Curing Autism Together

Last night's ABMNM® (Anat Baniel Method® Neuromovement®) Lesson Triggers Our Autistic Daughter to Cook a New Dinner Dish on Her Own & I'm Working on Patenting a Game

Today my autistic daughter who is now shockingly an adult (hard to believe how long I've been trying to help her recover!) prepared a new dish for dinner on her own, not notifying us, not asking for permission, help, or even for me to taste it at the end, which has NEVER happened!  This is new and it jolted me into writing another blog article even if it isn't polished or lacks pictures.  The truth is the ABMNM lessons work to advance her mental organization and development profoundly although you never know how it'll manifest itself, as in this case, in her individual ambition and drive to make the sauce for Macaroni and Cheese like the one from Whole Foods hot bar.  I did once recently, maybe a month ago, try to make a cheese sauce, but she did it differently than we did.  

I'm a ABMNM® practitioner and decided to take my daughter through the series of movement lessons I was trained on during the Anat Baniel Method® Neuromovement® Practitioner Training one by one.  By "movement lessons" I mean the directed "mat work" form of lessons called "Transformational Movement Lessons" or "TMLs", where we can both benefit physically and mentally, as opposed to the other kind where you work on someone else on a mat or table ("Functional Synthesis" or "FS" lessons), and mostly if not only the person being "worked on" derives the benefit, but I need to get smarter and more flexible too, so we do the TMLs not the FS's. I have to do these trainings in segments because they're really long for her - often single lessons are an hour long since I have to stop and help her with the instructions often, plus the cleanup of our apartment to lay down a bunch of mats in our great room takes extra time.

We also have a baseline progress as the result of multiple ABMish, neuroplasticity, cognitive and other challenges throughout her days that I throw at her whenever there are activities I think would be stimulating for her, such as having her learn to use her left hand to brush her teeth and to pick up things on the floor with her feet (generating neuroplasticity), learning new activities like her learning how to help me use the serger today to repair a reusable grocery bag, and of course Duo Lingo, where we've been learning how to speak and write Chinese for about a year and a half (we're on day 582) which is helping her slowly progress linguistically as we practice various phrases in chinese she never used to say in English, such as when things are supposed to happen like using a phrase "yesterday morning" in sentences spontaneously.  I have her close her eyes and listen to the chinese phrases to listen for words and break them apart into meaninful chunks, something she stuggled with more before I started doing lessons with her, which admittedly has been sporadic up til now.   She and I are always better at Chinese on days we do lessons and several days to a week later, and so I have started making time in my week to try to do a lessons more often for all of our sakes.  I'm confident in the long run she can fully recover if I keep offering lessons and ways to apply them cognitively. 

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I don't want to force myself to write too much as length as I used to nor to edit extensively or I just won't do it!  I know at this point!  But a bit on my journey - I'm trying to patent a physical & internet-based versions of a novel word game, something I've never done before.  Turns out patenting software, games and processes, as well as including both the physical and software form of games together - all features of this patent - are among the very hardest things to successfully patent for a variety of reasons but I undertook this to help protect the intellectual property of the software game we'll be releasing later this summer from copycats.  I finally got the abstract done, then realized it needed some tweaking and am now in the rewrite process, which is time consuming but really necessary.  I started on the Summary about the history of word games leading up to our product, but took a break from it to finish the Abstract as mentioned.  Wish me luck!

I'm a wellness and longevity applied science maven that I haven't had a chance to blow up into a business but I know it will happen eventually and likely soon as I work on it every day.  I'm still trying to figure out how to cure my PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) which causes insulin resistance and have tried many things. I'm using anti-aging supplements (NMN - Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) and Metformin to reverse aging, helping my gray hair revert to dark brown again - an on-going but slow process that's been going on for several years.  I'm still doing intermittent fasting every day to some extent to contribute to reversing aging now going on probably three years.  I can't wait until this patent is filed and we can release the games, so I can start selling anti-aging supplements that I've been using anyway and put out information on lots of things I've cured.  I am also curing that toenail fungus they always advertise about which I've tried things for years to cure but am curing it with raw honey - it's half grown out because toenails grow so slowly it takes a year or more to grow out the sick parts of the nail at a mm a month or less, but it's improving!  I have several other treatments lines up to test after the affected nails grow fully out and I can see if it comes back.

I've finally forced myself to reset to earlier bedtimes that I had been for a variety of traumatic reasons such as prior health issues I've since self-treated and cured, that used to amp up at bedtime and ruin my sleep not to mention my daughter's massive Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) that I cured (now around 10 years and running, probably more, since she had symptoms, like since Thanksgiving of 2012 or 2013, which used to keep her and me up most nights - it was so horrible but thankfully gone.  I will finish a video series/book about how I did it once I start the wellness company to go with the supplements after the Patent is filed.  I walk every single day for half and hour but just upped it to an hour and try to do so first thing in the morning while it's still really cool, like in the 50's or low 60's, which has reinforced my desire to keep this habit and move earlier to 5 or 6 am, I'm just not here yet!

Oh, I've mostly stopped doing the Son-Rise Program with my daughter as far as hiring and training others - it was too time consuming given my trying to create businesses I've been thinking about and planning for years and now am focused on implementing.  However the Son-Rise® Program attitude mostly dominates my really great relationship with my daughter, which is a "win" every day, and the mental techniques of the Option Institute are tools I pool from most if not every day with her and turning around my life to be what it as meant to be before Autism and other really bad stuff derailed me, so it's a "win" overall to have done it.   Thank you to any of you who participated in our program with Anna, some of whom I know have followed her progress here, it did make a difference.  

I need to go - it's already almost midnight and I need to get up early to walk!  

I know it's been a LONG time since my last post.  Sorry about that! I know I need to be doing more online communications on a number of topics.  Having PCOS makes me programmed to gain weight and have trouble losing it my whole life and I'm always embarrassed about how I look but I'm sick of hiding and think I just have to get over that.  

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this post!   Hope you come back to see posts here more often.  I'll be posting more often and would like to help other people this way.

Best Wishes until next time

- Barb : )

Anna starts using adjectives spontaneously in the last 2 wks, perhaps DuoLingo Chinese is helping

Anna has started using adjectives spontaneously!  

 

WITH ME (HER MOM):

Anna's mom (me) was trying to show her something at the center island - preparing food, telling her what to do next, and she said:

Anna:  I don't need you're stupid instructions!"

 

WITH HER DAD

Her dad said, "It's been a while since I did the Snake impression," meaning imitating the Snake character in the Simpson's cartoon show.  

Anna: "Yeah, it's been a while".

Dad:  "Don't you miss it?"

Anna:  No not really, it got old."

 

We're so excited to hear the push-back adjectives, spontaneous in the moment!  She has been able to use adjectives is a rehearsed and prompted way, such as saying "it went bad" when food looks rotten and "Are you sick?" if I cough, but the those have been used dozens if not hundreds of times but us and her in certain wrote sentences.  But spontaneous sentences with descriptors you haven't heard 'a million' times just about never happen.  Thus why these sentences, despite their negative cast, jump out!

 

We've been learning Chinese on Duolingo (on day 236) and it's causing us to practice parts of speech and word order.  For example, in Chinese, the "when" is nearly always between the noun and verb of the subject phrase, whereas it's at the end of the sentence in English.  For example, "I am busy in the morning" (English phrasing) is "I in the morning am busy", in Chinese phrasing.  We've been sorting sentence building kits I bought years ago.  We are starting to learn more adjectives and use time words in DuoLIngo Chinese, something Anna hasn't done spontaneously, spontaneously.  She still only sometimes includes a "when word" and with using the right "when words", such as when I might ask when in response to a sentence lacking any time context, she may say "a long time ago" when I actually know the event happened yesterday.  We're also starting to use adverbs in DuoLingo Chinese, such as "slow" and "fast", and positional words such as "to his left", "behind the restaurant", "at the hospital" etc, but those have not seeped into her language either.  So prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions (also) continue to be mostly missing from her language, but at least adjectives are coming into use. 

 

I'm not sure that would happen just from learning this from DuoLingo.  In fact, she started failing to learn and getting frustrated weeks or a couple months ago because of these new parts of speech coming into the lessons, so I had to start identifying parts of speech with her and talking to her/ asking her about parts of speech.  For example, I had taught her "a noun is a person, place or thing" and that "verbs are action words".  After she says something, I'd say "what's the noun?" and/or "what's the verb" and if she picks the wrong thing, using it in a sentence where it doesn't fit based on past experiences.  So if she says "go" is a noun, I'd say, "Can you give me some 'go'?" and she can tell it's wrong, and similarly is she say "dog" is a verb, I'll say, "Can you 'dog down the hall?" or something like, "I like 'dogging'" and she recognizes immediately from basic sentence patterns that that's new and wrong immediately.  So using the words for and working at identifying parts of speech helped her be able to continue and progress in DuoLingo as the lessons rise to a level beyond her abilities in English.  In a sense, she is starting to speech Chinese better in some respects, than English.

 

As an ABMNM (Anat Baniel Neuromovement) practitioner, I can see how one principle Anat often taught us was similar related variations should help you accomplish the things you struggle at.  I am gambling this will be the case with the Chinese language studies online.  I can't find an English online experience based on learning English this well.  Even DuoLingo doesn't offer basic English, only English based on another language you already know. 

 

Our 200-day goal passed a month or two ago.

 

As someone working with an autistic person aiding their recovery, if you child starts learning and taking interest in learning the same old things (in Anna's case, in nursery rhymes and cartoons) in various languages, consider this could be a way in to helping them develop language.  Anna was interested in German because many kids videos are available in German, but I was not so much.  I know I wanted to be an entrepreneur, for example a planner I'm developing requires finding suppliers for various materials, and would like to feel more confident and comfortable using and communicating with Chinese websites and vendors, so like any homeschooling, I tried to make it a win-win and both try to learn together, by learning Chinese.  Chinese is more logical and easier to learn than English and the romance languages (I know French, Spanish and Latin) which have male and female words - even neutral words like "dog" and "hand" are male or female, and you have to describe things in male and female forms of adjectives, like "grand" and "grande", to match their male and female nouns.  This over-gendered layer makes these languages unnecessarily hard.   Also, Chinese had shorter words and many other reasons it's easier (I can go into more detail if anyone wants me so or perhaps in the future), including there are pictures for all words.  Imagine a word for "home" that's a picture that is memorable and that most of the time looks a little like the word's meaning.  It's an extra layer to remember by.  I'm suggesting those with autistic kids who want to spend time with their kids that's pretty fun and a good habit and contributes to that child speaking better, I say go for it!