The livin' is easy.

We have been having a super fun-filled week!

PP had OT at Children's on Monday which went well. Tuesday was a home visit with the OT from school and our summer school teacher, Vicki. I had a lot of fun! The OT hadn't been to our house in a while and it was the first time meeting our summer school teacher so they told me how cute my house is and were amazed at how big PP is getting! We have been working on alternate forms of communication with PP lately, focusing mostly on using pictures. There is a neat acronym for this process, but I'm too lazy to go look at it right now! Vicki took pictures of PP's favorite things to make some special cards for me to use. She is proficient in this type of teaching, and the OT recently took a class to refresh/renew her knowledge about using pictures as language. I am surely not as knowledgeable as these two amazing women, so they are teaching me and PP at the same time! I'm excited about using pictures, because although PP is good at using sign language, she doesn't have enough coordination to accurately tell anyone exactly what she wants. She can use certain signs if you show her how to do them first (like 'help' or 'open') sort of defeating the purpose of her saying what she wants, but she mostly uses 'more' and 'yes' without prompting. Things can get confusing when you can only say 'more' and 'yes'!

The pictures will help PP to literally show me what she wants. Seeing it in black and white makes me realize how easy this sounds! We have been trying to get PP to use pictures for a very, very, very, very long time. It is not as easy as it sounds. The summer teacher had some new ideas for us tho, like making the pictures a certain size and only using pictures of particular things. I already have a bunch of pictures for PP: small ones, big ones, medium ones, just a couple of computer generated images, a whole bunch of real object images, velcro ones that stick to a corresponding piece of laminated paper, and a bunch more that I can't remember. Hopefully, Vicki can finally help us out and get the right combination of the style of picture that PP will respond to.

My big job in this is to push PP, as usual. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it! The nice thing about my job is that I get to play with kids all day! Wednesday was my reward for the week! I took PP to a splash pad by Lake Hiawatha. We met some friends from our ECFE class! The kids don't really play together, but I got in a few nice conversations with the parents. We had a great time! Chris got a blow up pool for me and PP to play in as well, so we have been making good use of that thing every day this week!

Thursday was ST at Children's. It didn't go so well because we had a bit of a rough morning. ST is still an iffy therapy for PP anyways. I bet it's hard for her due to her lacking ability to use speech and the abundance of ants in her pants. She would rather just run around the room, throw the toys around and eat snacks, but the therapist makes her sit down and look at things and touches her face. PP has to ask for every toy when it is being dangled in front of her face and if she doesn't ask for it, the therapist won't give it to her. She gets mad very quickly! Thursday was a 60 minute session; 30 minutes of tantrum and 30 minutes of pre-tantrum. Ugh. The therapist touches her mouth while she touches her own mouth and making 'M' or 'B' sounds. It works, sometimes, but PP just isn't a huge fan of ST. It is getting better though! When we first started this therapy, we had to switch rooms all the time. We ended up doing a couple sessions in a gym so PP could burn off steam. She used to always need  a snack to sit still, which isn't our goal for PP. Slowly but surely we have phased out the snack during ST, but I can tell when PP wants it. She gets mad about not getting snack also, making therapy really hard sometimes! We will get to a good place at ST someday, I hope.

Anyways, it's Friday. No more therapy til Monday, and no ST till next Thursday. Yay! We are gonna fully enjoy the weekend because we will get Papa Chris to partake in our adventures! Yay for family weekends! Yay yay yay!

Safe travels
XoX