School Days

This is a sample of Shiloh's school day. We use a "To Do List" - style plan book, because it's about a thousand times less stressful than a regimented time schedule.

Life Skills. This includes toileting, brushing teeth, brushing hair, washing, etc. The eventual goal of each of these is independence. He's getting better at this every day.

Dressing. This is also a Life Skill, but it gets it's own heading in the book. Shiloh has come a long way since January, and can now take off and put on all of his clothes without assistance (except for fasteners, of course).

Gestures. At mealtimes, he is encouraged to use learned gestures to indicate what he would like to eat. He's gotten quite good at several of them, particularly the one for eggs. Guess what his favorite food is.

Chore(s). This usually rotates from day to day, because all of us get tired of doing the same thing every day. Some days he washes dishes, some days he puts them away; other days he vacuums, does laundry, puts away his clothes, or straightens up the living room. A few of these things he has learned to do fairly independently.

RDI. This one takes up the most time, but can also be the most relaxed due to the lifestyle nature of the therapy. What we do largely depends on what his current developmental goals are (the most recent ones were Emotion-Sharing, Resilience, and Co-regulation).

Physio. We have separated the trunk exercises and the leg exercises and rotate them on separate days. Today was trunk day, so Shiloh had to do two sets of each of the following exercises:

• Preps
• Sit ups (combined with chin tucks)
• Bum bridges
• "Row-your-boats"
• Push ups
• Arm swings
• Crossovers
• Wheelbarrow
• Bilateral rows
• Some sort of reaching activity on all fours (this is a trunk and neck exercise)
  
• He also does ankle extensions every day (he has a bit of a problem with his right foot that we're trying hard to fix).

Occupational Therapy. Today's OTEs were drawing horizontal lines on paper, and beading. We do extra OTEs when Shiloh is bored and needs something to do.

We've also recently included "Mouth play" to the list of OTEs to be done each day, which involves doing things that target his lips and tongue (picking up cheerios with his lips, chewing hard or textured things, licking suckers, etc.). The object of this is to get his mouth more coordinated, which will help immensely when he's ready to start talking.

We can usually finish with most of these things in a couple or three hours, freeing up the rest of the afternoon for RDI and playing outside. Our summer schedule is much more relaxed than the winter one, as we have to keep him busier when it's too cold to play outside. We've definitely been trying to take advantage of the warmer weather, since we don't seem to get it very often in this part of the world.

Every Thursday night is game night, which we haven't been doing a particularly good job keeping up with since Julie's been on the nest. This is Shiloh's favorite part of the week, though, since we play all sorts of fun games.

Since we started late, we still have fourteen school days left to go in this school year. We're planning to take August off, though, and have a bit of a break. After this week's good news, we think Shiloh deserves it -- and we do, too.