Brushing and Joint Compression

Josh had therapy on Wednesday this past week. I screwed up a little with our typical schedule. Any day he has therapy, we do not do school until after we return home. I get the kids ready and make sure Josh dresses himself, so that in itself takes a ton of time due to his lack of cooperation with the socks and shoes. He can do it though...he did it two weeks ago with no trouble at all (other than the amount of time it took). Afterwards, we all pile in the van and I drive over to my mother's house where we all get out of the van. I get the other kids settled and Josh usually gets a few minutes to play before we take off for therapy.

Well, lo and behold, Wednesday was a mess as far as weather goes. I was running behind, so when I dropped the kids off it was a quick let everyone out of the van except Josh thing and then take off. This totally threw Josh off his routine, and boy did I pay for it the rest of the day.

We had speech first (and were 2 minutes late due to traffic being horrible). He was so incredibly whiny about 20 of the 30 minutes. Jessica had a really difficult time getting him to answer questions. Hopefully it will go much better tomorrow. {fingers crossed} In the end, he did do his work and even had a few minutes to play with the train.

We went immediately to OT. He was extremely distracted in there though. We usually are either alone in the large room or have one other smaller child doing something quiet. There were not only 2 other kids around or close to the same age, but also one little boy that was playing with trucks - his favorite thing in the world! Mindy put him in the ballpit and tossed in some beanbag animals for him to find. He couldn't concentrate. He wanted all of the blue balls out of the way because he "doesn't like the blue balls". He did eventually (after a good 8 minutes) find the beanbags and throw them in the basket like he was told to do, but it took a LOT of effort to get him to do so.

Since he was so highly distracted, Mindy had him pick two trucks and bring them into one of the smaller rooms where there were no other children bouncing and swinging. She took out some theraputty and hid 10 pegs in it for him to find and then line up on a peg board. Josh refused to actually touch the stuff. He would start to, but would then totally break into tears over it. He kept saying it felt yucky, but he wouldn't even try to feel it before assuming it would be. That's when I remembered Mindy told me last session to remind her to tell me about brushing! She couldn't believe she hadn't gone over that wiht me yet!

So she set Josh up with some beans and some little rubber fish that he needed to find and stick in the truck. While he was doing this, she explained about brushing and then demonstrated it. By this point it was time to leave, so on the way out I asked when to do this. We do his arms, hands, feet and legs every 2 hours right now. Whew! Eventually we will lessen it, but not sure when. I asked about whether or not we were supposed to end with some sort of proprioceptive type thing, and then she rememebred she forgot to tell me about the joint compressions, so I got a quick lesson in that as well. :) Josh actually enjoys it and seems to think it tickles, which I don't think is supposed to happen. I'm applying some pressure, so I will have to question that tomorrow.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better. {sigh} I feel like such a failure sometimes when we have days like Wednesday.