The Quiet Crisis Next Door

Tag: Autism and flexibility

  • What Some Kiddos Need To Stay Afloat Through School Changes

    I wonder how many parents take for granted that they can just drop their kids off at school or send them out the door to a bus stop and know that their kiddo is going to swim along through the year just fine without anything outside the expected start of the school year traditions being…

  • Something New, Something Zoo

    Friends, Family, & Loved Ones: I am going to be taking the next month off from writing here. I am stressed. I am overwhelmed. There’s a lot going on, and we’re once again needing to support a more beefed up therapy schedule as our son’s new ABA provider has begun services this week. There are…

  • February Gratitude & Some Reading

    To Eowyn The razor thin edges on so many words, the shattered shards of a strong divide, coated thickly with the dust of nearly a decade replaying only echoes of it all… a formidable array of obstacles that would have dissuaded many from trying to bridge such a potentially jagged and emotionally fraught gap. Thank…

  • Key Moments From Our Latest COVID Quarantine

    Andy actually wasn’t the first person in our family to develop symptoms, nor was he the source of our exposure- though he was the only one to be PCR tested because of his job. Two days after I got my new piercings, our sweet Hannah had brief unmasked contact with her boyfriend…who developed symptoms the…

  • Our Pandemic Public Therapy Progress Report

    A couple of weekends ago, on our last public therapy trip with Emily as Tony’s hab therapist, he laughed, smiled, and flapped as we walked towards the door of our local Fry’s. When we first started our public therapy programs, I never would have expected to see him looking happy in that context. The best…

  • Community Safety Progress Presents

    Hannah and I put up the outside Christmas lights by ourselves this year, and so Tony needed to accompany us up front. Historically, any sort of outside task required multiple (you should read that as every couple of minutes at least) sprints chasing Tony down as he laughingly ran out of our yard. But when…

  • French Fry Flexibility

    About 3 years ago, I had just headed out on a walk with Tony and Hannah when Andy called me. The garage door had broken free from its rails and he was trapped inside the garage. Because I was strength training pretty heavily still at that time, I was physically the strongest person in our…

  • How We Did Neurologic Music Therapy Via Zoom

    This week is another photographed journey, but this time we’re going to be moving past the challenges experienced in providing teletherapy to discuss the goals and therapeutic interventions for Tony’s NMT. We have been working on helping Tony increase his flexibility and spontaneous communication using Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT). Facilitating therapy looks different via teletherapy.…

  • Finally PT

    Miss E, Tony’s previous physical therapist, left the clinic where Tony was receiving PT around the same time as that organization was pushing forward with some business model changes that I felt would lead to clinic conditions that would be less productive for Tony personally. I of course support their rights to move in whatever…

  • Resurrecting Public Therapy

    The cashier at Bashas’ looked at me as she pulled Tony’s bag of suckers across the scanner and said, “I haven’t seen you guys in a while.” Her eyes crinkled around the corners, so I could see that she was smiling even though her mask covered much of her face. A whole year I thought,…