update on Kevin's OT

I've had some people ask about how Kevin's occupational therapy is going, so I thought I'd write an update.

We've had four therapy sessions now, and they've been really informative. Kevin's therapist, Jenny, concluded pretty quickly that Kevin is struggling with praxis (i.e. he has dyspraxia). Praxis is the process of coming up with an idea, planning how you're going to do it, and executing it. He struggles with the first two steps. When he can't come up with an idea or he's not sure how to carry out an idea, he will often go into fight or flight mode, and when that happens he will get distracted, dump out bins of toys and kick them around, talk a lot, or throw things. In therapy she has been doing activities where he has to make plans and then carry them out. Last week they pretended the floor was hot lava and he decided he wanted to go from the loft, to the ball pit, to the cloud (kind of like a stretchy hammock), to a step-stool, and then back to the loft. It was interesting because when he was in the ball pit he didn't know how to get into the cloud (or how to ask how to get in the cloud), so he had a fight/flight response (he got distracted and started talking and trying to do other things). Then later they did the hot lava game again and he was supposed to get in the cloud again, and rather than use a rope ladder (which was closer and would be more obvious to most people) he used the same method Jenny had showed him before. Jenny said that's pretty typical for someone with dyspraxia. Today they played hide and seek, and Kevin had a hard time coming up with his own ideas for places to hide. Instead, he would try to copy the places where Jenny had hidden.

Jenny also referred Kevin for speech therapy, but we haven't gotten an evaluation yet. I didn't realize this until Jenny pointed it out to me, but Kevin has a hard time articulating concepts like up/down/over/under and he uses a lot of gestures instead of telling what he wants. I guess I got so used to it that it didn't occur to me that he wasn't doing that. He also has a very disjointed thought process. He changes the subject a lot when he's talking. So speech therapy will help with that, and it will also help with the dyspraxia.

I'm so amazed that there are people who have figured this stuff out and learned how to recognize it in people. I knew that some of the things Kevin was doing were abnormal, but I would never have been able to put all the pieces together to figure out the things that Jenny figured out in just a few sessions. A lot of the things he does make a lot more sense now.

So far he's on grade level at school. The only problem is that he gets distracted when he's doing independent work, which I think is partly related to dyspraxia. Hopefully with therapy and support at home he will keep doing okay. I think school has actually done a lot to help him. Seeing the other kids writing, playing, and interacting has helped him figure out how to do it too. He's developed in a lot of ways since starting kindergarten.