Stuff With Thing

We are practicing tense with Heidi.

I hold a toy and jump it over an object and then say “The toy jumped“

Or I drop a toy and say “I dropped it”

Our focus words are ‘jumped’ and ‘dropped’ and it has been fun trying to emphasis the ‘ed’ on the end without making it into two words.

Toys of choice are the highly motivating “Fisher Price Little People” in this case her cars: “Eddy jumped the car” or “the car jumped Eddy”

I noticed over the last few months that Heidi will get see, hear and smell confused. Examples:

In an underground carpark where our voices echoed “I see my voice”
Standing next to the front door ready to leave “I smell the door”

So we’ve been playing with a sound effects game, listening to a sound on the CD and then finding the matching picture

eg play sound of toilet flushing
“I hear flushing”

And use the ‘hear’ sign of a hand cupping the ear to reinforce the verbal cue.

(picture thanks to PictureSET who have some great visual aides available free of charge)

point to the picture
“I see flushing”

And point my finger from my eye to the picture to reinforce the verbal cue.

This has worked amazingly well.

Smell we play with during meal times (naturally) and when the girls are helping me to cook - hold item of food to our noses for example vegemite “I smell vegemite”.

We’ve now almost got ’see, hear and smell’ sorted out although Heidi will still get them confused if she is very excited or distracted.

In, On and Under came to our attention during a recent speech therapy session.  We thought Heidi had these under control but while doing a test she got shown two pictures, one was a hat under a chair, the other was a hat on a chair.

The speech therapist pointed to the first picture and said “the hat is under the chair”.

Then the therapist pointed to the second picture and said “the hat is?”

Heidi answered “the hat is up the chair”

So with the help of our highly motivating Fisher Price Little People we are practicing “In, On and Under”.  “Mummy is in the house”. “Mummy is on the house”. “Mummy is under the house”

A wonderful friend in the states is sending me a parcel of assorted Rubber Ducks and I’m really looking forward to having some new highly motivating toys for Heidi’s speech therapy.  All these things only work for as long as Heidi is interested in playing the game and she is more interested and plays for longer when there is a higher motivational factor. And lets be honest how could a Rubber Ducky Nativity not be highly motivating

And this proud Mummy thinks that for 3 and a bit years old Heidi is doing pretty damn good.

Hope yesterdays entry has not scared everyone off.

Things have been progressing well with Speech Therapy.

Heidi lost her words for a little while about two weeks ago and went back to mainly communicating in growls and meows. So we went back to her PECS folder and using her pictures to communicate. That only lasted about half a day before Heidi decided she was ready to talk again.

I’m not sure if she was challenging us to see if we’d call her on the not talking or if she was just exhausted from all the changes and needed a break. Either way it worked.

One of the slightly more advanced steps of PECS is that the child selects which picture they want and then puts it onto their “I Want” strip.

Here is a picture of the outside of Heidis PECS folder with a sample of some of the pictures inside it - these were the ones we used for Annies Birthday Party social story. Down the bottom is the “I want” strip. Heidi selects which picture she wants from within the folder and sticks it onto the velcro on the “I want” strip and then brings the strip to me (or whomever she is requesting from).

(as I type this Annie is sitting beside me pointing at her name and Heidis name on the screen, it is both cute and distracting )

Here is a short video of Heidi choosing a picture and putting it on her “I want” strip, although she got distracted and wandered off before verbalising her request (which happens often, she is easily distracted).

Eventually we reached the goal of Heidi being able to request “I want…” without needing the PECS folder at all. I realised how ingrained it was when last night Heidi was having a nightmare and she woke up screaming “I want, I want, I want”. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she sure did want something. These days a good 50% of her direct conversation with us (as opposed to talking to herself) starts with ‘I want’.

So she is able to ask for what she wants and for the most part “I want” is a request for a particular item ie Nouns. Thus we have moved on from teaching Nouns to teaching Verbs.

Some of the verb work we have been doing with Heidi recently is

Build - We use blocks to build a tower and say “build up”. Then we knock the tower over and say “knock over”

Hold - This is Heidis current fav. game. We hold something and then drop it and say “dropped”. I’ve been mucking around with this a little - We kneel on the mattress in our lounge room, I pick up Heidi and say to her “mummy hold Heidi”, then I drop her onto the mattress and say “mummy dropped Heidi”. Lots of fun and giggles and Heidi seems to be getting the idea. Mind you I’m not dropping her far and it is onto a soft mattress so she gets lots of bouncing fun in.

Jumped - is the other verb we should be working on but with all the chaos in our house of late it has been neglected. So Jumped will have to wait.

Smiley Saturday time again. If you want to join in then click on the Smiley Saturday link above and head over to Lightenings to enter your Smiley Saturday link.

With Ralph and both the girls sick with some virus and my Crohns flaring up again I thought I’d struggle to find things to smile about but seems that is not the case.

1. I got some stitching done this week.

2. Because the girls are sick I got to use my jelly / jello hack for the first time.

When my girls are sick they get really dehydrated very quickly, so I like to keep a track of their fluid intake. So being that jelly / jello is a sort of fluid I wanted to track how much they eat because it is one of their fav. foods when ill. I’ve been collecting my empty yogurt cups, washing them out and storing them.

Friday I got out 15 of those cups and filled each one with jelly. One standard packet of jelly fills 5 cups which = 100ml of jelly per cup. Now I can easily track their fluid, plus I can throw the cups out later which means no washing up, thus one less chore when I’m busy looking after sick kids.

I also served their ice-cream in the little yogurt cups, calculating roughly 100ml of ice cream per cup.

3. My Mum sent the girls a “Design Girls Fashion Studio” which arrived in the mail on Thursday.

I will admit my heart sank when I saw it - so many little pieces and for ages 7+, how much of a pain in the rear is this going to be to do with a 5yo and 3yo.

Friday morning the girls were getting pretty bored, they’d been up most of the night and I was rather tired and not feeling so great myself. Annie pulled out the design studio and asked if they could play with it. I distracted Heidi with the TV, figuring that this was going to be easier one child at a time.

Then Annie and I opened the box, she picked the blond paper doll, we chose what she was going to wear from the cardboard pattern sheets. Then Annie picked which fabric we would use and I traced out the pattern and cut the fabric. Annie decorated the skirt and top she had chosen whilst I cut out a pair of clogs and a handbag which she then also decorated. We used the magnets provided to attached the clothing to her paper doll.

My opinion of this Design Studio has changed radically, this is a great little kit, you could use fabrics and bits of crafty stuff you have at home to make the clothing - heck you could even make the doll yourself using a bit of sturdy cardboard and then the kiddies would have all the fun of making hair, eyes etc themselves.

Annie was entranced for almost a full hour which is impressive considering she was sick and very tired.

Here is a picture of our decorated clothing while it is waiting for the glue to dry.

Then while Annie had a rest in the lounge room I tried to make clothing for the other doll with Heidi. She was interested enough to pick out the patterns, jeans and a shirt. But then she discovered the pipe cleaners and buttons and proceeded to make a necklace. Which resulted in some fantastic language / communication from her. I even got a little video of it.

So I’m pleased as punch that Mum sent us this kit, which just goes to show that sometimes things are not as difficult as you think they are going to be.

4. The final reason I’m smiling is that after my humiliation on Tuesday I’ve managed to get on the treadmill for at least 30 minutes each day (except Thursday). I’m not doing much of a diet change due to my current Crohns flare up but after my first two coffees in the morning I’m alternating each cup of coffee with drinking a bottle of water. Thus reducing my caffeine intake and increasing my water intake.

I hope you’ve got your smile on this weekend also.

We are having a family party at our place today for Annie’s 5th Birthday. Mothers Day with the in-laws, should be good, we like each other and it is coming up to the anniversary of my MILs passing away so we don’t want FIL to be feeling alone (especially on mothers day).

But our home being invaded by 20+ people does leave us with some problems - namely Heidi and how will she cope.

I’ve emailed the family -

quote:

---

A few requests.

To make Heidi feel more secure with so many people around I need to ask your help in a couple of areas.

1. the girls bedroom is a no-go zone. This is Heidis safe place and I need her to continue to feel safe there so that she sleeps at night. We will be putting a lock on the door but if things get too heated the I will have to unlock the door so Heidi can hide out in there away from everyone. If you can prompt your children before hand to be aware that they are not to go into the girls bedroom I would greatly appreciate it, as it is usually easier to enforce this rule if everyone knows in advance.

2. Heidi has the hyper-sensitivity to certain noises so common in those on the autism spectrum. In particular high pitched noises can cause her great pain which results in unpleasant meltdowns - I’m talking here about things like the mosquito ringtone, 80s pop music, other childrens screams (when constant and on going). Please be aware of this, I know there is not much we can do in some cases (ie crying child) but in others they are avoidable (high pitched ring tones etc).

3. If things get too much for Heidi then either Ralph or I will pop her in the pram/car and go out for a little while with her, thus allowing the part to continue. We don’t anticipate needing to do this but just so you know there is a plan B.

Thank you so much. We are looking forward to seeing everyone on Sunday.

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After I did that my next priority was a social story for Heidi. I don’t care if the party food is not ready in time, if the house isn’t clean, so long as I get that social story ready and Heidi fully prepped.

and here in all its glory (well minus pictures because they’d take forever to upload) is the party social story. Basically each line is a new page complete with pictures to illustrate what the written words are saying. It is much longer than anything I’ve previously attempted.

[snip] list of people who will be at party names removed for privacy [/snip]

GAP (General All-Purpose) Verbs

This is the next step for Heidi.

Most commonly used verbs for children aged between 3-4

1. want
2. go
3. do
4. look
5. got-have
6. open
7. play
8. That’s a
9. work
10. come
11. get
12. need
13. see
14. put
15. make

Listed in order of acquisition

nb - a child might develop the use of one and the loose use of another especially with like, need, want.

This week we have been focusing on ‘make’ using Play-doh and cooking. Mostly I cut out a shape with a cookie cutter and say “Mummy make (whatever shape it is)” and then “Heidi’s turn, Heidi make (whatever shape it is)“.

Added benefit - practicing turn taking.

Later developing verbs

• hold
• give
• lose
• find
• build
• cook
• drink
• eat

We’ve been practicing ‘find’ using the Animalia book by Graeme Base. That has been much fun.

It is so strange talking to Heidi and teaching her the basics of communication. Annie learnt to talk before she did pretty much anything else, I remember the delight we had in her increasing language skills, the joy of simply talking to Annie and the sillyness when Annie got the idea of ‘word play’.

So many times I feel that I took all that for granted, that evolution of speech and the ability to communicate ideas, non-concrete concepts, feelings and everything else without any work or prompting. It truly is amazing the way language and communication works. To think that only 12 short months ago Heidi could barely communicate - she had words but not the skills to use them in a meaningful manner, eye contact was rare and disscussion did not happen. It is wondrous the change time and a little effort can make.

And I look at Annie talking all the time and think now when do I stop to listen to her, because I spend so much time just trying to teach Heidi the basics of communication that we’ve begun to take Annie’s amazing communicative ability for granted. And yet there is Heidi the perfect example of why we shouldn’t just take Annie and her constant talking for granted.