Ann Marie's new favorite game is shaking her head, and she thinks it's even more fun if you shake your head too. Other favorite games include pulling towels and washcloths out of the drawer in the kitchen and helping to pick up toys. She's mostly transitioned from army crawling to regular crawling, and a lot of the time she'll actually do a bear crawl up on her feet instead of crawling on hands and knees. She doesn't really walk with help yet, but if she's holding something to stand up she can bend down to get something and then stand back up. We also found out while playing in the front lobby one day that she can climb stairs.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned Heidi's imaginary friend, Danyaya Mike (or Danya for short). Danya is a good outlet when Heidi wants to be the one in charge or wants to act out social situations in a safe way. It's interesting to hear her tell about the things Danya says or does, and sometimes it's enlightening because Heidi will repeat things that she's heard Ryan and I say when she's talking to Danya. Danya also fits nicely in the palm of Heidi's hand. Sometimes Danya does naughty things and then makes it look like Heidi did it, though. :)
What I am finding with occupational therapy is that it's a lot of trial and error, and if we try something new there's always a risk that it will wreak havoc on Kevin's nervous system. About four weeks ago his therapist tried having Kevin use an Integrated Listening System during therapy. This involved him listening to music on a set of headphones while doing his normal therapy activities. Apparently the headphones vibrate on the top of the head a little bit and activate the proprioceptive sensors, so it impacts several different senses at once.
The next two weeks were rough (we also missed the next week of therapy). There were more behavior issues and Kevin was yelling and fighting more. So the next time we went to OT Jenny tried a different music track. She ended up changing the track twice during the session because she could tell it was making him more disorganized. The next week was still rough with the same problems.
So a couple of weeks ago when Jenny heard about what was going on she decided to try Therapeutic Listening instead of ILS because it's not as complex and the effects don't tend to last as long, which would mean that if it had a negative effect it would die off after a couple of days. He looked really good at the beginning, but after about 20 minutes she took the headphones off because he was getting so disorganized. The next few days were really rough. On Thursday he was very irritable and yelled a lot, and he didn't sleep well that night, which is unusual for him. Then on Friday we had the worst day that we've had in months. There was yelling, hitting, screaming, tantruming, crying, and refusing to listen. I didn't know how to get him to snap out of it. I tried putting him to bed earlier and he wouldn't go to sleep either. Then on Saturday he was still yelling and saying potty words too much, so we tried making a behavior chart. Kevin helped me make the rules and I made a chart with ten boxes by everybody's name. I told the kids that if someone broke the rules they would get a check mark by their name, and if they got ten checks they would not get a treat that night (this was Jenny's suggestion). I knew that this would be a challenge, but even I didn't anticipate that Kevin would already have his ten checks within an hour and a half. Every time he got another check it made him more stressed and he would yell/hit/say potty words even more. So that behavior chart was a bust. But we went out of the house for a while and Kevin was a lot better after that, and then on Sunday through Tuesday he was a lot better.
So when I told Jenny about the week she decided to go all the way back to the very first Therapeutic Listening song track, which is less complex, and see how that works. She said he's really complex and his nervous system is a lot more sensitive than she ever expected. Even after doing therapy with him for seven months she still doesn't feel like she's figured him out. The effects of the music on him are interesting, because on the one hand they seem to really help him with coming up with new ideas and planning them out, which is something he struggles with, but on the other hand it seems like it's really difficult for his nervous system to process that much auditory input, so it affects his behavior afterwards. Like I said, it's a lot of trial and error. The next week after the less complex song track went a lot better! So we tried the same track again this week and we'll see if this helps him.
At occupational therapy one of the things we are working on is getting Kevin to communicate better. A lot of times he doesn't communicate what he's planning to do or tell others what he's thinking, and this leads to a lot of conflicts with Heidi when they are playing. So this week while they were playing, Miss Jenny said, "Kevin, do you think your sister Heidi can read minds? Well, she can't read minds, so your homework this week is to tell Heidi your plan so she knows what you're thinking." Well, at the end when he was putting his shoes on, she asked him if he remembered what his homework was. Kevin responded: "Work on Heidi reading my mind."
