Tag: community safety
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The Dirt King Rides Again
A few years ago, before the start of the pandemic, Miss Emily and I were trying to work with Tony to improve his tricycling skills during a habilitative therapy session. At that time, we were still experiencing easily a dozen or more attempts from him to run off per any type of outing. There was…
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Habilitation Thoughts & Thanks
The last habilitation therapist to work in our home was a lovely young woman. I really liked her. She had never worked with the developmentally disabled. Had no educational training, no knowledge of the therapy types or techniques. I trained her myself on Tony’s programs…personally I care more about someone’s ability to be patient and…
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When Community Safety Makes My Heart Sing…
For a few months now most of Tony’s community safety walks have been handled entirely by me acting as his habilitative therapist. Using differential reinforcement and a parental enforced consequence for pushing (the non clocked in parent would tell Tony that any pushing would result in him loosing kindle privileges for 2 minutes when we…
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Why Certain Stores Get All the Public Therapy Lovin’
Because of the nature of what we do when we are working therapeutically with Tony in public, more attention grabbing behaviors from him can and will happen still…even if we are currently on an upward slope of considerable improvement. We are sometimes really pushing the boundaries of what he can tolerate. In stores right now,…
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Some Thoughts About Why
Generally, many of the teens who went to my high school came from families that were far better off financially than mine. At some points, I was saving money given to me at Christmas and for my birthday by my grandmother and my Aunt Cile and Uncle Lawson…and I would use it to buy thrift…
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Celebrate Every Little Thing Like It’s Big
The stress in my life lately has been palpable and ravenous, requiring the delivery of an increasing diet of effort, guzzling sleep while leaving behind far too many regurgitated memories of middle of the night hours. Last night was the first night in several days I slept more than 6 hours. Tony was awake a…
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“No Pressure”
Andy and I watched Encanto for the first time this past Sunday, broken into sessions wrapped around the chunk of hours I needed to work with a new habilitation provider. As I listened to Luisa sing “Surface Pressure,” I felt how aptly and concisely it seemed to capture the way I feel so much of…
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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…
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The Nightmare of “No”
“He’s growing so tall! He’s doing so well! He’s being so patient!” We were finishing up a quick trip into a local grocery store this morning with a new ABA behavioral therapist that is working with Tony in the mornings, and those were the cashier’s comments to us. As I have explained before to those…
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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…