Curious George: Boy's best friend

K’s relationship with his books is a development that I would never have anticipated.  I always envisioned a more sporty, athletic or physically stimulating outlet for him.  Our children are mysterious and parents of children with autism are often afraid to have expectations. I don’t dare imagine K’s future abilities. He doesn’t talk to me or share his thoughts with me. I don’t dare dream.

But the following is the scene in my house most of the day. This has become K’s number one choice of stim, pass time, whatever you may want to call it. When he can think of nothing to do he will pull out a bunch of books and stare at the picture, talk to them, repeating scripts, sometimes “reading” the letters, kissing the pictures or labelling things.

He has favourite ones, most of them are curious George books. He wants to be alone with them, and will often shut the door to his bare room and sink in to the bean bag or lie on the floor and spend time with the pictures.

I feel as if to him the characters in his books are real. He treats them like real people, kissing them and talking to them. The other day he dropped a book behind the bed, hung upside down to retrieve it and wiped it with his hands saying “Its OK, I going to clean you Curious George Finds a Friend” (that’s the name of the book: Curious George Finds a Friend).

He takes in more than we think, but due to his inability to express his thoughts we never really know how much. Today as he was helping me clear the table, he picked up the baby's spoon and said "It's a tadpole spoon". We have been reading a Curious George book about tadpoles. He has never seen one in real life.

I really really want him to learn how to read. I hope one day he can read, comprehend and really enjoy the world of books and literature. So he can take his beautiful imagination on exciting journeys. A major goal or aspiration for any special needs parent is to help their child find constructive ways to spend their time as they get older.

His decoding is progressing very very slowly. The problem with any kid with severely limited verbal abilities is that they will soon start decoding words they don’t comprehend. So many words are not in K’s vocabulary, because he has such a limited vocabulary. A typical child’s receptive and expressive vocabulary is way beyond their ability to read and decode, so you have already laid a groundwork for language and communication before you start tackling the written word.

It will take K a long time and I am not sure what his reading comprehension abilities or limitations will be.

Watching him, baby poi has developed a strange obsession with books, flipping through books and wanting to be read to, almost constantly. She will stalk people, holding a book, repeating “booka booka” trying to get their attention. If you look at her, she takes that as affirmation and will seat herself wherever she is and expect you to follow her lead and start reading to her.

Amaranth Flour Pancakes

An early morning request for pancakes and realisation that we had no brown rice flour left, led to some experimentation in the kitchen. Which, as you can probably guess, was successful. (Otherwise why would I post my kitchen failures?)

Ingredients


1/2 cup Amaranth Flour
1/2 cup Tapioca Flour
4 table spoons Arrowroot Starch
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 table spoons ground almonds (or almond meal)
1 tsp honey
1 table spoon melted butter (or clarified ghee)

1 Banana mashed
1 egg
almond milk (or water)

Use non-stick pan and low-medium heat.

These were MUCH  better than the rice flour version. Fluffier, tastier and definitely healthier.

The milk, I did not measure, just go by consistency (not so runny and not lumps).

Enjoy with whatever syrup (we have Organic Agave Nectar) and gluten free margarine. YUMM.

Being gluten free, we often find ourselves feasting on rice. I am going to be making Amaranth Pancakes from now on.

These passed the test with our brutal food critic. Some bits were willingly placed inside mouth and ingested, instead of being regurgitated or thrown down the high chair with cruel nonchalance.

Aftermath of a Meltdown

Often, despite doing all the right things a meltdown is a physically and mentally draining experience for person with autism and their caregiver. K usually has a meltdown to the point of exhaustion or until whatever it was that was overwhelming him or making him anxious has abated by itself. 

Sometimes your behaviour is not the antecedent to the meltdown. The meltdown is about something that is not under your control and you cannot control the emotional state of the child. The only option then is to wait for it to be over. In the midst of the storm all you can do is try to keep everyone safe, and make sure you are not reinforcing anything negative and not overreacting. This might not make any difference in the short term but at least you will not make things worse. All the while you are fighting feelings of embarrassment, failure, helplessness and so on.

Prevention is the best cure, but not every scenario can be anticipated and you cannot make every single environment bend and contort to suit the specific needs of your autistic person.

A few years of meltdowns and screaming fits have trained me to become relaxed, analytical and easy going about tantrums, while they are happening, but at the end of it all I still find myself exhausted. There is effort required to be relaxed, analytical and easy going, although does not seem like effort while you are in the moment, I will notice its toll later when things are calm.

Give yourself time to recover.  

Sometimes it can take several hours to a couple of days.

A feeling of resentment  towards your kid is a natural human emotion. I am not a saint (yet). And although he has gone back to “normal” being his usual self, I feel no inclination to be near him or have anything to do with him outside of necessity after he has screamed himself purple for hours throwing things around and banging doors. 

I feel strongly, that as a parent you are definitely not allowed to pity your child. And it will take me some time for me to forgive him despite knowing that his behaviour is often not under his control. 

Unlike a lot of kids on the spectrum his age, K is aware of someone's upset with him. He tries to repair after he has regained his composure. He will follow me around the house saying "Look at my face. You want kiss". Or something of that nature. 

I used to feel guilty about these emotions, but now I recognise this as a part of my recovery process. 

As long as there is recovery, repair and you are ready to face another battle for the sake of your child and his/her learning, then why should there be any shame in being truthful about the difficulty you are facing?

There is no need to deny the existence of your frustration and paint a false fairy tale picture of harmony and joy for the world. Whining and complaining is wrong, but being honest is not. 

Autism is difficult to live with. I wish my son was easier to live with. There is no shame in that.

Why Homeschool? Some Lessons From The Muslim Homeschooling Conference 2012

Sometimes energy levels are low, kids are sick for weeks, and you are feeling like all your great ideas and awesome plans are too Utopian to ever become reality. It helps then to actively search for some kind of inspiration somewhere.

A few weeks ago I attended the Toronto Muslim homeschoolers conference. The Muslim homeschooling community is young and small right now but one that is active and really ambitious. Many inspiring ideas were shared at the conference.

I would recommend any education related talks by a homeschooling father and teacher by the name of Michael Reist. He has a website here. 

Another topic which seemed to be one of great significance to most families was "Why we homeschool". 

My reasons for homeschooling were more lack of choices for special needs education and my lack of financial resources to send K to a private direct instruction school. However it was interesting to see that many families, with no learning disabilities or other apparent barriers (financial or otherwise) were still debating the subject. I never considered homeschooling from a typical parent’s point of view. 

Everyone’s journey is different. People find challenges in their particular situations, that seem easy breezy to us raising kids with special needs. It doesn’t mean however that their struggles are any less challenging to them, as ours are to us. It is all a matter of perspective.

In the homeschooler's meeting following the conference, this was the topic up for discussion. I was encouraged to hear about the challenges of other families (none of whom have special needs children, we are the only ones in this community  homeschooling that I know of yet). At times it made me feel very fortunate that I have a real grasp on what is really important, as a result of the challenges and difficulties I face in teaching my son. A lot of people are not in touch with that kind of reality and that kind of  “bigger picture” attitude. I was grateful how having an older child with autism has made me so easy going, perceptive and sensitive to the needs of my second child.  There were also times when I realised there are some challenges we will never face with K, that some of these parents are currently facing in raising and teaching their typical children. 

Most of the time the environment, people’s experiences and their children are a constant reminder of our disability, the things we will never get to do, and joys we will never experience with our son. So it was kind of refreshing to feel that in some aspects we are in fact ahead of the game. 

The sisters discussed many wonderful reasons why they homeschool and I am going to list a few here.

Preserving the children’s Fitrah and providing an Islamic education

This was of course the number one reason for everyone in the group. As Muslims we believe that all human beings, are created with an innate nature or Fitrah. It is an encoding within human nature that makes them capable of knowing God,  believing in a divine power and accepting religion.

This is mentioned in the Quran in various places. It is a fact supported by studies of human behaviour and psychology. It is not a new or alien concept. What you do with this innate nature is another story. Allah says in the Quran:

[And mention when your Lord took from the children of Adam- from their loins- their descendants and made them testify of themselves, [saying unto them]: Am I not your Lord? They said: Yes, we have testified. This lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection, Indeed were of this unaware] Quran 7:172

So pretty much the fact that humans know there is a God is that it is within our very own souls and denying it is denying human nature. That is what Muslims believe.

Many parents (not just Muslim) are concerned about  the lack of God in schools. It is also our Islamic duty to nurture this Fitrah or nature, and to protect our families from the punishment of the Fire, which is also a command of God. So many believe that protecting their children’s nature to believe in God is their divine duty. 

Questioning the existence of God, Denying it, considering that it is OK not to believe in God, and other ideas are a threat to this and corrupt the true purpose of mankind's existence, which is to believe and therefore worship and obey God. Secular public schools have no room for this kind of attitude in their curriculum. Rather they foster an atmosphere of tolerance to any and all beliefs. Concern and respect for all humans is essential, but clear distinctions between right and wrong and the obligation to convey this message to others is also an Islamic duty.

The condition of Islamic schools

Many parents were not happy with the way Islamic schools are run and the values they are teaching. There were sisters who mentioned that  they had withdrawn their children from Islamic schools due to the teachers’ ignorance about Islamic ways of teaching, disciplining and Islamic manner. 

A vital point that one mom made during this discussion was that when homeschooling, the parent educator needs to constantly evaluate his or her own behaviour for negative habits that they may be passing on to children. You may be protecting your children from the negative in schools and Islamic schools, but to pay attention to protecting children also from wrong cultural practises mistaken for true Islamic teaching and your own failings as a human being. I thought this was an excellent point. Just because you are a parent does not mean you are perfect. If you have taken the responsibility to educate this child, then ask if you have really received an education in Islam yourself? 

Bullying and anxiety

This was also a common thread. Many families had withdrawn their children from schools and had not sent the  younger siblings to school at all, because of the bad experiences of their older children. The bullying and pressure to conform had taken its toll on some children’s physical and mental health.

Effective use of time, preserving individuality and teaching social conduct rather than "socialisation" (aka being like everyone else)

This was also an excellent reason many stated for homeschooling. As children we were once curious and individuals. Over the years we were schooled out of this important human trait. The one method for everyone, one curriculum for everyone and one time for everyone to learn system has put many people off institutionalised schooling. 

The prison model of “time served” in each grade/credit was also mentioned. Homeschooled children are learning faster, making better use of time and resources in the community, have better social opportunities and so on. Instead of being lumped together with everyone of the same age in a coup mentality similar to that of a prison, the homeschooled kids learn to socialise with peers and also with people of various ages. They are self motivated learners not driven by envy, competition with others, but are taught to compete with their personal bests. 

You can find various articles and books on this subject, I don’t want to go in to this in too much detail or the post will never end.

Attachment parenting and the guide apprentice relationship

This was my favourite. Homeschooling for many is a revival of the parent’s role as a the main guide in a child’s life. You are not a pick and drop service, the enemy, the dummy who doesn’t understand your kid and so on. It is a means of empowerment for the parent and a way to re-establish this ancient, God given responsibility to prepare a child for adulthood. 

Many moms also talked about how they loved having their children at home. They stressed the importance of always being in a dialogue with their kids about what they wanted from their education and giving them the choice of school. Homeschooling mothers of older children said how their kids do not want to go to schools and when they had been sent for personal reasons ( new baby, travelling etc) they had begged to come back. 

Older children who chose to attend high school for ease of college entry, after being homeschooled all their lives, are grateful to their parents for not sending them to school and recognise their education as a real privilege when they were around their high school peers. 

So these were some reasons the mothers in the Muslim community are homeschooling. There is a Christian homeschooling conference coming up that I intend to attend. The Christian homeschoolers are decades old here and I would love to benefit from their experience and knowledge.I will post about that conference later inshaAllah.

For more information on the Toronto Muslim Homeschoolers click on this link.

Declutter - How To Be Special On An Average Income

Once upon a time we used to live in a two bedroom apartment. (A year ago actually). There were two bedrooms but we all lived in one. The second bedroom was K's therapy/school room. The only storage area was crammed with games and toys and other items required to run a home ABA program.
However with a new baby, I felt it would be very difficult for four people, one of them with autism and the other a new born, to live in one room. So we moved upstairs to a larger, 3 bed apartment.

This obviously increases our living costs. Try doing a 3 bed in the city of Toronto. I think we live in the only building in the city that gives you the best value for your money.

K and his baby sister share one room (most of the night! People migrate in this house in the middle of the night to various locations). My husband and I got one room to ourselves at last.

And this is the third (master, although same size as the others) room. It is the therapy and homeschool room. It is K's space in this house that is exclusively for him.



We are fortunate that we have been able to provide a space for him that is a room on its own. But sacrifices have been made and will continue to be made to achieve this. There is a third baby arriving in April. (What? Did she really say that? More on that later, lets focus on "decluttering" for now). So four people will be living out of two rooms and two small closets.

We also have an L shaped living room. This is one arm of the L.


It is also a space for people to read, and for me to work. We have no television. Kids watch and do stuff on this computer.

That is the other arm of the L-shaped living room. That's it.



That is my living room. There are no tables or anything. If we get more than four people coming over, well they just have to make use of the floor. That dining table that you can barely see in the corner, I am thinking of getting rid of it for a smaller one. So more space can be created if the need arises.

The storage again is filled with K's materials. I do not hoard. I have no pictures, decorative ornaments, vases, plants or pets. My husband and I share a tiny closet, so do the kids.

If you have a house with children, large sofas and coffee tables, huge entertainment centre, TV blaring, designer dining area, decorative ornaments, loads of furniture in the rooms and so on, then chances are you are NOT decluttered.

Why declutter?

For Homeschooling

Decluttering is important for homeschooling. The children need a designated space for themselves and easy access to their own materials. These need to be organized in bins and shelves not piled up in a box on top of one another. Children also need to be taught to clean up after themselves and for that there needs to be a place where everything goes.

When you add a special kid in the mix who will experience sensory overload at the mere sound of footsteps walking in his direction, then it becomes even more essential to do your best to provide a decluttered and simple environment.

Organisation has been key in teaching K independence too. Last year when we would sort our laundry together as an RDI activity, in the end he would only be able to put his underpants away in their respective area in his closet. He would often put shoes in the sink, dishes in the garbage and so on, when asked to put stuff away. I would have to follow him at a distance and if he was going to make a mistake then I would physically step in and point or guide his reference to the correct area and he would either get it or need further prompts to the place where he needed to place the item.





All this practise has finally paid off. Now K's receptive understanding of where dishes go, where socks go, where underpants go and where shoes go and so on. These are great frameworks for teaching problems solving. For eg, what happens if the sink is full of dirty dishes (happens a lot around here)? Then dishes need to be put in other empty spaces. On a good day he can figure this out, placing them on the counter and even the hob. Many many dishes have broken in this process of learning. I shop for my dishes from dollar stores or used stores like goodwill.

Inclusion has to start in the home.

The moral of this post is that when one person in the house has special needs, everyone has to work together to incorporate their needs in their home, their sanctuary. This does not mean you prefer them over your other children, but they are special due to their inability to function in certain situations. So those who are able need to adapt and make the compromises. They also need to be taught how to interact and behave around their special family member, to the best of their ability. That is inclusion. Inclusion is not that you throw a person in a situation they cannot handle and then tolerate them or have pity on them. Which seems to be the case in almost every environment we go to, whether its someone's house or in the community.

(Hopefully we can teach our daughter how to be the best sibling for K and in the process teach K to do his best in return.)
 
Inclusion is to pay special attention to the needs of the special needs individual and then design the environment or interaction around that so it is mutually beneficial.

Declutter your space. You don't have to have a house, backyard and beautifully finished basement to do it. We are a single income family. There are many expenses, but the rewards of a peaceful home, an organised space and a happy child are priceless. Mind you, it is not always clean or tidy, but always a work in progress.

I dont have so much room, what do I do?

I find you can still create space to have some sort of designated area however small for your child to work and de-stress.

Noise can be reduced by eliminating TV altogether or at least when the family is sitting together. Its hard enough to hang around "people" than to add TV and other noise to that environment. We do not watch things together as a family. If K watches a short show or something on the computer, it is for a few minutes by himself. If I want to watch a lecture or use the computer for something it is on my own time.

Get smaller, compact furniture. Don't get more than what you absolutely need. This place is your home, not a place for other people to come and hang out and go wow. If you have limited space, cater it more to your needs than the need to entertain others.

Use space effectively. I use a lot of under-bed storage. Don't store things for years thinking you will use them. Except for a few toys, I have nothing from a few years ago.

I will try to do a follow up post on how to shop and be special on an average income. InshaAllah (If Allah wills).

Story of a man and his kelp

I have been slowly trying to purchase more organic groceries over the past year. We started eating organic meat over a year ago, starting only with K first. It is expensive and we never thought we would be able to afford it ourselves. However as we tried to eat healthier over time, we found that our grocery budget was able to accommodate healthier and organic foods more.

This is mainly because we eliminated the other junk and eating out from our diet. As we become more conscious of our grocery bill and consumption we also wasted less.

Now almost 2 years in to a diet and lifestyle change we eat only organic meat at home. Our produce is organic too. Our diet is slowly changing as we try to do less grains. K can't resist gluten and we just cannot eat breads in front of him, so we slowly just stopped eating them!

Recently I watched this video of a doctor who cured her Multiple Sclerosis using a diet composed of mostly raw foods.

We are biryani eating people of South East Asia. We cook all our vegetables. To us salads are cucumbers and tomatoes, and sometimes spinach. I have been trying Kale for a few months but just crush raw Kale in smoothies. I know you shouldn't cook leafy greens and I cannot bring myself to eat the tough leaves raw.

So a raw food diet is like alien world for us.

But we also have health issues, like autism and ataxia in our home. Watching that video was very inspirational and my husband (who does not always like our organic food bill) went out and bought some sea weed of all things.

I have no idea what to do with Kelp. We tried cooking it, it was so chewy and salty. We tried frying it and it became salty chips. Fascinating. I read you can make broth out of it.

Anyway, he decided to create this concoction of power foods. My husband cannot cook to save his life. When he makes something it is usually everything mixed together and ground in to powder form ready to just drink in a glass of water!

So he ground boiled chicken, raw beets, raw kale, raw carrots, cooked sea weed and some other stuff (I think onions?) in to this power powder :D

It actually wasn't bad. I mixed it in my pasta with some olive oil and mayo. Quite yummy I must say. K at some in his rice pasta. We made sandwich spread out of it.

Here are some photos of my husband doing his thing. For someone who is utterly useless in the kitchen, I think he did great!





Well done Kelp Man.

Autism: It must be something else

So many times in the early days of post diagnosis I would read stories online or on message boards of people whose children with autism were suffering serious medical problems. People would endlessly discuss seizures, severe gastrointestinal problems, medical neglect and other horrific issues that often accompany this disorder.

Despite our son's intellectual disability and his mysterious behavioural and physical dysregulation issues for which we have no answer medical or otherwise, we would still consider ourselves one of the lucky ones. Because in my 3 short years on this road I have, by now not just read about the horror stories on message boards but met them, spoken to them in person and witnessed their frustration.

Kids who will have strange episodes where they fall from standing, go in to complete brain death for a few minutes, their bodies becoming like dough, recovering shaky and confused. Neurologists shrugging their shoulders, not able to diagnose these as seizures because EEG's were "normal".

I know two such children. Both of them have very different circumstances and are very different in their functioning, and the medical community will not acknowledge their illness as directly related to their autism.

I thank God every time I talk to their parents that we don't have this in our house.

I also live in a kind of fear, for my little girl.

Because along with these stories are also stories of children who were developing typically until age 18 months, or 2, or 3 (it varies from story to story) and then one day a throat infection developed, the child went into a coma and their mental health deteriorated from that day onwards. Or the child had a vaccine, got seriously ill a few weeks later and regressed to an autism diagnosis. In all cases, parents distraught, confused and baffled. Many of these families dealing with a strange sense of loss for years (strange because they haven't really lost a child, but in fact they have, because a once healthy, speaking, interacting, happy child transformed in to someone else).

Its one thing to read articles and emails and another thing to actually speak to a family describe their child's before and after. I wonder did that child really do all that their mom is saying when they were younger? Its hard to imagine when you see them now at 7 or 13 or 10, unable to speak or engage in any interaction.

It keeps me up at night, and I have irrational thoughts of never leaving my house to protect my daughter.

I no longer debate with myself if K's physical dysregulation and learning disability is a result of underlying medical issues he may have, that mainstream medicine has yet to identify and relate to his disorder. I have already accepted that conclusion and I would rather spend my time trying safe, easily available solutions, that my family can financially afford.

But the fact remains that the large numbers of children seriously suffering every day of their lives, being medically neglected and their medical issues not acknowledged as linked to their autistic disorder are a testament to the chronic misrepresentation of autism spectrum disorders.

I believe in an after life and I am generally very optimistic about the plan of God. I wonder however what drives people to vociferously defend autism as something to celebrate and preserve.I celebrate God's love for me that He chose to guide me through whichever means He thought best. I celebrate the progress of my son and his beauty. I celebrate human beings who are able to find beautiful expression DESPITE their autism. I celebrate being alive and able to be a mother and have a family. But I denounce delusion and denial. Most of all I reject oppression, injustice and neglect.

When will this attitude change? When will autism spectrum disorders be considered a serious medical illness that deserves money being spent on researching cures to the various symptoms so many autistic individuals suffer from?

This attitude of "autism is not a medical problem but must be something else" (such as statistical anomaly, a different point of view, personality disorder, natural selection, consequence of nerds mating, purely genetic and other ridiculous nonsense) has to change to do justice to the really vulnerable individuals and their families.

Reading Progress

I am hesitant to post this for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I am not sure what I am doing. Secondly, I don't know where all this is going. Thirdly, although we do a lot of activities together, this just never turned out to be one of those "homeschooling" blogs where moms will post every detail of the teaching they do with templates and links. I mean its great they do that, because thank God there are great ideas out there for us to get inspired, but it just takes too much work.

But we are doing something we never did before. It may not lead anywhere, but so far we are enjoying ourselves. We do claim on our header that this blog is about homeschooling so I will post some homeschooley type things once in a while. Who knows it may help someone out there or inspire them.

Those of you who have been following this blog from the start, will know that many old posts have gone missing, and the video links are broken. Since I started hijaab I have deleted hijab-less videos of myself. I video tape a lot still but can't be bothered to dress up for them just so I can post them online. In this video I sat down to work with K right after I finished praying so I decided to keep my prayer outfit on and it worked. Alhamdulillah.

Also loyal readers over the years, who might remember some of my older videos (although they have been removed) might like how things have changed around here. Things get better, and I guess if you keep working at it, the relationship does eventually become less of a fight. Sometimes. Video tape your journey, for yourself, it can become your biggest inspiration.

So we are doing this online reading program called Headsprout Early Reading. K learned to use the mouse only a few months ago, but he is slowly mastering the use of the computer. He also knew all his letter sounds before we started. I am not sure what will happen when we get to words with silent letters and vowels. We may have to stop in the middle and continue when he is developmentally and receptively ready to take that kind of instruction. Who knows. AllahuAlam as they say (Allah knows best).

So here is the story so far.

K can join some letter sounds and is learning blending. Who would have thought eh? Alhamdulillah.

We have to do a lesson a few times to move on. You have to be mindful to sound out big words like "feels". He is finding it really hard to do that. Mostly its automatic behavior and relying on rote learning that gets in the way of K's processing. He knows how to join sounds, he knows the sounds, but to stop, sound out, join and then comprehend it as a word he recognizes, like feels, that is just too hard for him. But we are going to keep going until it fails.

He is a very rule based kid, duh. He has autism. But reading and comprehension has a lot of exceptions to the rule and we will deal with them as we encounter them.

He is also very mindless and resorts to mindlessly giving answers (without listening to the question or spending any time thinking about an answer). Teaching mindfulness is a work in progress. It is very much a developmental thing in this house and a case of tireless practice. But he has shown us, slowly that he can slow his body down enough to think, even if for a second and he has shown us in various ways how capable he is MashaAllah.

So here is a book of "sounds" we made together.



They are sounds he already learned from the online program and I wanted him to find them in words. So I gave him sticker letters and asked him to stick the sound on the paper. For the two letter sounds I gave him only those two letters and he "spelt" them correctly. Next time I will try to get him to pick from a bunch of letters and see if he can spell the sound correctly. For instance give him f, r, a, n and ask him to spell the sound fr and see if he can do it.



The pictures were placed on the table, three at a time. I sounded out each word in the picture and asked him to pick the picture with the sound he just spelt on the paper. He got all of those right without having to think about them too long.

InshaAllah as we progress we will try to do this without visuals i.e. listening to words and picking out sounds that he has learned.

We practiced some blending with magnetic letters.

He sat through it all because I promised him that we would do headsprout reading on the computer after we finished. But you can see he is engaged and enjoys the activity regardless of the prize in the end. And really thats all that matters to me at this point. That we enjoy doing stuff together and gets lots of smiles.

Here is the video:



You can see when I ask him the simple sound of ee, he says "ull eeeee" because he learned to sound the word "lee" and did not even bother to think that there was no l there. That is the mindlessness I am talking about.

Also whenever we work with K, we do high probability teaching. I am not doing any ABA in this video. But I scaffold things for him and give him the answer and then test him again to see if he was paying attention and remembers. This is the only way to teach him because he is motivated to stay in activities in which he feels competent. He repels failure and the smallest breakdown or challenge takes him to the dark side of uncertainty and then the behaviors start. So we try to make sure he is successful most of the time. It takes a lot of scaffolding to do that. I also have to make sure I do things quickly and move to the next thing quickly.

I also don't bother to think too much about my instruction and making sure I always ask the right way. I have to fix that, but he deals with that pretty well. At one point I point to "fran" and instead of saying "sound out that word" or "read that word", I say something like "whats that sound", which doesn't even make sense! But he is OK with it Alhamdulillah, he knows what I mean.

You know what I love about this video the most and what shows that he is actually thinking when he joins the sounds? The fact that he moves the letters both ways - to the left and to the right to complete the words. This isn't rote. And who cares if he isn't perfect. For me his natural and flexible behavior and level of comfort is the real prize.

Science of Tantrums

I usually do not post video or audio links that are not my own because I figure they eventually make their way around to the relevant people through facebook or mailing lists, so why post them on my blog?

But this one was really interesting. Particularly because our number one behavior issue is unnecessary screaming and whining.

Find out about the science of tantrums here.

A couple of years ago there was the towel tantrum, then the bath tantrum, and so many others I cannot remember (the really ridiculous ones sort of stick in my mind). One weird one these days (which is thankfully on its way to extinction) is the bandage tantrum.

K will out of the blue start screaming for a bandaid. Initially I would ask him if he got hurt, and he would point to some ridiculous part of his body, like his teeth, or a finger nail or his hair. Later as they unfolded more frequently (possibly because he was being reinforced due to my genuine concern) I noticed they were unfounded and there was actually no hurt. Or he would walk, and then do a pretend fall and go in to screaming that he got hurt, requesting a bandaid. Obviously catching on to his drama, we started to put him on extinction. He followed us around the house getting more and more upset. He would work himself to the point of no return which is full volume screaming, red eyes, red face, tears and all that, and sometimes falling asleep for a few minutes from exhaution at any given time of day.

He gave up on me eventually, but would look for dad if he was home. Giving way to explanations, questions or reprimanding, would just prolong things. Eventually as dad tried to be more patient a few times, we successfully bored K out of his OCD bandage request. (He tried to change it in to asking for stickers, to use them as bandages, sticking them all over himself, but I knew what he was up to so I did not let that escalate). Now if he is found sticking stickers on himself, no one pays any attention and just moves on. Eventually he will satiate and move on too.

Its an old pattern and we have learned to recognize them and deal with them.

This has gone on for 3 weeks, several times a day.

Needless to say, K has been sleeping well at night, because a few (2-3) of these tantrums a day (often lasting 20-40 minutes) and its exhausting for a 5 year old kid. If you ever really worked yourself up, or had a complete emotional breakdown or panic attack, just one, remember how it exhausted you for days?

Anyway, that's life and we live it Alhamdulillah (All praise is for Allah). I am grateful for the patience and self discipline Allah gives us in these moments and we are able to (most of the time) be consistent and not give in to anger, frustration, depression or any of that stuff. If we ever do give in, the nature of the beast is that you get lots more practice :D

Here is a picture from someone with a great sense of humor obviously

Being Me - Muslim Women's Conference

Another exciting event coming to Toronto.

I will be there inshaAllah, will you?






For more information go to Being Me.