A "Wahoo!" Moment

Every single day after school and before dinner, the girls and I head out to the stable to feed Yodi and do other "horse-owner" things. Its become a pretty good routine for us, and they both look forward to it. As well as genuinely enjoying the horses, the girls have become great friends with the boys of the stable owner. These boys are typical, grubby, dirt-loving boys.......so its rather amusing to watch the once-prissy Tiersten and Jennica get good and muddy, or covered in sawdust, or catching bugs, or climbing trees, or whatever.

In any case, yesterday the girls were out in front of the main barn playing with the boys, while I was down the barn aisle cleaning Yodi's stall. A few minutes before I was ready to leave, Jennica came walking quietly down the aisle and told me that she was going to be out in the Durango waiting for me. She didn't seem upset at all, but I instantly figured that she must have lost an argument with the other kids, or gotten her feelings hurt, or some other such "kid stuff". I told her that was fine, and that Tiersten and I would be out in the few minutes. The Durango was literally parked about 50 feet away in plain view, so I wasn't too worried.

Within about five minutes, I wrapped up my work and Tiersten and I headed to the car. Sure enough......Jennica was sitting happily in her carseat and reading one of the magazines that I keep in the backseat for them. Odd. I asked her if she felt sick and she said that she was fine. She just wanted to read. Heh.

And then I looked over to where the boys were still playing. They had found a big chunk of plastic culvert somewhere, and were taking turns crawling into it and then "rolling" each other around the driveway. Bingo! My lightbulb came on! I confirmed with Jennica that she had, indeed, taken her turn in "the tube". The type of spinning motion that she would have experienced as she was rolled around the driveway is called "vestibular input" and it is something that is part of her sensory disorder. Because you don't often put a child in a horizontal position and spin them, its not something that many people are familiar with, but I've seen Renae work with it at therapy. Jennica does NOT handle it very well, and it is brutally disorienting to her.

The "wahoo" part? She handled it in a calm and reasonable manner!!! And on her own!!! No screaming! No hitting! And no running away! She quietly removed herself from the environment and chose another appropriate activity.

Is that progress? It sure looks like progress! WAHOO!!!