Marlaina took her two ABA’s (Whitney and myself) on a fieldtrip this morning to meet with Sen. Ray Cleary about getting a bill to the Senate (and of course passed) that would give families of children w/ASD insurance coverage for services not specifically medical and/or educational (ie ABA, speech, OT, diet, etc…). As you all know, the state only provides but so much and the rest is up to the families (out of pocket). For this reason, many children with autism are denied life-changing opportunities. Anyway, the Mt. P Mom’s of Children W/ASD met with the senator to pull on his heart strings (so that he could go on and do the same with the Senate) as a way of trying to get this state (atleast in one way) up-to-date. The senator got to hear the perspective of the mothers and also of the therapists. Hopefully, this will meeting will really go somewhere but only time and persistence will tell…
On to Tony, he was having blast with daddy Anton, jumping, playing with crayons, just having his own little party. So when I showed up to work Tony wanted to jump some more, swing, run outside, and basically continue to play. We did get to roll balls of different sizes with “roll ball” prompt and Tony said “ball”. When we went on to matching (using two boxes with objects) Tony tried closing the lids and saying “all done”. I said “no all done”, he whined, I pulled out the squish balls, then he calmed a little and matched some. This was short-lived because Tony was pretty tired at this point. Outside he ran, played “aah boom”, touched bushes, banged on the fence, rubbed the bark on trees, was just really aware of his surroundings. So when he was ready to nap Tony said “all done”, went to the stairs and waved goodbye. I hope we can get work done Fri.