Taking the Scenic Route

The Group Picture from Vacation Bible School. Notice anything odd?

How about this:

Smiley camera-ham girl  vs.  trying to get a good photo is like catching lightening boy

Amazing, isn’t it.

Exploration Place has some new exhibits that are a lot of fun.

Zane has been interested in studying the human body, so this was the most perfect exhibit possible for him.  It was really well done and kept both kids, but especially Zane, really engaged.  The animatronics did elicit some nervous giggles from Zora, who was a little freaked out by giant talking creatures.

“Gas Attack” pinball, with info on what causes gas.

The Urine game:  a video game where you learn which things the body leaves in the bloodstream and what gets sent into the urine.

Foreground:  Operation game with rubbery organs; Background:  Digestive tract playground…you walk in the mouth, slide down into the stomach and then past the intestines, and exit through the, well, let’s just say you exit onto a brown mat. 

Burping

There was also a “More Munsch” (author Robert Munsch)  exhibit that talked about creating stories.  It had a lot of neat literacy stations.

And, of course, the familiar exhibits that they always want to see.

Zora *needed* to stop by and play Veterinarian for a while with the other kids.

And the Tornado machine.  (yeah, you can tell these kids were raised in Kansas…they get less than concerned about high winds.)

In fact, Zane is nearly blissful.  He wants to do this over and over again.

In the flight room

An EP employee actually took the time to walk Zora through an entire flight sequence.  It was really neat.

And, in the corner of the flight room, an exhibit we had never stopped at before, but this time it captured the kids attention for quite a while.  It is an active beehive, with the hives inside plexiglass (or something like it) and an exit to the outdoors for the bees.  It was a lot of fun to watch.

It was a great trip.  He has been reading a lot about the human body, especially the digestive tract, and after leaving they both have wanted to know more about bees.  It was on a Friday, when the Zoo has their “wet & wild Fridays”, so the crowd was greatly reduced.  The perfect amount of people…enough that Zora could get some interaction, but Zane wasn’t overwhelmed.

After our weekly family meeting, we let the kids pick a game each (and do everything we can to dissuade them from Mousetrap, because that game is torture for adults) and play.  Zora chose the Dora Candy Land game, but since we only have one surviving original piece (Boots with Balloons) they raided the toy box to find other characters to play.

Zane chose Uno.  (and the adults cheer!).  Since both kids lack the hand size and motor planning that Uno often requires, I ran downstairs to my “don’t want to throw this away just in case I need it” pile and grabbed a piece of styrofoam.  A few slices with a knife across the top and you have handy dandy card holders.  I have seen these made out of those foam florist bricks wrapped in packing tape and it worked a little nicer, but this was successful, and FREE. (although the styrofoam snow was a tad annoying to me, it didn’t really bother anything).  The original idea was passed on by a local OT designing something to hold cards for stroke patients.  I thought it was pretty clever.

Oh, and Zach lost.  By a lot.

It is the first time I have been to this park, but will not be the last.  It is a drive for us, but it is awesome.  It is fully fenced in, handicap accessible playground, so it accommodates nearly any playdate we might have.

Zora was SO EXCITED.  Not only a great play area, but a lot of her friends from school also made it.  She was in heaven.  Zane found a whole lot more to enjoy here than he does in typical playgrounds too (and with the fenced in area, I didn’t have to hover to make sure he didn’t leave), so it was truly a win-win for our family.  It was really nice to sit and chat with the other moms instead of chasing after kids every moment.

(merry-g0-round)

And from one of the other moms…

Zach took Zora to her last day of Preschool.  They were planting flowers and decorating the flowerpots for Mother’s Day.

She was very proud of her flowers.

It was a great year, with lots of growth, and I can’t wait until next fall when we can do it all again.

Zora is saying good-bye to the student ST she has had all year, both at preschool and individual therapy.  Luckily, it won’t be a total good-bye for me because she will have Zane as a client this summer in a new literacy component we are planning on adding to his schedule.

She has done a fabulous job with Zora this year.  I was truly impressed.

I am happy with the progress Zane made this year.  He is quite a bit more verbal, is learning to manage his emotions better (not perfect, but better), and he is just generally showing a lot of growth.  I am very proud of how hard he works and how far he has come.

Rosie did a really nice job with him this year.  She had the right amount of support and pushing him, something that can be challenging to manage.  We will miss her.  Here she is helping Zane get ready for his “Show and Share”.

They made play-do as a cooperative activity.  It smelled really yummy because Kool-aid was one of the ingredients.  Made me hungry.

And here is the whole crew (minus the Clinical Educator who dashed for her camera so she wouldn’t be in the photo.  stinker.)  If anybody in the group wants an unmodified photo, let me know.   This wasn’t the best shot of Zane, but the better shots of Zane were not a good shots for at least one of the adults each time, so I am posting this one instead.  We all know Zane’s head isn’t attached to the play-do bag.

At Zora’s conference I saw something I have never seen before in the stack of papers and testing.  She is actually improving, as in moving to a higher level of functioning on her speech abilities.  I am accustomed to making sure they are staying on their own unique learning curves (that they are gaining skills at a steady rate, trying not to stress that they aren’t following the ‘norms’), and after years of being used to seeing scores that tended to follow the same path, it was almost weird to see results that changed the severity level.

Granted, most parents probably aren’t tempted to start dancing when they see “Low Moderate” functioning, but I sure as heck was.   She is pulling herself higher, and I am SO proud of her.  This is what Early Intervention can do for Phonological delays (totally different set of issues than the Autism I am accustomed to dealing with.  Ironically, Zane scored at and above average for a lot of the phonological stuff that Zora struggles with so much). 

(blue was a year ago, brown is current tests.  It is a test where they evaluate how she pronounces words.)

Between the two kids, I am getting quite the education in communication disorders and speech therapy.  lol

Zane goes to a “Friendship Group” twice a week.  I snapped a few pictures this time.  They start the day with a “circle time” sort of thing where they greet each other and ask questions like “How are you today?”, with visual supports/PEC cards to ask and answer the questions.

They usually have a craft (often done cooperatively to develop communication and cooperation skills), a game (turn sharing and, in theory, how to win/lose gracefully…although the ‘gracefully’ part has a way to go, it is MUCH improved), a “show and share”  (usually a toy, but this day Zane brought the book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus”), and some sort of special activity.

About the hair.  Zane refuses to cut his hair.  He has always hated both the process of cutting hair and having short hair.  In the last few months I noticed that he was starting to approximate eye contact behind the bangs, and knowing how he feels about cutting his hair it occurred to me that maybe he doesn’t like short hair because it doesn’t provide the sensory screen that long hair does.  I waited until I felt like he had developed the habit of initial eye contact/visual referencing (not sustained eye contact, just letting people know he is talking to/listening to them), because I didn’t want to mess with that, but finally I couldn’t take it any more and started putting his hair into a ponytail to get it out of his face during ST.  (I actually came into the room one time and pulled the holder out of my hair and put it in his when I just couldn’t take it one more minute.  He was pulling his hair purposely in front of his face that day and it was causing issues, and I had made him start putting into a ponytail the week before for swimming.)  From that point on, when he has either ST (because they need to see his face) or swimming (because of my own experience of coming out of the water with a wall of hair suffocating me so I know that it can be panic inducing, even with an experienced swimmer) he has to let his hair be pulled back unless he agrees to cut it.  He is allowed to pull the ponytail out as soon as those things are done (and he usually does almost immediately).  It is a comfortable truce for both of us.

The only down side is that boys do not have long hair in this part of the country, and you can imagine how on top of things the STs had to be to keep the comments to a minimum with a group of boys who don’t have a polite filter.  lol.  Right now I am just waiting for the hair to grow just a little more so the ponytail looks a little more boyish and lower on his head.

Ready to leave