We Have a Talking Box

Long time, no blog.

Let's see. My son has a shiny new AAC. In less than a week of using it, he managed to reprogram the food page to show only the button for pizza. I'm thinking that was inadvertent, but it still makes for a funny story. Oh, and then his sister took it to the other room, where we heard the device repeatedly say, "I have diarrhea . I have cramps. I had a stroke. I have diarrhea."

Oh, and then my husband lost the cord and remembered throwing what he thought was an old phone charger away. Guess what he found after we spent $70 ordering a new one? Yeah.

Good times.

I do think his talker will do him some good, though. At the training session, they stressed that we should also push buttons to demonstrate how it can be used for communication instead of just as a noise-making toy. We did a couple of times, not a huge amount. We're still getting used to it ourselves, right?

Anyway, he still likes to stab randomly at it to see what all it says, but if you ask him if he'd like something to eat, he'll press the eat button or "eat" and then "it" or "eat" and then "food," or sometimes a specific food choice offered to him. Yeah, food really is the way to a boy's heart. Anyway, I think he's getting the hang of it. Hopefully by kindergarten we can get him a real method to communicate when words are failing him.

Speaking of words, we were downtown today, and someone had a Great Dane. My son loves dogs, so he wanted out of his stroller to go pet him. When we approach the owner, my son says, "Clifford!" Heh.

Progress and the Boy

It's been a while, so here's what all's been going on.

The boy will have his AAC. Insurance is even paying for it. Wow. We can use our family grant money to cover the initial exam and possibly some training on how to use it with him, yay.

I don't doubt that it will be a tool to get him to talk more, not a permanent substitute for vocal speech. He may need some sort of AAC forever, we'll see, but he's definitely making more and more strides toward actual understandable speech.

He's picked up on my repeated attempts to get him to add adjectives to his noun labeling, so he'll point and say things like, "Blue fish. Green pants. Red bird." He actually seems to get some facial expressions. He's been playing Starfall.com a lot, and his favorite game is now the "All About Me" module. He's learned "boy" and "girl," though he doesn't always label correctly. He's learned happy, smiling, sad, and grumpy, and he'll make facial expressions to match. They're still exaggerated, but that's some big progress there!

I don't have to watch over him constantly to make sure he doesn't run away at events and in the store. He'll actually walk next to the cart. He told us he was ready for that step, and he was. Please, please, please let him tell us he's ready to potty train next!

Now this looks promising... an educational summer

I hadn't seen this before. Mrs Riley's PageBuilder.

Instant visual support builder. Very helpful. Reasonably priced, too. I tried it out on preview mode last night, and it looks like it would do exactly what I wanted it to do. Except change from squares to business card templates. Sigh. 

My husband is now insisting he can do the same thing for free using Avery templates and clip art. He's stuck on the templates because he wants to use up the 23432432432 stacks of business card paper we have but haven't yet used. 

But he's digging the idea of a visual weekly planner for the summer, so if he wants to do the work and is willing to use the system, he's welcome to do it however he'd like.  Plus I secretly suspect it will make him more organized to have a visual schedule with things like back yard play and craft time written into the day. 

We found a magnetic white board at Target for easily a quarter of the cost of one over at Office Depot, and the plan is to use magnetic business card backs we also have on hand to tack the items to the schedule.  I'll resist the urge to smuggle sarcastic lolcat captions into his day.   

Cakes

King has been very interested in his toddler board books with labeled items. Specifically the food book. That's been a big hit. He loves to have us name all the foods for him, and I catch him naming the food for himself (but he'll insist you do it for him if you catch him.)

Today, everything is about cakes. King took out one of his puzzles with a big cake, and greeted me this morning to inform me "Cake!" "Cake!" "Cake!" He also pointed out his Curious George books where George was eating something cake-like. Pancakes and chocolates as the case may be, but we'll go with cake. And then he pointed to and correctly labeled George.

Yay for talking. I'm thinking we need to make a nice dairy free cake to celebrate.

I'm also thinking we should make him a few word books to keep the whole talking ball rolling.

Everyone Loves Toys

King is doing well lately. I think part of it is organization, part of it is time, and part of it was the Christmas break which let me work with him more. He's taking more and using his words more functionally. He learned and used cracker, apple, banana, orange - and kept using them over and over. We had to put the kibosh on more than two bananas per day.

We also took all the toys scattered all over the house and organized them into clear bins. The old open toy shelf type thing wasn't working. Not only were the kids not using it and leaving toys everywhere, they'd also end up just piling toys into big, assorted messes in the bins. The floor wasn't that clean with all the toys preventing good sweeping, and the whole thing just made me feel tired and disorganized every time I looked at it.

So the new system with bins means each activity has a home, and each activity can be cleaned up after it's done. This has not only prompted better communication - legos, Play-doh, draw, blocks, but it's a visual gestural way to indicate exactly the activity you want to do. King can grab one of the bins, say "Open!" and then clean up afterward. He starts singing the clean up song, puts the toys back, closes the bin, and puts it where it belongs. This is huge!

Not only has he started using more language around this, he's been more functional overall. I think it helps all of us to have some more organization in our lives.

I will tell you the paint bin has been slightly problematic, though. I liked the idea of the paint bin. We have washable paints and an easel on which to use them. Problem is that it's become a preferred activity, and there's only so many head to toe cleanings we can do for a boy during the day. For now we've put the paint bin behind the gate, but maybe we'll figure out a way to limit the painting without all the meltdowns.