Glass half full or . . .  I asked our Intensive team phycologist for some ideas on improving our morning routine.  My love and logic plan has not been completely successful at changing Julia’s morning behavior and motivation to get up, dressed and ready for the bus.  She still really wants to get on the bus and she wants to keep her iPad for the day but those two carrots are not sufficient to get her up and moving when the alarm goes off.  She prefers staying in bed as long as she can, dilly-dally in the bathroom without managing to do more than take off her pj bottoms, bring clothes downstairs and rush through her morning routine to just make it onto the bus.    I am not sure whether her inability to keep moving through the routine is sort-of normal preteen activity (I remember the same struggles with Cheshire at that age.) or a real inability to keep focused on the task on hand.  (umm, is that really the normal preteen behavior??)

So, I asked for more help.  One piece of advice I got was to give her her ADHD med about a half hour before she wakes up.  So, set my alarm for 5:30, shuffle into Julia’s room with a pill and a glass of water, put the pill in her mouth and give her the water.  

No, I am not happy about this one, but heck, if it works I’ll do it.

So, went through the 5:30 plan with the result of Julia being a whole lot clearer and focused when the alarm went off about wanting to stay in bed until the absolute last minute!  

Yes, kinda’ funny.

Julia lost iPad privileges for the day and she vowed to do better tomorrow.  And she will.  For tomorrow at least.  Someone said it takes 21 days to change a habit.  I think it’s a lot longer for me, and for a kid on the spectrum much, much longer.  

But we’ll get there.

Thinking about the last year, one way or another, I am focused on teaching Julia independence and self-care.  Some of it I also taught to Cheshire, but teaching Cheshire was teaching a person who was always almost out the door.  She wanted the teaching or took to the teaching because she could see that she would need it one day.  Maybe not consciously, but her outward trajectory was always present.

Julia, not so much.  I teach her to shower, to wash her hair, cut her nails, floss her teeth, put dishes in the sink and to always put water in her oatmeal bowl.  And Julia learns and practices, but if you asked her, she is always going to live with me.  And she might.

I’ve lost my train of thought.  Julia had some lovely parts of the day.  In the car, between school and speech therapy, I asked, as I do every day, what she did in school, making her tell me three things and probing for details.  Math, multiplication (grouping really), lunch, ate everything and sat with Quinnie, reading with  . . . someone else, and they worked on questions together.  When I ask about spelling -- 100% on last week’s 25 words -- asking if she does it alone with a teacher or with a group, she very proudly tells me she “has a group.”  

And then, Julia asks me what I did today.

She has done this a few times in the past weeks but it still is a surprise.  I scramble to make my day at Waisman sorting through information about special education to summarize into a single information sheet, sound exciting to her ears.  I end telling her that I learned something and she asks a follow up question!  First, she tells me that she likes learning and then she asks me ‘how much do I like to learn.’

And for a moment, I can almost be sure that one day I will really have a reciprocal conversation with Julia.

Of course, if she can really do that one day, she will definitely not want to live with me for her whole life.  And that makes me smile.

The student-speech therapist who has been working with Julia, under Linda’s direction, made a writing resource book for Julia.  It has adjective and adverb word banks, visual maps for writing paragraphs, and sample lists for generating ideas.  Julia used the word banks after she got home to write her “perfect paragraph.”  The topic this week was what she liked to do on a weekend morning and the content and sentence structure, even on this first draft, is markedly better than at the beginning of the school year.  

And adding three numbers is beginning to be a bit easier.

That brain is stretching and so, a bit of difficult behavior is not hard to take in stride.  

Tonight, I went to the fourth meeting of the Pocket in the Rocks workshop.  The work is going slow and although some of the exercises are interesting, I don’t know whether doing them -- lots of drawing and short talkings in small or larger groups -- offers much.  However . . . after tonight’s session, four of us around the table stayed for a few moments after the session.  Two of our number has missed the last session and the other two, including me, caught them up.  That was powerful, with the other woman who was there saying, “you mean, you feel that way too?” about her comment last month that she did not belong in this group.  

Just maybe, we found the key to the workshop.  Is it when we start sharing without need of direction that we find ways to build resilience.  

Interesting concept.  Possibly a good lesson?