Taking the Scenic Route

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

Yeah, so the title is random.  I didn’t want to make two posts.

First, recent artwork from Zora

I evened out the bangs a bit, but I am still deciding if I need to do a little more, but decided to do the least I could and see how it goes.  After the haircut, and before the pictures, she and Zane were messing around and Zora somehow ended up with a bloody lip.  They were supposed to be sleeping and I couldn’t get the story out of either of them, which means it was probably an accident and neither of them knows exactly how it happened, but neither wants to get in trouble because they were supposed to be asleep.