Dear Grayson: June 2013

28 June 2013

Grayson's First Swim Lesson

Today was Grayson's first day of swim lessons.

I wanted to sign him up for a couple of reasons:

1. He LOVES water. He loves to splash in water tables, he can't get enough tubby time, he loves playing in baby pools, and when we were in TX last summer he loved the pool at the lake. So I thought this would be something he would have so much fun doing and give us something to do on the weekends :)

2. One of the top causes of death for children with Autism and children with Special Needs is drowning..more specially, wandering...and wandering leading them to water and water leading to drowning.

I know that is not the best topic to hit on but it is a serious one.

So I thought it would be a good idea to get him started in swim lessons and make it an on going thing so we can make sure he is safe in and around water (granted he will never leave my sight near water but still..).

Anyway,

It was a great success! Zak got to be there as well and we all had a blast!

It was a parent/child class and there were quite a few kiddos and their parents in the class as well, which at first made me a little nervous ... well nervous isn't the best word... not really sure what the best word is, so let's just go with nervous.... I was nervous only because Grayson LOVES other kids, so I thought he might be completely distracted and then get frustrated that he couldn't actually play with them.

I was wrong. He did amazing! He loved that there were other kids around but he just loved being in the pool all together!

No pictures to show, sorry :-\ but we were all in the water so I couldn't capture any of the photos.

20 June 2013

AutisMate

About a week ago I bought an app called AutisMate

For those of you that do not know what the AutisMate app is..its an Augmentative Communication and LifeSkills App that allows us to create different folders such as "Our House" "School" etc and within each folder we create different scenes of areas of our house by using actual photos of our home and objects in our home so it looks just like what he is around everyday and then within the scene we create "hotspots" that he can touch and it will speak for him or open a choice board. For example he can touch the refrigerator in our kitchen scene and it will say "I would like something to eat please" and then it will open a choice board that has photos of his waffles, fishsticks, chicken nuggets...etc" and then he can chose the one he wants. The same goes for his play room with toys..etc

We haven't gotten that far yet, although he is exploring it all and figuring it out just not doing those with intent yet. HOWEVER he is doing one scene with intent! As most everyone knows Grayson LOVES tubby time, taking baths, playing in the water..etc..so he had been exploring his bathroom scene a lot lately and just pushing the bathtub which says "I would like to take a bath" and then I have it where he can press his rubber ducky that then plays a 4 sec video of the water running that I made. So at first he was just exploring it just because but today we have a breakthrough!

Today, he clicked on his bathroom scene, touched the bathtub which then said "I want to take a bath", took me by the hand, walked me over to the stairs, touched it again to speak for him, we proceeded up the stairs, he pressed it one more time, then set it down and walked to the bathtub and looked at me! SO EXCITING!

After that he figured out that he really can communicate what he wants, so a couple hours later he did it again and this time he was even more clear about it by taking me to the stairs first, grabbing his iPad, going into the scene and making it say "I want to take a bath" then we went up the stairs and he took it into the bathtub, set his iPad on the bathtub and pressed it again and reached for the faucet!

Couldn't be happier or more proud!

Now I obviously don't want him to begin to think he will get whatever he wants whenever he wants by getting the hang of the app, but I want to encourage him to use it so I will give in to constant positive reinforcement of letting him play in the bath 5 times a day... if I have to for him to understand that he really can communicate with me, otherwise if he does not get a positive response with the app, he will think that it doesn't help him in any way and won't continue to explore and use it.

YAY GRAYSON!!!

http://www.autismate.com/