Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Tobey Jude and the new OT...

Tobey Jude went to his first appointment with his new OT in Plymouth yesterday....for those uncool parents without special needs children (haha), OT is short for Occupational Therapist. Now, I have no idea why they call it Occupational... that makes it sound like I want him trained to go get a job and start paying rent. I told him that I won't make him get a job until he was either 9 or toilet trained whichever comes first (again, joking).

If you don't know Tobey he can have boundless energy, even with medication. And yesterday was one of those days. The poor therapist had no idea that Tornado Tobey was coming into her office. First she couldn't get over his cuteness....which you know she is human and he is such a little stud! But I noticed her asking some open ended questions, and I then realized they didn't even tell this poor woman that the dude doesn't talk! So, after giving our lengthy Autism history and her getting over the shock of us having 7 kids we came up with some goals. For one, they are going to work on helping Tobey use utensils...that would be awesome! The second thing is they are going to help him to start dressing himself, which would be so great. She is also interested in having us start doing brushing therapy. I do not know enough about this therapy, except that you use these special brushes on his arms every 2 hours, and then he could start having some bad behaviors for 4-6 weeks and then we could end up with language...maybe? I have no idea! But, I will start studying up on it, and if it could help the boy to talk....I will try!

And then we discussed some other things that could help him out.... We discussed a crash pad. This is like a huge bean bag that has a washable cover and he can jump on it and kids like him have a tendency to sleep on them! That means that the boy may not be sleeping with his Dad and me when he's 16. And then we talked about the chewy tubes he uses, and he needs some with more input. I have no idea how to phrase this but they vibrate! Now I understand that I need to get this to help Tobey, I have even got used to the whole chewy tube thing. But this one is going to take some getting used to, I mean really? And then the last thing she suggested is a swing to help calm him down. Not a normal swing....no, not for kids like him. This thing is huge! Like we are going to need a bigger house some day to be able to put all of his equipment in. Unfortunately, I do not have millions of dollars....so we will have to do what we can, when we can.

We have had to start messing around with Edwin's dosage for his new meds already, I knew this would happen but I guess I thought or hoped in the back of my mind that this little pill would fix him...there is no such thing. The past few days he has been feeling kinda yucky, achy all over his body. The first thing I thought was maybe it was a side effect of the meds, but the Dr. says maybe he is just getting sick. Hopefully he is back to his self on Friday when he gets to see Building 429!

The 15 year old, has been dare I say...pleasant? I know! I have no idea what happened! She just got done reading The Boy In The Striped Pajamas and now I am reading it and then we are going to go on a girlie date and discuss the book! Lena also got to be one of the millions of people that seen The Hunger Games on opening night...so she has had a good week!

I think that is all for today, I am sorry about the lack of blogging...I will put it on my to do list next week and attempt to do better! Have a great one!

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