Her Wicked Sense of Humor (and an AAC update) - October 25, 2012

My kid continues to make excellent progress with her AAC device. Nope, we didn't have overnight magic - I have learned not to hope for that anymore. Things take time, patience, energy, and...well...time time time. And time. But. She takes it to school every day and the teachers work with her to help her find words and participate in discussions. Her therapist is carefully leading us through the maze of how to use it, where words are, and how to help her communicate - and she keeps me in check when I want to move things along too quickly. (Plus her therapist is great at slowly unlocking more words/pages each week--she just added a hippotherapy page!)

At home, the kid uses it when she feels like it and doesn't when she doesn't (to mama's dismay - but I am learning to back off) but she does things like ask for milk vs. juice spontaneously, and she also has been sharing her excitement about an upcoming field trip. Overall, I am just thrilled with how everything is going. I'm so glad we went in this direction with this particular device! But...I want to fast-forward to mastery, as I always do, and I want to jump into sequencing, and...yeah. But when I step back and see how far we've come, I'm bouncing off the walls again.

Meanwhile, she is absolutely obsessed with me taking videos of her dancing. She will take her iPad and put on the song "The Sid Shuffle" from Ice Age 4 (they danced to it at school), carefully prop it up on the couch, step off the couch, and then whine and point until I get my phone out and film her. If I fake it, she knows. So I have lots of short videos of her dancing, falling, wiggling, whining, and more. Yesterday I caught what is probably my favorite, so I decided to share it here.

In brief, she notices her SMOs (ankle braces) on the floor, picks one up, dances with it while standing completely unassisted, and then tosses it aside. That little smirk on her face at the end kills me as my giggles probably reveal. I imagine her thinking, "Pssh. I don't need those, I stand and dance just fine!"

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