Tag: nonverbal communication
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Habilitation Needs To Be In Waiver To Meet Member Needs: An Open Letter To Arizona AHCCCS Administration
My name is Ariana T and my son, Anthony (Tony) has multiple qualifying DDD diagnoses. He has complex behavioral and therapeutic needs, but has demonstrated progress through his therapies that have allowed him to gain skills he otherwise would not have had, thus reducing the cost of providing future services to him. For the past…
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Picturing The Path Of Increasing A Few Functional Skills In Public Spaces
My loved ones, I am going to keep this week’s post pretty short. I’ve been eating stress for breakfast, lunch, and dinner lately and I’d like to go regurgitate a workout and hunt through the internal wreckage for some glimmer of inner peace outside of the glittery shimmers gracing my eyelids. Even when that’s how…
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“So, How’s He Doing?”
I get asked a lot lately, “so how is Tony doing?” Well, it’s been a very busy couple of months. We went right from the transition out of services with his former ABA providers (and he was really heartbroken about that) into the holidays where pretty much everybody who works with us wanted to take…
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“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”
Our son has what is considered to be severe Autism. Some people think that means he can’t love people, or that he doesn’t pick up on things they do and certainly that he doesn’t grasp any of the implications. He has always loved, always bonded with others. And I have never seen him bond with…
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Our Therapy Goals Path Going Forward
This past May, I started creating my own programming for Tony’s community safety and public therapy goals as his habilitative therapist. This was necessary as his ABA team had recommended working on a completely home-based program and public outings with their therapists were limited at their request. Yet, our ongoing need as a family for…
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Celebrating 2 Years of Telehealth Speech Therapy Being More Successful Than The In Person Sessions 🙂
Tony has always, always hated speech therapy. For many years this was his least favorite therapy type, as every speech therapist who has ever worked with him can attest. Our little man understands a great deal more than most people realize (in both English and Spanish), but he still usually doesn’t want to communicate unless…
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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…
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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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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.…
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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…