FIVE

happy fifth birthday morning balloon drop 

Gorgeous Birthday Crown

Her best friend did his robot dance for her.  She cheered, they hugged.  

Check out that big 5 year old riding by herself

She choose what she wanted to do all day on her birthday.  We woke up to balloons and Lightning McQueen GeoTrax (huge hit), had speech (okay, she didn't choose everything), opened presents, swam, watched some TV, and ate at the Chinese buffet.  

Her party was a few days later.  We tie dyed, played on the swings and in the yard, threw water balls, ate, and had fun with some of our favorite people.  

Then we closed out the birthday weekend with a carnival at Howell's Balloonfest.  She had a blast.  I am pretty sure I need to get this kid to Michigan Adventure this summer.

End products

CHAMP Camp and D.C.

Alright my sweet, neglected blog readers.   It is time for me to tell you about our road trip and CHAMP camp in Washington, D.C.

Granny, C and I hit the road early Sunday morning and stopped in Youngstown to enjoy a huge metropark with a fun children's garden and playground.  We spent the night at the Pittsburgh airport and had an awesome room, we could watch the planes land from our window.

We arrived in D.C. the next afternoon.  There are wacky D.C. roads  that change direction based on the time of day.  They made it tricky for us, but we got there.  We stopped by camp before checking into our hotel.  I was not a fan of driving in D.C.  Don't do it!

Camp started Tuesday morning.  We had a few hurdles immediately. C did not connect well with her clinician.  The clinicians were trained and using DTTC (Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing).  In short, if the child can not produce a sound you provide a physical facial cue to help.  "Open" was a one of our target words.  So, her clinician had container after container full of toys.  For "O" she would lightly squeeze the chin, "P" your hand pops off the lips, "N" is one finger on the side of the nose.  C did not enjoy having this woman up in her face at all.

The professor who planned and facilitated camp was amazing.  I can not say enough great things about Jodi Kumar.  She is an expert in apraxia and is a resource we are so thankful to have.  She worked with all the parents and clinicians to provide personalized help.

While C was struggling with her wonderful and patient clinician Granny and I were observing, in parent discussions, or in learning sessions with experts on apraxia and sensory processing.  The current research on apraxia was shared and discussed.  Oral motor exercises have been proven ineffective, you should only practice words.  Repetition, repetition, repetition.  Approximations are discouraged as you will practice the approximation as many times as you will eventually have to practice the actual word to learn the motor plan.  This information was frustrating as it is most of what we have done for the past few years.


Camp ran 8:45 to 1pm daily.  After camp we would grab lunch and then play.  We went to the National Zoo and even got to see panda bears eat dinner up close.  We checked out the monuments and exhausted ourselves on the 90+ day.  C had her first Metro ride and cab ride.  She was a stellar traveler, listener, communicator, and all around awesome vacationer when we were not at camp.

Camp was a 15 minute walk from our wonderful hotel, the Melrose.  Everyone at the hotel went above and beyond to make our stay great.      It was a 10 minute walk to Georgetown, where we found great food most nights.   There were motorcades, airplanes, helicopters, buses, trains, and construction every day on our walks.

Let's talk food.  We had phenomenal stone fire pizza, pasta, Mediterranean, burgers, sandwiches, salads... handmade salted caramel ice cream...mango and brie waffles...Seriously, it was glorious.

Throughout the week our clinician and Jodi worked on different techniques to engage C.  We had video chatted a few times prior and had reserved the "sensory room" for one session each day based on these discussions.  They wound up spending most of their time in the "sensory room".  C responded and participated more and they started to have fun.  They only problem was there was no observation in that room.  The treatment rooms we small rooms in a row with a long skinny room next to them.  The parents watch from the skinny room with headphones through a mirror.  So, we were not able to observe much after day one.


Corinne barely touched her talker at camp, but did a good job using it to request things out and about.  She did not want to participate in graduation and we wound up leaving without saying goodbye to all the other wonderful families because she was just done.

The day of graduation we hit the road for Cleveland.  It should have been a 6 hour drive and we left around 2.  Since it was a Friday in D.C. the traffic was already horrific (did I mention I hated driving there?).  It took us 3 hours to get out of D.C.  and we arrived just before 11 at the Glidden House.

Glidden House is a mansion from 1910 on the campus of Case Western.  It was beautiful.  We crashed and then awoke to a huge complimentary breakfast.  We choose this hotel because it is next door to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens.  We checked out the frogs,  the trains, the gardens, and the rose competition before it was time to get back in the car.

When I asked C to get back in the car she said "NO".  When I asked if she wanted to go see daddy she opened her door, jumped in her seat and said "go".

The final leg of the drive was uneventful and we were home before dinner.  We missed Daddy / Kevin like crazy and it was so nice to be home!

Road Trip

We have a 9 hour road trip in June.  I trying to set aside the toys she like that are good for the car to make them exciting again byt the time we are on our way.  I am targeting one activity per hour.  So, I am trying to come up with 18 total activities.

So far I have:

1.  Homemade number book with dot stickers
2.  Button Snake
3.  Aquadoodle Travel
4.  Pipe cleaner magnet bottle
5.  Look and find Kai-Lan Book
6.  Sew 'N Sew
7.  Puzzle Flashcards
8.  Balloon filled with flour to squeeze
9.  Books
10.  Glow sticks for after dark
11.  Edible necklaces - Cheerios, pretzels, etc
12.  Magna-Doodle
13.  Coloring Books - Crayons and Markers
14.  CDs for sing along time
15.
16.
17.
18.

We will have our iPad as well.  We will drive 4-5 hours each day and I theorize we will watch one movie on each leg.  I just don't want the TV on the whole trip.

Do you have more ideas for us?  Please share!!

Words, Signs and Apraxia

We have been taking sign language for a few months and are about to start an intermediate course.  We are getting more comfortable having a basic conversation in ASL.  C has been doing an awesome job doing signs with her approximations since about December.  Signing with her attempts at verbalizing gives her more motor memory to work from when trying to say it again.  Apraxia is all about repetition and building motor memory helps.  So, signing has been great.  Her sign vocabulary keeps growing.  When I tried to make a list of sign she uses regularly for school last week it was over 30 signs.

We took the little one out with some people from our ASL class, our deaf teacher, her family and friends.  There were 4 little girls signing.  It was so interesting to watch them share crayons and request colors with sign.  If feel like we saw it click for her that some people talk with just signs.  Since she had only seen signing with talking previously I think this is the first time she really understood it was a language on it's own.


The moment I e-mailed the list to school she stopped using her signs as often.  Her private speech therapist thinks it is great that she is signing less.  She is still producing good approximations without the sign.  This means her brain is telling her mouth what to do on it's own, without additional motor help.

So, we will keep learning more signs and she will keep outgrowing them.  I'll keep you posted.  

nom nom nom

One of our favorite OT exercises involves a hungry puppet, little craft balls, and a pair of tongs.  The puppet tells us how hungry he is and asks for his favorite color snack (usually green or brown).  Then the little one has to pick up the ball with the tongs and feed it to him.  Our puppet hates pink ones and spits them back out, sometimes across the room.  So, depending on the color she feeds him she will get a different response.  We usually do this activity with 15-20 balls and she feeds all of them to him.

CHAMP Camp

I am thrilled to announce Corinne has been accepted into Childhood Apraxia and Motor Planning (CHAMP) Camp.  This is the second year George Washington University of offering Apraxia camp.   This unique, 4-day experience offers extensive individual therapy; both small and large group sessions, as well as parent education sessions in Washington, D.C. the week after school lets out.  

My mom is going to join Corinne and I on this adventure.  Corinne will have camp from 9 am - 1 pm and my mom and I will attend one parent education session daily.  I theorize we will return to the Melrose (thank you to the Melrose Hotel for providing our room for the week of camp) for a nap and then head out to explore the offerings of DC.  The National Zoo and the Air and Space Museum are certainly on our list.  

Does anyone have any suggestions of things we should check out or food we shouldn't miss in DC? 

"Talker Therapy"

School provided an AAC device at the beginning of the school year after an evaluation last year.  School has a structure for her to use it at snack time and in some of her one on one therapy.  She has access to it all the time at home and we have been trying to focus on utilizing her "talker" to make choices.  She is great at saying "I want to watch Cars", but other than food and TV we have had limited success using it for communication.  We have worked on building vocabulary, colors, animals, shapes, and more can found in the talker and she uses it  to answer questions.  I have had a hard time taking it the next level where it is an actual communication device.

We found a speech therapist we like who uses AAC devices in her sessions at the end of last year.  I talked with her a few times to discuss the idea of talker therapy in addition to the apraxia speech therapy she already does with an apraxia specialist.  In my head, and both speech therapists agree, it is useful to have these tasks separate to focus on speech production in the two half hour sessions and expressive language with her talker in a weekly one hour session.  It took a little while to get everything in order.  This was week two of "talker therapy".  

Our new therapist is getting to know C and exploring her device.  She has shared ideas with me to help force talker use and avoid complete reliance.  We want to work on talking, and signing, and still listen to non-verbal communication, but we want her talker to allow her to communicate.  One of her suggestions was to close my eyes and tell her I need her to tell me. This forces her to use her talker to make a request, pointing or gesturing can not be effective if I can not see her.

We tried it today with her shape puzzles.  I know she knows her shapes and it was an easy starting point.  She choose the puzzle she wanted to do.  I had all the shapes.  She had to tell me the number of each shape she needed to complete the puzzle.  She tried to just grab the shapes from me a few times, but I explained she had to tell me and did an example on her talker.  Then she got it.  She did an awesome job.  We completed the flowers, fish, dog, and butterfly.

Parking Lot

My parents returned from visiting my sister and her family to inform us my nephew is car crazy.  I suggested they make a letter or number parking lot and realized we still hadn't done it.  I grabbed a box and cut one side off.  Then I made large parking spots for our large cars and small spots for the matchbox sized cars.    We made the large parking spaces letters and the small spots numbers.  I had a bucket of cars ready to play with and drove each to her.  Then I asked her to drive it to the B like boy or M like mama.  She then drove the car around and eventually pulled into the letter spot.  The letters went very well with the prompt of an example word in addition to the letter.   

Number recognition is not progressing as well letter recognition with verbal cues.  So, the numbers were much more difficult.  We counted 1 - 8 pointing at each number to start.  Then I followed a similar routine giving her a small car to drive to the 7 parking spot.  This didn't work today.  So, when I asked her to park the car 7 I also pointed to 7 and we traced the number with her finger.  Then I gave her the car and asked her to park it on 7.  She did a great job with that level of guidance.  She only wanted to park the cars once and then pack them up, but she did a great job staying focused and cooperative.  

Space ship

C was thrilled to get this out the box and tried to help me build it.  I was not expecting to break a sweat building this cardboard spaceship, but it was difficult and you have to be inside it to for most of the building, which is tricky with a helpful four year old at your elbow. We did manage to finish it and it has been a huge hit this week.  

We read in our space ship and have packed lots of food and prepared many pretend meals for our space mission.  

We decorated the inside with stickers.  She peeled all the stickers and put them on the walls and ceiling.

We colored the outside of our ship.  Coloring on vertical surfaces, funny angles, and delicate pressure to get the crayon to leave a mark, but not hurt the spaceship were all required. 

 Then she found all the circles printed on the ship and carefully colored them in.  Then we took our crayons inside and worked on drawing circles around our stickers.  

Easiest (and Yummiest) Dinner Ever

Crock Pot Shredded Fajitas

2-3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 onion
1 pepper
1 can of black beans
1 jar of Global Warming Japanese salsa
6 whole wheat tortillas
shredded cheese (we go cheddar most of the time)
avocado or guacomole (optional)

1.  Slice onion and pepper.
2.  Put chicken, onion, pepper, black beans, and 1/2 jar of salsa in crock pot on low for 10 hours
3.  Just before dinner time use two forks to shred the very soft chicken
4.  Use slotted spoon to serve onto tortillas
5.  Add cheese and avocado or guac
6.  Enjoy

I feel like the salsa you cook in makes a huge difference to the flavor of the chicken.  The Japanese salsa has a very unusual flavor and is just magnificent.  I also make this as a freezer meal with the other half of the jar of salsa.  Then I can just thaw the bag and throw it in the crock pot.

Disclaimer:  The kiddo is a deconstructionist and doesn't eat assembled fajitas, tacos, sandwiches, etc.  I serve her the contents with a fork, fresh peppers, and a little pile of cheese.

Ski and Skate

We have been busy trying new things this week.  We took advantage of the snow and tried cross country skiing.  Granny and I each held a hand and only the little one had skis.  She did a great job keeping her feet straight taking her foot back when her skis crossed.  We went out for 10 minutes and then she decided she was done and we went back for 10 minutes.

Today we went to the roller rink for the first time.  It was a preschool and strollers skate.  There were about 20 people total.  It included rental, a lesson, snack, and 1.5 hours of skating.  I had not been on skates in over 20 years.  It is not like riding a bike.  I found the lesson useful.  We both learned how to fall and how to get up.   She did great.  We held hands on the rink, but she was confident on her own on the carpet off the rink.