Pulling Back Together??

The day went a bit better as it proceeded, but it continued to be a bit bumpy, like our car brakes right now as the pads are wearing low. Aidan continued to be in pain each time he drank and a certain amount of the fluid leaked out onto the bandage and onto his shirt. So I was changing the dressing and clothes about every 3-4 hours. Aidan was almost heroically brave: “It’s better! I’m laughing!” He alternated between resting on the couch watching Pokemon videos, and running around the house with almost his usual energy, and asking to be pushed in his new purple wheelchair/stroller.

The fact that he watched Pokemon for a good part of the day meant that most of the other kids did, too . We also went to the library, to the post office, and to the grocery market to get our weekly treat and some 7Up for Aidan. Aidan’s OT showed up since I wasn’t unable to get hold of her to cancel the visit, but she stayed for only a few minutes to cheer Aidan up, and left him a toy to play with.

After we got home from the library the older kids made plans to plan out the movie they want to make this summer. This was probably the synergistic high point of the day, as they all gathered around the table and discussed weapons, costumes, technical aspects of the filming and so on. I started dozing while they were doing this and suddenly jumped up with horror. Aidan’s IEP with the speech therapist was scheduled at the local school and I was already 15 minutes late! Leaving the little ones at home with the big ones, I started calling her to let her know as I went out the door and drove down the road, but the line was busy. I got stuck behind a slow van so I can’t say I made it down the mountain in record time, but I would have!
I did get there pretty late but it turned out to be another high “synergy” point of the day since LM liked my ideas about pragmatics and prosody and had some great ideas for resources to use — we will get to use Earobics, and Boardmaker for scheduling, and some other things I could never afford. I asked for some input from the learning specialist and the behavioral psychologist and she thought that was a good idea. We were scribbling down all kinds of ideas and agreed it was better for him to work on several things with a lower percentage of consistency, rather than hammer on a couple of things for a higher percentage. For my purposes because of what I know about Aidan, that will work better because he’s always done better with a broad sampling of things with overlap rather than targeted drill that doesn’t interest him much.

After dinner, I played a game of chess with Liam. This is why I think I may be pulling back together: I actually won! First time in about 7 years (he is almost 20). Better than winning, it was an unusual game with lots of options. For the first time, I could see a sort of stylized storyline in the movement choices we made and guess that maybe that’s why it’s enjoyable to math and pattern minded people (which I’m not, very much, at least not in our family demographic cross-section.