Listening and looking... again.. and again...

Time flies so fast these days and I really can't believe I haven't posted about Raiyan for almost a month! This post is definitely long overdue so I thought I'd just sit myself down finally and update all my readers about Raiyan's progress.

Overall, Raiyan has been doing well. In school, he still has Jo support him in some of his classes and though he is coping well with the work, the main problem with him as conveyed to us by his teacher is still his tendency to switch off, tune out and not listen to what she is saying. This, along with him not looking at the person he is talking to so has clearly been a problem for his class teacher to handle. Another difficulty in class is also his need to be prompted to finish his task and how he needs constant remindings to carry on doing his work until he's finished. As usual, what Raiyan tends to do is to start on some, then switch off and start turning to something else he's interested in. I have to stress that this is not a huge problem but it is part of the work in progress that we have to do with him so that he is able to keep up with the rest of the class well.

Outside school, Raiyan is still having ABA sessions with Kerri once every 2 weeks and Jo 3 times a week and the things we are concentrating on are (well apart from constantly making him look and listen):

1. Continuing on with verbalising clues: He is getting much better with this and he is coming up with some very good independent answers. Of course with his special mind, some of the answers that he comes up with can be bizarre but the things is, they are not necessarily wrong! They are just things that doesn't occur to us immediately. And at the same time, things that seem natural to us, Raiyan simply doesn't get! It just shows how deeply analytical his mind can be and he would rather see the more difficult point rather than the straightforward one.

2. Maths: Of course this is to help supplement what he is doing in school. Though Raiyan can do simple sums with his fingers and in his head, we are trying to go further and make him understand the use of the numbers and not just simply count and memorise. For example, we want him to know instantly that 2 + 5 is the same as 5 + 2. Raiyan was also having difficulties with the different descriptions used such as plus, add on, more than, minus, subtract, take away etc etc. He is fairly familiar with them all now but he still gets confused and that delays the instantaneous answers we sometimes seek from him.

3. Money: Hand in hand with maths (or so we think), we are trying to familiarise him with coins (which was something I had tried to start with a while ago but it was just too difficult at that point so we gave it up for a while). We decide to pick it up again since it is something that he is doing in school (who makes it more confusing by making the children learn BRITISH coins on top of Bruneian coins!). So far, we have started with 1 cent, 5 cent, 10 cent to make up 20 cent or 50 cent coins. This was very challenging for Raiyan again at the start because he just couldn't get the concept of a single 5 cent coin making up 5 one cent coins (with him being so visual he needs to SEE the five separate coins for him to think it is 5). There was even a point when he looked at the DATE on the coin and thought THAT was the value of the coin! Of course we were like "nooooo.. don't make it more complicated than it already is!"

4. Emotions: This is another thing that we haven't done in a while, so lately he has gone back to the basic emotions of happy, angry and sad only whenever asked how somebody feels. We need him to learn a much wider range for him to help him with his comprehension and composition work. Kerri gave a box of emotion picture cards for us to work on and I'm also keen to use the "moods" application on my iPhone which has a wide range of smiley faces characters displaying many different types of emotions. Already in the car just now, he reacquainted himself with "annoyed", "irritated" and "disappointed" which are all the types of feelings he feels when Addin takes his toys away!

So these are the work areas that Raiyan is focusing right now along with being constantly reminded to listen and look when someone is talking to him and when he is talking to someone. When I think he wasn't listening, I would ask him "what did I just say?" and make him repeat what I just said. Also, if I know he's not listening, I'll just stop talking abruptly and then there will be an awkward silence and then he will realise that something went wrong and that's why I stopped talking.

To improve on his looking, we also keep playing the "looking game" where he has to look at my "face" (because looking in the eye is difficult for them) for as long as he can. His record at the moment stands at FORTY seconds, with his eyes not leaving my face at all! What he does instead is look at my eye, then move a bit to my nose or my mouth and then look back at my eye and to me that's really good already!

As for independence skills, he can go to the toilet and wash himself already, he can take a shower and change his clothes by himself to, he eats at the dinner table at all times and the best news of all (well for me anyway) is that he has finally stopped stroking my elbow when he is about to go to sleep!!

Syukur alhalmdulillah for all the progress Raiyan has made this past 20 months! Will keep everyone posted, promise!

Out of the Box

A known trait of autism is the relative lack of imagination and this rang true with Raiyan, as everything he knows and thereupon communicates are derived only from things he himself has seen, observed and learnt and not from what he has thought of himself. The rigidity trait would often worsen this lack of imagination as even if we try to "teach" him to imagine and free himself from what he is only familiar with, his resistance to change would always get in the way of him even attempting to think of a different picture, let alone an "imaginary" one.

Raiyan is also a very visual person which is why flash cards have worked wonders for him and his language but once you take away the flash cards, then it becomes a whole new battle altogether!

But slowly over the last year, we have seen Raiyan beginning to overcome the need to stick to things "as they are" and also we've seen his imagination starting to flourish, such as:

- During our Singapore trip and right after visiting the zoo, he himself changed the lyrics to "Old MacDonald" to go "Raiyan went to Singapore Zoo, e-i-e-i-o. And on that zoo, he saw an elephant, e-i-e-io. With a trunk trunk here and a trunk trunk there, here trunk, there trunk, everywhere trunk trunk... etc";

-Instead of just thinking and articulating just one verb connected to one noun, such as kick the ball, sit on chair, he can now easily say other verbs such as, bounce/throw the ball and move/sleep on chair. This is also in line with my earlier post on how we gave him a small item and he has to think of different ways to interpret it;

-He's correcting us less when we steer away from the usual course of a familiar story whereas before he would just NOT be able to accept it and he would insist we tell the story as how he's used to hearing it;

-We've been going through flash cards with simple pictures and a "speech bubble" on it and he is supposed to think of what is being said. For example, there is a picture of a barber and a girl with really long hair and Raiyan is supposed to "imagine" what is being said. His visual and literal mind would immediately just say "the barber says "I'm going to cut your hair" and the girl says "Please cut my hair." (zzzz boring right?). But NOW, (and because he just finished reading Rapunzel) he actually said with a giggle "the barber says "Hey! You look like Rapunzel!"

-Instead of just piling up building blocks on top of another, he has started to actually make them into functional shapes, such as a rowboat, a helicopter, an airplane, a car- and all of these independently too! Look at him proudly showing them off!

I accept the possibiliy of some parents reading this and wondering what's the big deal with all the instances I have described but trust me, it means a whole LOT to us. We really feel that it is important for Raiyan in this early stage to train himself to start thinking outside the box (as they say!) and hopefully open himself up to new and endless possibilities!

Which is why I'm feeling exhilarated with what happened this morning. See, we were doing this colouring activity last night and even with this one below, he kept asking me in the beginning, what colour is a diplodocus and what colour a torosaurus was etc. He even wanted to look for a dinasour book for reference! But I told him that it's okay, there is no right and wrong colour- just use your imagination and colour them with whatever colour you want! Which he did! How cute is the pink and green ankylosaurus btw?!

So I left him to finish that off last night along with more activities at the back of the page (for him to get 2 golden points!). But this morning in the car and on the way to school, I saw that he didn't do the last part:

Of course Raiyan just said "I don't know how to do it!". Clearly, being the visual person that he is, this was something that I needed to coach him on. At first even I wasn't so sure if he was able to do this. But I tried and asked him to close his eyes and imagine all the scenarios above and tell me what colours he sees. And he answered:

a rain storm: Grey

a beautiful sunset: Pink

a flower garden: Green for the grass and multicoloured for the flowers

a forest fire: Orange

your favourite ice cream sundae: chocolate brown

your favourite holiday: multicoloured. (I wanted him to be more specific and asked him what is his favourite holiday which of course is the ZOO so of course there are many colours in the zoo!)

a walk in the woods in the autumn: Orange

a farm: at this point, he was being more descriptive than just "multicoloured" and he answered red for barn, black and white for cow, pink for pig, green for grass and white for sheep!

a jungle: brown for trees, green for leaves and green for grass

a parade: red, blue and yellow just like in a circus!

Here's hoping for more progress in the future! Amin!

Can you handle the truth?

Raiyan's into his "difficult to eat" phase again and a few days ago he still went on with the pahlaver that his stomach was full and that he had a stomach ache so that's why he couldn't eat his meals. It became so dramatic that he would gag and then run up to us to show the tears in his eyes and a "repeat" of his gag reflex and saying "SEE mama? the food makes me cough and sneeze*!" (*we haven't quite taught him to say "puke" or "vomit" yet so the closest thing he came up with was a cough and a sneeze! Hehe!)

Seeing how sick he did look, I thought okay maybe he really is full or there is something wrong with his stomach so he really can’t eat anything anymore so I caved in and said he didn’t need to finish it. BUT THEN, not long after that I see him coming out of the kitchen with a bowl of chocolate biscuits! That’s definitely not someone who is full or is having a stomach ache is it?!

Of course I know Raiyan is not deliberately lying and that actually he’d say anything just so he can get out of eating a balanced meal of rice, chicken and vegetables – I mean he is a child after all, preferring to choose junk food over wholesome foods! But I did want him to stop talking about having a stomach ache when he doesn’t because it just gives off that “the boy cried wolf” feeling and what if ia ketulahan and then banar kena bagi stomach ache when at first he didn’t have one right?

So I taught him about “lying” and the “truth”. I told him that he can’t be telling the truth when he says he’s full and can’t take any more food and then after that is stuffing his face with choc biscuits. I then asked him if the reason why he didn’t want to eat his meals is because he doesn’t like the taste of it and he said yes that was the reason. So I drilled in him that saying that he doesn’t like the food would be telling the truth and saying he has a stomach ache when he doesn’t have one is lying and NOBODY likes lies. He looked like he completely understood what I was saying and promised not to lie about having a stomach ache again.

You know what’s gonna happen next right? This morning I again caught him not eating his breakfast and I asked him why he isn’t eating it. Raiyan with pure confidence replied “I don’t like burger and that’s the TRUTH!”

LOL! What am I going to do about him??

Stinky and Smelly?!

This story is so funny that I find it's worth it for me to confess to something slightly unappealing about myself; I like to wear silk baju kurungs to work a lot but unfortunately with the financial restrictions of late, I'm not able to send them over for dry cleaning as frequently as I should. SO, what I tend to do is febreze them (heyyy I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this-already getting defensive!) before ironing them hoping it will help make them smell fresh and new again..

But this one morning the one that I wore somehow to me still had a lingering sourness to it but I just thought that since I'm wearing it, I'm probably and hopefully the only person who can smell it..

UNTIL, in the car, Raiyan made a sniffing gesture and said "Ugh.. smelly and stinky!!".. I was slightly taken aback with this and immediately thought "he's not talking about me is he??". So I asked Raiyan "who is stinky and smelly Raiyan?"and then Raiyan just embarassingly giggled "hehehe" so I then asked "Is MAMA smelly and stinky??" to which Raiyan replied with a cheeky laugh "Yeess!!"

You can only imagine what state of denial I must have been in in trying to disregard my own stinkiness that it took an autistic child to reveal it blankly to my face!! Needless to say, I went straight back home to change!

PS: I also loved how Raiyan felt embarrassed to tell me so meaning there is some level of social conscience in him to not tell it straight! :D