It was a little weird moving back into the blue house. It felt in some ways like we'd been on a very long vacation. Every time I return from a vacation I'm always struck by how loud my feet sound on the hardwood floors, almost as if I'm a stranger in someone else's house. But by the time I've taken care of all the details like going through the piled-up mail and watering the plants, everything returns to normal and I feel like Dorothy saying, "There's no place like home!". After a two year absence, the house didn't just seem empty but completely foreign, and the details took months to sort out, but normalcy did finally return. And, boy, did normal feel good.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Autism Adventure: Part VII
It was a little weird moving back into the blue house. It felt in some ways like we'd been on a very long vacation. Every time I return from a vacation I'm always struck by how loud my feet sound on the hardwood floors, almost as if I'm a stranger in someone else's house. But by the time I've taken care of all the details like going through the piled-up mail and watering the plants, everything returns to normal and I feel like Dorothy saying, "There's no place like home!". After a two year absence, the house didn't just seem empty but completely foreign, and the details took months to sort out, but normalcy did finally return. And, boy, did normal feel good.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Sparkle Fairy Sparkles
I didn't get a chance to post about Gracie's first day camp adventure. We won a free summer camp to a local Christian theatre group, and since Ryne was going to Cub Scout camp that week and Anna was going to church camp, we let Gracie sign up for the drama camp. She had an great time, and was even named "Camper of the Day" one of the days.
The last day of the camp they put on a performance that was a cross between American Idol and Sleeping Beauty (huh?). Really, it turned out quite cute. So here is Gracie in her role as Sparkle Fairy.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Sweet Sixteen
When Anna was the age that most kids start taking swim lessons, we were overwhelmed with autism and newborn Grace, so Anna didn't get to do a lot of activities that many kids get to do. Unfortunately, with kids starting sports at such an early age these days, if you don't start young you're often left behind. By the time she started swim lessons she was 2-3 years older than all the kids in her class (and since she's always been 95th percentile for height it looks like she's even older than that). It was the same with gymnastics. When she tried soccer she was put with kids her age, but then she was in the uncomfortable position of having to learn a new sport with kids who had already been playing 3 or 4 years. So a couple of years ago, when a heard about a neighbor lady offering private swim lessons just down the street from us, I quickly signed the kids up.
With the one-on-one instruction, Anna quickly caught up. But she still not what I'd consider a great swimmer. She would be able to swim independently in a pool without us having to be too worried about her, but as far as technique was concerned she had a long way to go. So when the instructor suggested at the end of last summer I sign Anna up for swim team I thought she was nuts. But this instructor coaches for a couple of local swim teams, so I figured she must know better than I do. Anna was excited about the idea, and even offered to drop soccer and gymnastics to try swim team.
So we signed her up for the team that the neighbor helps coach. It is a year-round team and the beginning level practices 2-3 times a week. It started out a little rough. Anna hardly knew anybody and she knew little about swimming. Marc and I knew less than her, so we were no help! She looked very awkward in the pool. She was extremely slow compared to the others in her group (again, mostly kids who were younger than her). Anna is a perfectionist, so you could tell she was really thinking about how she was supposed to swim rather than just going for it like most kids do. Sometimes it was almost painful to watch. But her coaches were great by really encouraging her.
Eventually she started to make progress. We didn't sign her up for any meets right away, but finally in December we decided to give it a try. The first meet is very stressful for both parent and child, because you have no idea what you're doing. Your biggest concern is just getting your child to their event. Once I got her to her event, I was just praying she didn't get last place. Looking back, that sounds so selfish. Somebody has to be last place, and it's not the end of the world if it happens to your child. But I just didn't want her getting too discouraged. Fortunately, she did not get last place (she wasn't too far from there though). We did a few more meets and her confidence improved. We didn't sign up for a lot of events, just a couple of easier ones. So while some kids would be entered in a whole day's worth of events, she would sometimes go to a meet for just one event (about a minute or two of actual swimming). As the year went on she started making some friends, and she was improving every week in her swimming abilities.
By the time summer rolled around she was very into swimming. She said she had found her sport. In the summer many kids also compete in a summer swim conference of neighborhood teams. It's supposed to be less competitive than the year-round teams, so many kids will join who don't swim year round. So we signed Anna up for a summer team in addition to her year-round team. This has been such an amazing experience for her. Since she's been in the pool almost twice a day all summer, she's improved dramatically. She's now able to swim events like butterfly and IM that she couldn't do in the spring. Most importantly, she really loves the sport. When I pick her up from practice she can't wait to tell me how she improved her pullout that day (maybe someday I will know what a pullout is!).
So here is where the bragging starts. She achieved qualifying times for ALL the individual events for the all-conference meet (think summer league version of the Olympics). She was so excited. The preliminaries for the conference meet were last night. I struggled a bit on how to encourage her. I tried to remind her what an accomplishment it was to just be there. I didn't want her to get her hopes up too high. As I looked at the swimmers names listed in the psych sheet (fancy swimmer term for program) many of them were names I recognized from the year-round meets, so we knew the competition would be tough. Anna stayed calm and had a great attitude. She wanted to do her best, but she was just going to enjoy herself.
As the meet got started things went as we expected. Her team in the medley relay came in last place. Her first individual event was the freestyle. She won her heat and took more than a second off her time, but placed 27th overall (out of 38). She was so excited about winning her heat that she didn't care about being 27th.
Her best event was next -- backstroke. Looking at the psych sheet, we were shocked to find out that she was seeded 17th out of 53 swimmers. The top 16 would advance to the finals. I was afraid that she would feel too much pressure, but she remained calm and happy. She remarked that she had a good warm-up and knew just how many strokes she needed before her turn. She was ready to go.
Again, she took more than a second off her time. But it was likely that everyone else improved as well, so we would have to wait and see. I was much more anxious about it than she was. I will have to work on being calm like her. She swam her IM shortly thereafter and did not do great, but she took that in stride as well. She was done for the night and said she was ready to go home.
"Don't you want to wait for the results for the backstroke to be posted?" I pleaded.
"Nah, I'm ready to go to bed."
Well, we ended up waiting anyway because someone had parked so close behind my car that I couldn't get out. As the official taped the results sheet on the wall, I peered over the crowd at the results. Anna stayed off to the side, but finally started to show some anticipation.
You would have thought she had won the Olympics by our reactions. In fact, as I went to bed last night I wondered how the moms of Michael Phelps and Katie Hoff do it. I was so excited for my kid that it took me over an hour to fall asleep last night. I don't think any of us care how she does tomorrow night in the finals. I'm just so glad that God has blessed her with something that makes her happy. I am encouraged by how far she has come in less than a year in this sport. It's a good thing to remember in other areas of life, like autism. And I am encouraged that she has maintained such a great attitude. I am confident that she would still have viewed the night a success if she had come in 17th.
Update: She did even better at the finals!!! She took more than a second off her time AGAIN and placed 13th. Here is her swim from the final:
Friday, July 18, 2008
Autism Adventure: Part VI
Ryne adapted very quickly to his school. He had awesome therapists who genuinely loved him and loved working with him. The school itself was not very big, but very cheerful looking without being overly stimulating. Word about the school quickly spread. More students were added in the fall and continued to be added over the next couple of years.
Having a consultant on-site turned out to be a huge factor in Ryne's success. He was a quick learner, so his programs needed updating quickly, which is often difficult when you're having to communicate with a consultant by phone or email. It also allowed staff to work together more effectively. Instead of communicating through written notes over days at a time, a therapist could walk ten feet to the next therapist to discuss something.
As with most ABA-VB programs we used the ABLLS to guide and track our programming. This is what the language portion of his tracking sheet looked like his first year or so at the school.
The gray portions are what skills he had when he started at the school (June 2003), and the colored portions are the skills he learned by October 2004. As I mentioned before, he had quite an extensive vocabulary before he started at the school. This is reflected in the "Receptive Language" column (red arrow). If I asked him to get the cup off the table he understood the command and could even say cup and table. But if we pointed to Anna and said, "Who is this?" he could not answer. That is reflected in the "Labeling" column (orange arrow). "Intraverbals" were severely lacking (blue arrow). Intrarverbal behavior is what enables a child to have a conversation, so that was our primary focus with Ryne over the next two years. An example of something we started with was, "Who's your sister?"
Gradually Ryne gained more and more language. When he started at the school he would have just said, "Cracker," as a request, but he eventually was able to say, "Momma, can I have the square crackers, please?" Within a year he would see his little sister crying and spontaneously make comments like, "Gracie is sad because she is tired." And by the end of year two he was asking people questions (unprompted)and then responding appropriately -- for example, he'd ask someone when their birthday was and then tell them his birthday.
We also worked on things like potty training (within our first month at the school he was diaper free during the day), fine and gross motor skills, play skills, social interaction, and group instruction. The majority of his day was one-on-one instruction with a therapist. But the day would be broken up with short "circle times" with the other students. Here's a clip of him singing some of the songs he learned at circle time.
Ryne became a whole new kid while he was at this school. As his language developed, so did his social skills. He was interacting with his family more and more, especially his sisters. He developed some sweet friendships with a few of the kids at his school. He was approaching kids at the park and actually playing with them. He was doing well in a regular Sunday School class with the help of an aide. Toward the end of the second year he went to summer camp and a gymnastics class with the help of aides and did great. Tantrums became less and less frequent. We no longer had to lock bedroom doors at night to make sure he didn't wander off or keep a death-lock on his wrist any time we went out in public to keep him from running off. He slept in a bed, sharing a room with his older sister, instead of collapsing on the floor after pacing his room for an hour. He started swallowing pills on his own (we tried for a year to get him to do this, but it only took his therapists one day), which enabled us to start on a biomedical program again.
At the end of two years at the school, it was clear he was ready to attend a regular kindergarten classroom. But it would not be in Chicago. A lot had happened to our family outside of our autism adventure during our two years in Chicago, including the blue house never selling. Marc was offered a promotion with his current company back where the blue house was, so we said good-bye again to Chicago. One of the hardest things I've ever done was picking Ryne up from his school on that last day. He loved it there (so much so that for the next year he would say he wanted to go back to Chicago and go to his old school). I was in tears, and so was the staff. As I was about to buckle him into his car seat, a car rushed into the parking lot. Out jumped one his therapists, tears streaming down her face. It was not her scheduled day to work at the school, but she just had to say good-bye to Ryne. That was the kind of experience we had at this school.
So why haven't I included a link to the school? Sadly, it doesn't exist anymore. It's not easy operating a school. The business side of running the school apparently got to be too difficult, which led to the school closing. But a new school rose out of it's ashes, run by two of the ladies who had worked so closely with Ryne. The new school is in a better location, has much better facilities, and has an incredible staff. We visit quite often, and I'm just amazed at the things they are doing there.
The more famous Sinatra tune about this great city says, Chicago is one town that won't let you down, and it certainly did not let Ryne down. We will be forever grateful for the blessings God gave Ryne during those two years.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Road Trip: Day 7
About 15 minutes into our canoe trip, we stopped for a picnic.
The kids all tried paddling this year.
My two favorite boys.
We take turns letting one kid tag along in a tube.
See you next year, Michigan!
Road Trip: Day 6
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Road Trip: Day 5
In this picture you can see some of the standing water behind our tent. We certainly could have had it worse.
Like this couple! Their campsite was just across the driveway from us.
And this was just behind them.
Anna and Ryne woke up and they were much wetter than I had originally thought. All our sleeping bags, pillows, etc. were soaked. The park ranger showed up and said it was supposed to rain off and on for the rest of the day, with 80% chance of storms at night.
Thus ended our first camping adventure. We checked into a local hotel for the next two nights.
Road Trip: Day 4
Road Trip: Day 3
Hooray for the red, white, and blue!
Grandma Grace with her 4 great-grandchildren
Friday, July 11, 2008
Road Trip: Day 1
Yes, those little ant-sized people are our three kiddos. I know a good photographer would have had the subjects closer and still captured the background, but 1) I'm not a good photographer, and 2) I was standing in the street and didn't really want the kids there with me.
Even if you're not a swimming fan, you'll be impressed with this video I took of Michael Phelps winning the 200 meter butterfly. Amazingly, we were only about 4 rows from the top of the center, and still were able to get good video (what you see is not nearly the quality we can see before uploading).