There aren't very many speech sessions that I can say Alex is 100% engaged and she completely rocks it out BUT - today was definitely one of them!!! We haven't been to speech for 5 weeks due to the casting, so I don't know if she was more engaged because she had so much time off or what, but I'll just say that it was pretty awesome for me!
For the last couple of days Alex has been REALLY interested anytime someone is drinking anything. She's always loved to grab my coffee mug and get a taste, but lately she's been grabbing glasses, water bottles, juice boxes, whatever. When we got to therapy, I asked her therapist if we could try some straw exercises with her - sucking from a straw has always been a huge challenge and we haven't been able to master it. Today we started our session with the honey bear and a straw and she was totally getting the water up through the straw and on MULTIPLE attempts she swallowed what she brought up. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!!
She was very happy with the exercise!
Whitney kept giving her two pictures of an activity to choose from and she reached out and very purposefully picked out each picture. When the activity was over Whitney would hold up the sign language picture for more and another activity and it was so cool to watch her switch it up between a new activity or more!
At one point Alex picked that she wanted to play with a puzzle. Whitney got a puzzle that has about 8 animals on it, and once you put the animal back in the correct spot the animal makes the corresponding sound. So she would hold up a rooster in her left hand and dog in her right hand and would then ask Alex "which one is the rooster Alex? Can you get the rooster?" and guess what Alex did on every single one of the animal choices but one? She picked the appropriate animal!
One of Alex's FAVORITE toys is a See N Say. At Children's they have the totally old school version (I think I remember that version when I was younger!) but I had also brought her 'modern' one - it was so funny to watch her keep picking the older model. She did a really great job of reaching out and trying to activate it herself too.
Whitney left the room to go grab an I-pad and I was telling her how I was SO proud of her and we had some quick photo op moments...
Definitely was feeling the love from her!
Once Whitney was back with the I-pad it was CLEAR that was not what Alex wanted to do. Thinking back now, she wasn't given the choice to play with the I-pad over something else, she came back in and just picked an app for Alex to play with...maybe she didn't appreciate the assumption!
When it was pretty clear she didn't want the I-pad Whitney gave her two more choices and this time Alex picked that she wanted to play with bubbles. She had the best time with that - every time they popped she cracked up.
She even reached out to pop the bubble herself!!
Definitely one proud Momma today!
No comments:
Post a Comment