Shortly after I sent out my post last Saturday, I received an e-mail notifying me that The Fabulous Miss Whitney had passed away. For those of you who haven’t been reading with us long enough to know, she was his first habilitative therapist (between the ages of 3 and 6). Our son loved her. I loved her. Our family loved her. I spent an hour crying last Saturday.
Whitney was better qualified than many habilitative therapists. She had a degree in speech language pathology, worked in special education, and shortly after she moved to another state, completed her Masters in Special Education. Hab therapists in the state of Arizona aren’t required to have any sort of training or education, so truly we had extraordinary luck to work with her. Beyond that, it was an honor. She is a beautiful person.
Even though most of the years she was with us she was only able to cover 10 hours a week of his approved hab hours because of her job in the school system, our family and our son were blessed beyond measure to have someone with so much love, so much compassion, and so much knowledge and experience as regards to therapy techniques and the developmentally disabled working with us. Yes, she had a supervising BCBA because the first two years of the hab program in Arizona require use of ABA and a BCBA to do the programming for individuals with a qualifying diagnosis of Autism (past those firsts couple of years the hab therapists and family direct how the goals are to be worked on and what strategies are to be used). But some of the ideas that benefited Tony came only from her.
For example, our little man had significant trouble sucking through a straw and couldn’t seal his lips around the edges of a regular cup. She recommended a product with specialized attachments to promote lip strength and teach the ability to suck which I purchased (and if memory serves reviewed it even) from Amazon that would allow me to squeeze liquid up a tube initially to help him gain the concept. She is the first and only person to have recommended that to us, and at the point she joined our team, we had already been doing other types of therapy for a year and a half.
She also recommended trying out colored construction paper initially for scribbling because white paper at the time reflected the light too much and it hurt Tony’s eyes to look at it while trying to scribble so he wouldn’t. She truly was fabulous and our family owes her more than I could ever begin to articulate.
Because of that, I am going to finish by creating moments of typing and reading silence.
