she's just calmed down a lot.

Now, we haven't been perfect in our application, especially when it comes to calming down during meltdowns. And maybe this is just our girls growing up. Still, I'm happy with the progress.

And I don't think I would have seen the difference so clearly if my husband hadn't taken the time yesterday to watch that DVD, and then taken the time afterward to remind me of the differences.

So, my point is that I'm very grateful for my girls and my husband. :)

Update and Progress

This is going to be the first of two posts today.

Rachel has been showing a lot more interest and a lot more frustration with academics. She loves school and got upset with me this week when I didn't immediately have everything for school together right when she wanted it. :) Considering that last year she couldn't have cared less if I was teaching her numbers or letters, I'm very happy.

Also, she has been writing letters on her own. A year ago I had to figuratively pull teeth to get her to write anything at all. Now, she writes about 4-5 letters consistently (she's really fascinated by the shape of "A") and writes "letters" to me about various things. Her sentences this month have stayed at an average of 3-4 words in length. We're still working on grammar in many cases, but I'm thrilled at the sophistication I'm starting to see.

Sarah is doing very well with phonics and reading. Comprehension and sequence are a struggle (no surprise) so I'm going to make that a focus during the summer and in the playroom (we're figuring out a new schedule now that some time has opened up). In math, Sarah has been learning how to add two-digit numbers and has been doing excellent on her number facts. Her rigidity still shows up, but she's slowly becoming more flexible.

Sarah showed more progress a couple days ago: she wanted to watch a movie and my husband said no. In the past, she would have said, "But we HAVE to!" and threatened to lose it emotionally. In the recent past, she would have said, "But we have to!" and pouted, eventually finding something else to do. This time, she said, "But Dad, I like it. I want to watch it." She still kind of pouted, but she found something else to do. I hope that last response will become a new trend with her.

Both girls have been doing a lot better with company. I didn't even notice until we had a friend over this last Sunday. He said that the girls were a lot calmer and interacted better than they were when he first started coming by (two years ago). Sarah didn't climb on him and neither got into his face... much. :) I was very proud of both of them.

Although we've been using SR principles informally, I still have Getting the Playroom Going Part-time as a goal. The principles work, but the best results we've seen have been during time in the playroom. So, I've made a couple calls regarding babysitters. Hope I hear back soon. I'll let y'all know if anything pans out (sans details to protect privacy of babysitter).