An excellent session

We had Sensational Kids yesterday and Beth had a fantastic session with Rod. We have now ceased Occupational Therapy as for some reason the budget has decided that Medicare will now not be allowing psychological based Occupational Therapy to be claimed under the Mental Health structure. It used to be that you could get 12 visits per calendar year and in some cases 18 visits subsidised by medicare. As we always found speech to be an absolute necessity for Beth we did Occupational Therapy in conjunction as we could claim back a large chunk of this. We never found it to be as beneficial though as speech clearly had been. Now that it’s not claimable we decided that we would just concentrate on speech therapy.

Rod brought it a white board to yesterdays session and pretending to design and order a pizza with Beth with her doing the main bit of the work. She had to tell Rod the phone numbers and tell him what had to be on the pizza. I filmed quite a bit of this as it always fascinates me how Rod gets Beth’s mind working. Most of it is on the film but I got a phone call near the end. Rod had got to the stage that they had called for the pizza but they said it would be 3 hours as they had run out of onions. Rod said they had devised a solution where they would pay the greengrocer $100 to deliver the onions in a helicopter, therefore solving the problem. It was a great exercise as Beth had to sequence the ingredients even though they weren’t written in order. For example there were onions and apples, ham and cheese and tomato sauce. She figured out that the tomato goes on the bottom, then some cheese etc etc. Rod was always querying what sort of cheese and types of apples were wanted and Beth took to it all really well.

Next we played a game where I had to pick a picture out of a pack (blindly) and Beth had to write a sentence on the board of what the picture said. Once again she found this pretty easy such as “there was a boy walking up the stairs” or The boy is hearing with his ear.” It was a good change from her “Once upon a time” stories. She had one where there were two similar pictures, both of the same boy in bed but one was asleep and the other was awake. Rod pointed out that there were two similar pictures and Beth had to make the story different so I’d know which one it was. She wrote “The boy is sleeping in his bed.” I was really pleased with how this game went. I must remember to not ask direct questions though, rather, make suggestive movements or use words like “and” to get her to elaborate. If I just fire questions at her then she doesn’t have to think about her answer as I’ve given it to her.

I’m going away tomorrow for a HAGS night away. We went last May too, into town for the night and to a swish restaurant for dinner. This time we’re off to Healesville for lunch at the pub which has been on one of those Victorian travel shows and has a fabulous reputation. Then we’re off to a pamper place for contour wraps and massages then out for dinner to who knows where! We’re staying in a Bed and Breakfast overnight and hopefully after brekky will check out some markets before coming home. I can’t wait, I love a bit of pampering at the best of times. I’ll put some photos on here when I get back. Toodleooo xxx

About Sarah

Mother of an autistic child wanting to write about my personal experiences
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2 Responses to An excellent session

  1. Bronwyn G says:

    I hate the Budget …

    The onion solution was terrific. THREE HOURS!

    “Go on” is a good elaboration word.

    Have an awesome pamper! This is for all the HAGgisses.

  2. Sarah says:

    Thanks Bron, we had a fabulous time! Yes, Rod uses go on a bit, must try it too. The budget is apparently going to change the final date to April 2011 so will try to get Beth onto Occ Therapy again.

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