home sweet home

And it feels so good! It's rough being away with small children, or maybe it's just my small children... Going off in a large metro area proved to be tricky, trying to juggle day trips between rush hours, therapy times, and a grumpy toddler's nap/bedtime so we were mainly limited to only going a few miles away. My mom refuses to drive in a city so I always had to which didn't always settle well with the Boo. Gabrielle calls herself Boo now by the way. It would of been very difficult doing anything without my mom there. I was able to leave Gabrielle at the town house with her and take Madeline to therapy alone without worrying about how to keep a toddler entertained there or having to wake her up from a nap. 

Madeline loved the Star Center and her therapist. She keeps saying that she wishes the center was in our town so she could go all the time. She did very well during all the therapy, and even had minimal anxiety! They repeated a portion of her auditory testing while we were there, with the same results. We were curious if the first results were accurate or if her anxiety had affected the testing. Unfortunately I have also learned that further testing for her learning disabilities will have to wait until she is around 7 years of age. She turns 6 in January. I have some more calling around to do but so far no one is interested in seeing her for another year. We are hopeful that she will have improvement with her cogitative abilities after all this OT is finished but it obviously won't solve her learning issues. It sounds strange, but it is nice to see that it has nothing to do with me or homeschooling. I second guess myself at times with her because of her issues and wonder if she doesn't need more then I can offer which may be the case when she gets older. The therapist this week during OT worked on B and D with Madeline, all week long. They played games, they wrote the letters on large blocks and she would knock them down on the zipline, on and on. Today Madeline wanted to write her name. I have to slowly say each letter, after each one she doesn't know, she asks me what it looks like. She got M, A, which are two letters of the alphabet that she always knows, then we got to D. I said D and she asked me what a D looked like. She had no idea after a week of one and one with a professional, learning only two letters. 

The OT is interesting. Madeline only has mild physical effects of the SPD, she actually always terrified the therapist because she wasn't used to children being able to do so much physically. As in doing a back roll off of a swing, jumping off the top of the climbing wall... Madeline only has slight left to right differences in her body, she doesn't get dizzy like normal people do hence the need to get feedback into her body which she does by more movement, more action. She is very strong, especially in her upper body, but her hand muscles are not where they should be, that is evident in her inability to hold a pencil/crayon in any other way then what a toddler does. I've been learning how to do calming activities with her to get her calmed down before she gets too wired, which ones actually work with her, how to read her cues better, and many other things.