Sleepless Nights

It’s going onto two am. My daughter is restless, she won’t sleep. Giving up trying to get her to bed I’ve made her a warm drink and put on a soothing DVD, thankful I don’t have to work today. I don’t know how I’m going to go in a few weeks though when my night shifts swing to five am starts. At least at the moment I can usually get in an extra hours sleep before she starts demanding breakfast (usually by jumping on me). She is a different child to last weekend when she was admitted to hospital and a drip placed in her arm. After sleeping for fourteen hours straight I was only able to rouse her long enough for her to drink some water and then promptly throw it back up again. Thank God for the warmer weather. This winter has been the worse one for illnesses since Elizabeth was born. She has practically taken every second week off school this term. I just hope this is building her immune system up for prep next year.

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.