So my blog looks a little different now. I got lured in by the new templates. I figured since I don't often put pictures on my posts it needed some livening up. Actually I am probably just bored and this is what I felt like looking at. Water is always good to add to anything as far as I'm concerned. I thought of putting a photo my husband took of a butterfly, in place of the rainforest but I have so many pretty photos lately from our walks that it was hard to choose. The little mushrooms are another favourite. I went to Movie World today. Finally got Jaiden onto the Batwing ride.

It shoots you up fast into the sky and then falls and bounces back down. Similar to the Tower of Terror ride that Dreamworld has. It was our last visit before our passes expire. Tomorrow I am torn. Part of me wants to shop for the last minute pink things for my daughters birthday next weekend. The other thinks I should head out to the "Green Day Out" and support the local environmental groups. There are animals, and bands playing and it is family friendly. My sister is going, and my husband is driving down the coast to another festival anyway. Never enough hours in a day. My planning wouldn't take all day, maybe I can do both if I stop in at the shops with a list on the way home. I might let the weather make up my mind for me. I do wish I saw more live music though, and this would be a perfect opportunity. If I don't organise tomorrow then I can do it on the Saturday while Aurora is at a girlfriends birthday party. Now that I have the craft idea organised, (making friendship pins) the rest is just shopping stuff.

I read the new Kathy Reichs book last night. It was a last minute grab while picking up the last Harry Potter for Jaiden from the library. I have another fiction to start tonight, from a new author. Nora Roberts. New to me at least. Coincidentally Nora is who Temperance (character in last nights book) wanted to be reading. Other books I grabbed were one on Messy Play, one on sensory issues and how to deal with them and one of Stanley Greenspan's books, about treating ADHD without medication. It actually has some great ideas for helping children with sensory dysfunction too. I like that Greenspan looks at an individual childs personal strengths and weaknesses in talking about an intervention. His ideas still include ABA, in my opinion, but not as discrete trials. He suggests finding out, through observation, why the child is behaving in a certain way. This may include sensory perceptions being processed differently, fear, pain, or attention. He advises caregivers to meet the child at their level to engage their motivation to play, and gently expand the thought process of the child to include new ideas. The idea being that the children have been conditioned by negative experiences to behave the way they do. If interacting has been painful because of how their brain processes the noises involved, that child will learn not to interact. If we make interacting less painful, by controlling the environment and modulating our voices, a child may overcome the initial bad experience and come to enjoy interacting. I think I would like to know more about correcting/improving a childs sensory processing, if it is making life hard for a child. Most of the sensory book was about making accomodations for the child, rather than Research into brain plasticity has shown that areas of weakness can be trained and strengthened. Greenspan does seem to address this in his work. Usually by working with the child at the developmental level they meet the criteria for, and working through the patterns a typically developing child would. By finding out the senses that a child prefers to use, we can motivate them to use the senses they find harder. Engaging a visual child with a great looking environment, expressive faces etc while introducing them gently to more audio input, with some quiet songs. Or a keyboard with bright lights to engage the visual to make the sounds more appealing. Eventually as the child became more attentive to the other stimulus, the brain would expand the maps for that sense. I would like to eventually work with children with autism in a company that combined all the knowledge and therapies currently available to us. ABA and sensory input, and play therapy, and group work. With C, his brain seems not to process a lot of proprioceptive information. He has to touch, lick and chew things all the time to get input. If I start with the full on squeezes and pats and tickles he likes, and pair it with music which he loves, I should be able to reduce the amount I need to do, for him to notice. Then he will be able to hold a light pencil better, without needing funny grips or other accomodations.
Well it's too cold to sit down here any longer. I think a shower to warm up and into bed to read.