School's Out

Today marked our last official school day for the 2008/2009 school year. Tomorrow begins our month of summer vacation. We'll still be doing some necessary things in August (we can't stop doing physio and RDI completely), but we'll be aiming for the bare minimum.

By way of celebration, we took Shiloh to the Imax to see African Adventure 3D today. He was most impressed, particularly with the elephants and lions. Julie and I thought the movie could've done with more animal shots and less footage of the boat going through the water, but it the experience was still entertaining and fun.

Plans for vacation include no plans, no appointments, and no schedules. After our amazing accomplishment at the beginning of the month, I think we all deserve a break.

Canoe Toters

Yesterday, we drove to Portage la Prairie on a strawberry quest. "U-Pick" strawberry farms thrive in abundance here in Manitoba, and one can buy the berries locally in the height of the season at very reasonable prices. Of course, there are strawberry farms closer to Selkirk, but this was a good excuse to take a drive and see a part of Canada I've never seen.

Portage la Prairie is a city in the Central Plains Region of Manitoba. The name is derived from the French word portage, which means to carry a canoe overland between waterways. In this case the "portage" was between the Assiniboine River and Lake Manitoba, over la prairie.

A testament of French ingenuity, the city was built beside the Assiniboine River, which proceeded to flood it quite regularly and persistently. Remarkably (in what was perhaps destined to be the only documented case in history), the French traders refused to surrender, and stubbernly rebuilt the town just as regularly and persistantly as the river could destroy it. Then one day almost two hundred years later, someone (we presume it was a non-French person) finally thought to dig a floodway to divert the water, thus ending the annual flooding. While the regular floods weren't so good for the development of the town's infrastructure, it had the happy side-effect of making sure the French traders had at least one good wash every year, which likely had a favorable impact on the city's tourism.

Today, the population stands at approximately 13,000. Attractions to Portage la Prairie include depressingly flat land occupied largely of mustard fields, and not much of anything else. Had someone thought of building the floodway sooner, it's quite probable that the people of Portage la Prairie would've had time to think of something interesting to make their town famous. As it was, potatoes sounded like a pretty good idea to the tired and waterlogged Frenchmen, so the town hosts an annual potato festival in August.

For us, though, the best thing about Portage la Prairie is that for $4 a pail you can pick some of the juciest and sweetest strawberries you've ever eaten. And for $6, you can get all of that juicy sweet goodness without having to pick them yourself. It just doesn't get any sweeter than that.

A Midsummer Night's Hallucination

Last night, after collapsing into a salsa-induced coma, I dreamed that the baby came early. He had strawberry red hair and blue eyes, and was already old enough to try standing on wobbly legs mere hours after returning home from the hospital. We also put him down for a nap on the stairs, and I was teaching him to talk.

I told Julie this morning about the red-headed baby in my dream, and she said "No! No red hair!" Of course, she needn't worry; her dominant native genes will most probably preclude the possibility of having a fair-haired (or fair-skinned, or even fair-eyed) baby. But I can still dream, can't I?

Communication Breakdown

It may seem like a simple enough task to you and me, but eating a hamburger with both hands can be quite daunting when you lack bilateral coordination (that is, when you can't get both of your hands to work at the same thing at the same time). Holding a bowl and stirring, threading a needle, buttoning your pants, tying your shoes, eating a sandwich - in fact, any task that requires the use of both of your hands - can only be accomplished through bilateral coordination.

Shiloh has always had trouble with this. He would try something with one hand, but somehow couldn't get the other one involved. In effect, he was limping along using only one side of his brain, because in order to use both hands at once, both sides of the brain must work in tandem. His problem was that the two sides of his brain weren't communicating very well.

Shiloh isn't the only one with this problem. Most people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) or PDD (Pervasive Developmental Delay) have trouble thinking the way you and I do because the various parts of their brains fail to communicate with each other as they should. The result is a lot of confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety.

The RDI program (Relationship Development Intervention) is about forging new connections in the brain in order to retrain it to think properly. Once the two sides are able to work together, natural dynamic thought can occur. Coupled with Occupational Therapy, Shiloh's brain is learning to communicate with itself, which helps his thoughts make it to the right place and allows him to do all sorts of new things that he could never have done before. Suddenly, he's beginning to grasp dynamic communication, thinking, and problem-solving.

And he can even eat a hamburger with both hands.