Hard to Handle

Remember back a couple of months ago, when I posted about the door handles on our cars?

The handle on the Honda Fit, Joy could easily manage. You just hook your fingers or thumb under the handle and exert moderate pressure upward. Piece o' cake.


The one on the CR-V, she was not able to operate. You have to choose the correct half of the handle, wrap your hand all the way around, and pull outward with significant pressure. Didn't come easily.


So we worked on it bit by bit.

First, I wrapped Joy's fingers around the handle for her, and then put my fingers on top and opened the door hand-over-hand.

Then, when she got the hang of grabbing the handle, I pulled on her wrist (so she had to get her grip tight enough to keep hold through the pull).

Then, I moved the pull-help back to her elbow.

Then, I started asking her to make the pull, and only helped a little.

On Thursday, Joy began opening the door on her own.

This process took several months, practicing at least every other day, sometimes every day, sometimes more than once a day. But the resulting increment of independence is a beautiful thing.

(Barbara/TherExtras, here's lookin' at you!)

Teaching Hospital/ity

We live in a university town with a slew of medical education programs.

Our university-connected health care is attached to a "teaching hospital" and generally comes with observers and learners accompanying the doctors, particularly for pediatric stuff. Joy's neurologist generally comes through the exam-room door like a mama duck with three or four little ped-neurologists-in-training swimming in his wake!

Joy doesn't seem to have a problem with this. She likes people, on the whole, and doesn't fuss at new faces. And I'm happy to accommodate. The world needs more pediatric neurologists, etc., and how else will they learn? I suppose that in certain circumstances I'd refuse to let my kids or myself be "practiced" on, but that really hasn't come up yet. With Rose's broken arm last year, the cast was wrapped by a student, under the careful oversight of the experienced emergency-room doc. At one point I let a student start an IV on Joy. What better subject than a kiddo who demonstrates so little fear and has a high pain tolerance? (Though if she'd missed the stick, I'd have asked for the teacher to finish the job. She did fine.)

We've opened our house to students too. Again with a university in town, the local Birth-to-Three was a natural fit for having therapists-in-training who were looking to Joy's therapists as mentor. Some of them brought some really interesting ideas and approaches, and Joy never rejected a single student.

Recently Lynda the Wonder-Woman daycare lady hooked us up with a friend of hers who also runs a home daycare and who was taking a class on inclusion of special-needs kids. She needed a lot of hours of observing such a child, at daycare and home and in therapy, to meet class requirements. We took her grocery-shopping with our family, opened our home to her, let her observe Joy at Lynda's. The world surely needs more daycare providers who have what it takes to care for and teach children like Joy!

One of our intensive autism line therapists, our House Blend baristas, has a special training role in the Agency 2 organization. We opened Joy's sessions to one of her trainees earlier this year too, training for someone else's team. The trainee connected nicely with Joy, came for quite a few sessions, expressed regret that she wasn't going to be working with Joy.

And then at the beginning of March, we suddenly wound up with a big gap in our schedule where one of the baristas had been. We thought of the new trainee... and she leaped at the chance to join us! She's been doing a great job so far. We could have limped along for weeks while Agency 2 tried to hire someone new for us and then got that person trained up from scratch. As it was, we were up and humming with a full team again remarkably quickly.

Hospitality and teaching are good things.