Floortime

Yesterday my daughter had her first appointment with her new Occupational Therapist, Priya. Unlike previous therapists who were usually straight out of university, Priya has fifteen years experience working with Autistic children. She employs Floortime, which is a specific technique to follow both the child’s natural emotional interests (lead) and at the same time challenge the child towards greater and greater mastery of the social, emotional and intellectual capacities. With young children these playful interactions may occur on the “floor”, but go on to include conversations and interactions in other places (http://www.floortime.org/). Elizabeth was very engaged with Priya from the beginning and whilst occasionally she would drift of to investigate the room (as she always does) she always kept a surreptitious eye on Priya. For the moment we have thrown out PECS and have gone back to getting Elizabeth to initiate communication, in this instance requesting ‘more’. Whilst Elizabeth is good at ‘leading’, that is taking our hand to where she wants to go, she rarely initiates play and if she does it is usually to give her a piggy back which is not a good activity for communication. So as of today, I will be implementing five, twenty minute Floortime sessions a day (well, that is the goal anyway) and hopefully in a few weeks we will be able to start back on PECS.

Winter days

Every year around July, the endless, dreary days of winter bring on a melancholy of spirit that is hard to shake. It is not the cold. It is the greyness, the lack of light that affects me. But just as I thought I could not stand yet another rainy, overcast day I woke up this morning to sun streaming through my bedroom blinds. Making the most of it I threw open all the windows, letting sunshine flood the house. Soon the rooms were filled with the earthy smell of eucalyptus and sun-warmed grass.

After breakfast I put on one of my daughter’s favourite CD’s and danced to Justine Clarke, my daughter squeezing her eyes shut as she spun around the room. After a morning tea of avocado on toast and yoghurt, instead of clearing the table for table tasks as we normally did I left the dishes as they were and upended a large box of blocks onto the lounge room floor. As I lay on my belly building towers blocks, Elizabeth banged them together or jiggled them by her ear, occasionally knocking the towers over with a squeal of delight. Afterwards we lay in a patch of sunshine as I read her stories and sung her nursery rhymes. For lunch, instead of having the winter fare of soup and crackers we shared a plate of mini sandwiches, fruit and cheese, picnic style.

As Elizabeth dozed on a full belly I sat down and begun to write, the first real writing I had done in weeks. Being only July, I know that winter will all too soon re-assert herself, but if we are graced with the occasional day such as this I think I might just get through it.