New therapies

Well it has been a while since my last post but is mainly because my life is organised chaos most of the time. We have all been to Central Australia for a bit of a family holiday, partly to go to a wedding and whilst there thought we'd 'pop' over to see Ayer's rock and Kings Canyon. It was just beautiful and if I have a complaint it was just that we probably needed a couple of extra days to do the k's we did. My Husband has taken a few tour groups to those places and and when he estimated the time it takes to go to these places, he was estimating how long it takes grown adults to get ready, not a family of 5, one with autism and one of them a year old. But still, it was gorgeous and we had such a lovely time together.

Ayer's Rock (Officially known as Ularu these days) is just magnificent and if you ever get the oportunity to see it, I highly recommend it. It is well worth the 5 hour drive from Alice Springs.

Anyway, the main reason for my post was to update you on some of the new therapies and treatments we are trying with Fletcher. He has recently been assessed by our OT with having Sensory Defensiveness. I hadn't heard of it by name before then but I knew he had it. He is sensitive to a few select sounds and situations, quite irrationally, like car horns and people whistling a tune, singing in person but not on tv or on the radio and until recently, the 'happy birthday' song. Any of these thing would send him into a meltdown, particularly the car horn in shopping centre car parks. He started coping with the 'happy birthday' song about 6 months ago but still is apprehensive about it. So we are going to start the Wilbarger Protocol and sensory diet. It involves using a special brush on his arms, legs and back every 2 hours for the next 6-8 weeks followed but joint compressions. They tell me he will enjoy it but I had a bit of a practice today and it was damned near impossible to get him to sit still. He sat fairly well yesterday while Shane and I were being trained but honestly, the thought of doing this at least 448 times over the next 8 weeks makes me want to burn this little brush right here and now. I feel like I have to have a 'supernanny-like' schedule on the wall to remind me of all the stuff I have to do and at what time. On top of this, we are going to try out some newish kind of musical therapy. It involves wearing special headphones (Fletch, not me) for half an hour, twice a day and listening to special music, mostly classical. We tried it out with Fletch last week and although it took us (his OT and I ) over half an hour to get the headphones on him, once he realised it wasn't going to hurt him he really enjoyed it and became incredibly calm. After the treatment I took him to daycare and their observations in his communications book were that he was so calm and relaxed all day. Shane's parents have been a gem and offered to buy the headphones, thank goodness as they are something like $300.

So, whilst they probably won't start at exactly the same time, I will probably be doing these 2 new therapies at the same time for a period so that should be fun. I don't think anything else we have done to date has been so labor intensive on our part. Has anyone else out there tried these? Have you seen a difference? I would love to hear from you all.