Curing Autism Together

Anna uses the word "freedom" spontaneously & in a novel sentence, first time using and abstract noun

ANNA'S FIRST SIGNS OF UNDERSTANDING/ SPONTANEOUS USE OF AN ABSTRACT NOUN

The last few days of Chinese - and life too, actually - have been really challenging with Anna, where she struggles to learn basic things from language most people knew before school age, like what "this" or "that" are used for (ie, "this" is usually used for nearby stuff, "that is usually for stuff farther away), which was what happened yesterday.  She has trouble understanding what I'm saying and what we're learning at Chinese again because it's doing something she can't or doesn't do in English most of the time, now.  I get so frustrated having to explain to a 20 year old how to use "this" and "that" in a sentence, and there's difficulty even having her understand the teaching that we often have to so sideways into teaching other basics of language just for her to understand my current point - all stuff even a 5 or 6 year old would normally have no problem with.  It's so frustrating I wonder what I'm doing trying, like I am crazy to keep trying. 

 

But here are occasional signs that she's moving developmentally in language she's been using here and there, especially in the last several months since we've "hit a wall" on harder language in the chinese duolingo app.  We work on chinese every day and every day she learns something better about language in general, but we're so behind in terms of the parts of speech and clauses being underused or not used at all that it's easy to feel overwhelmed despite small signs of success creeping in lately.  It's not like when she was starting her recovery, where any improvement or change at all was huge, in part because we were imagining a change in the learning curve that could approach normal or even high functioning, whereas now at 20, little glimmers of progress after years of never spontaneously using prepositions, nor adverbs, nor adjectives, nor conjunctions, nor clauses that make sentences more complex.  It's so easy to feel hopeless or upset with myself for spending so much time trying.  

 

Anna shown here, helping me clean up.  I made a shape with her out of plastic packaging we were going to recycle/ toss, before-hand.  

 

But still, the occurrence of these changes need to be encouraged and focused on by me much like blowing on embers to ignite a flame, is how to speed and encouraged the "sticking" of the newly emerging skill.  There was at least one or a couple changes lately, but the one I just heard was exciting and hopeful a few minutes ago, so I had to write.  (I often write to create a timeline, what happens with her that is hopeful, without ever posting it publicly, because that takes more time than I have at the time when I was recording, but I thought I should post this because it's a big deal.)

 

Anyway, Anna said "I was organizing my christmas paper toys into a zip lock bag so they won't get wet and if I want to I could have the freedom to play with them".  Notice the abstract noun, "freedom", not something we talk about often, not something she has a reason to have rehearsed using.  She often talks about organizing, something I've included her in for many hours as I have cleaned and organized myself, including labeling, cleaning and boxes and folders, etc. but never using new language that I know of.  Since she "hit the wall" as a child learning all the nouns she could that she could see or draw, and unable to learn any "concepts", I've been wondering for years how and when she'd ever be able to learn a concept she couldn't point to in the physical world of nouns and verbs.  Well, how glorious and poetic that "freedom" was her first abstract, spontaneously used abstract noun!  I figured she's use these parts of speech more masterfully first, but getting abstract nouns is something I've been waiting for since she was failing to develop at a year old, worsening, so I've been waiting almost 2 decades for this.  I guess I'll take what I can get and glad this was one I didn't have to coach to directly, a severe rarity when working with autistic people.

Anna’s language skills noticeably improve after 2 years of learning Chinese on DuoLingo app

“I wash the bras periodically”, Anna says, slowing down to say “per-i-o-di-cally” as if reading a word for the first time in a dictionary.  We’ve been doing DuoLingo app’s  Chinese course for nearly two years on a streak but in reality started a few months before staying in the streak.  It’s teaching her that learning what words mean is just something you do regularly, something she didn’t used to do before we started that course. It’s teaching her - and I am as well - how to learn a language as an adult, including asking her to look up and then we use words in Chinese for things that we say in English a lot. 

My daughter Anna has had particular difficulty with using time in sentences because she doesn’t understand it at all, but we use “every day”, “yesterday” “next week”, last year etc  all the time in Duo Lingo units I’ve spent extra time on, and she seems to have spontaneously taken on this word not in our Chinese lessons yet, but spontaneously like normal children and adults. Also, she’s been much much easier to teach new language to in the last month or so, when it suddenly occurred to me she’s learning and getting better at using some language in Chinese than in English and set out to become “DuoLingo Mom” repeating important questions often like DuoLingo does, and she’s been learning at a more normal level from me since then. For example we were talking about something being hot and I was asking her how hot, and decided to teach her adjectives describing versions of hot like “burning”, “scorching”, “boiling” hot, etc and she learned them right away, something that nearly never used to happen.  

It appears my attempt to use DuoLingo daily, in this case to learn Chinese, which I find more logical and simpler to teach an autistic person than English due to pictures representing words plus phonetically spelled written words for the same concept, no plural or singular, no male and female nouns or adjectives (which I thing is a problem in Spanish and French, two languages I considered before settling on Chinese), fewer articles (no “a” or “the”, only “this” “that” and “every”) - is finally paying off with regard to improving my daughters language skills!  It’s proven that bilingual children score higher in testing and us Neuroplasticity inducing which I tested and gradually have seen improvements in her spontaneous incorporating of language she never used to use and also better uptake or targeted DuoLingo- like teaching it key info she needs to know - but only today decided to start recording these changes more regularly, which I’m happy to share and hope helps somebody else with an autistic child try this activity which - by the way - is an easy 5-20 min daily thing to do together which my daughter and I both enjoy and get something out of 🙂🙂👍🏻

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!

Using Anat Baniel Method (ABM) Neuromovement to teach time / position / angles to an autistic person

I'm an Anat Baniel Method® Neuromovement® practitioner with an autistic teenager.  I also so the Son-Rise Program with my daughter as a team leader, but was never certified in that.  I've been writing these blog posts often without posting because I don't have time or prioritize making them pretty with pictures, include both my child and my own growth and development (I have high-functioning autism most likely - never diagnosed) and more brief and elegant, but decided I'm now just going to post so you can see a lot of the data points I'm saving by drafting posts, in the nearly original form - this is one of those.  

 

USING ABM NEUROMOVEMENT "DESK TRAINER" / "NEUROMOVEMENT FOR YOUR BUSY LIFE" 

For the last several weeks I have been use anatbanielmethod.com's "NeuroMovement for Your Busy Life" (formerly known as the "Desk Trainer") series with my daughter -sitting on couches in our family room - more consistently - like every other night (than sporadically, like a few times a month, as I have in the past).  These are short lessons (around 10min) with an animated cartoon character sitting in a chair with pelvis sitting at or above knee level (knees bend at 90 degree angle, or more extended), feet flat on the floor.  

I've been using these lessons as a jumping off point and create variations as we're doing it (and am now offering iPad/ video lesson / coaching, too), and today was trying to clear up the pelvic clock by having her point out with her straight arm in space what direction each of the clock numbers are  using the desk, doing lessons that last something like 10 min) to create lessons for my daughter that help her brain differentiate through the attempt to make certain movements.  Anat is charging something like $40 for access to this series - or was when I got the subscription - because what's great is that's for life and you can keep cycling through the something like 30 lessons, most with both left and right versions (so actually like 60 lessons), and your child may, like mine, be more able to learning because her brain is more awake and prepared to differentiate - aka "learn".  

[FYI - See my next few posts that may be backdated and appear before this one or after (I haven't decided yet) about big leaps in my understanding of how learning IS differentiation and my child isn't (or wasn't) generally open to learning / differentiation (of course, isn't autism defined by aversion to novelty - i.e. avoiding, not taking in or storing new things - i.e. have innate mental resistance to learning due to the condition?)]

 

TEACHING LEFT AND RIGHT POSITIONING TO AN AUTISTIC PERSON USING ABM

I have worked a lot on right vs. left issue in the past.  I tried to find asymmetries on her hand, such as I had a mole on my right hand and that's how I kept them straight at first in primary school, and did find two small moles on her left hand, but that never caught on because you have to point out left then translate that to which is right; it's easier if the right hand has a mark on it, and she doesn't have that (although as I write this, I'm inspired to go back and look again, given its importance).  

So I rely instead lately on her knowing which hand to write with based on her preference plus her experience and practice.  If you ask her "which is your right hand?" she raises her hand half the time (i.e., cannot sense within herself which is which, at least at the speed she's making herself choose - she could probably choose correctly if she paused a minute to decide though - something Ill also try when we do our next lesson, now that I think of that, too).  Whenever she raises the left hand, I ask her to pick up a pencil or marker that's on a table near here, with that hand, and write her name on a piece of paper in a notebook, an before she even starts to write, she now knows it's the wrong hand (she sometimes starts to write, then realizes it's not easy - she can feel the distinction).  

So to help her know and groove in sensing the asymmetry of her right hand is easier to write with due to preference + practice (not that the left couldn't write if necessary, too).  I keep saying, "Right is what you write with", and asking her to write with it, so she hooks up her cognitive concept - left vs. right - with the feeling of relative ease with her right hand vs. her left.

 

TEACHING DIRECTIONS IN SPACE AND HOW TO TELL TIME, BASED ON CLOCK HAND DIRECTIONS 

I am working on her doing the pelvic clock - pretend you're sitting on a clock face and rolling your pelvis toward the front, trying to roll your belly out as distended and loose as possible (12 o'clock), back to touch as much of your tail bone flat to the chair as possible as much to the chair (6 o'clock), and tipping the right side of your pelvis while rolling the left side as far onto it's side on the chair toward 9 o'clock and vice versa for 3 o'clock.  

She was making progress but her rolling forward wasn't that far or clear (meaning there were a lot of extraneous movements), and her side-to-sides seemed to involve more leaning that true tipping the pelvis while remaining centered over your pelvis, which requires the pelvis and shoulder approaching each other on the side you're tipping up (opposite the side you're rolling farther onto and putting more weight onto).  So I started asking her to point to 12, to 3, to 9, to 1, 2 etc and realized she didn't have the clock directions mapped clearly, so how could she roll her pelvis in the correct directions clearly?  

So I had her point to 12, then to 3, then asked her to fill in by pointing to 12 again, then 1, then 2.  She didn't move them enough to be in the right position for 3, which was more like at 1 since her steps were way too small. She also kept bending at the elbow or wrist rather than keeping her arm straight - a constraint of the activity that helps her arm and the torso move together when straight but break apart and lose bearings when bent, so I had to keep reminding her to point with a straight arm.

I had introduced the idea of visualizing you're sitting on a giant clock with 12 noon pointed straight ahead when your head and torso both are pointed straight ahead before in one of our car sessions I did with her years ago, and again when driving in the car on many occasions - especially long-distance drives - when she would say "Look at that cow!" or something else, and I helped her give me clock-inspired directions to get me to look in the right direction briefly so I wouldn't crash my car, such as "Look there's a squirrel at 10 o'clock!"

Today this seemed right to reintroduce, merging it into the pelvic clock part of the lesson I was beefing up and adding to the desk trainer segment, that couldn't go into as much detail as I could as an ABM practitioner.  I pause the video on my laptop and add steps that help build up and deepen the concepts in the videos, which in this case was adding the pointing directions and visualization of the clock on top of the video directions, which assumed the individual actually could visualize and tip the pelvis in the correct directions, which was NOT the case in our developmentally delayed autistic child.  

What I wanted to say was, she was smiling and seemed really happy when we were doing this - I think she was hooking up those past experiences with the present context, and it for sure was making positioning directions relative to her body, clearer.  

The points I wanted to make in this post were:

1. It's really useful to make the body participate in cognitive concepts.  Similar to my teaching my daughter to understand counting through stepping, regular counting on fingers but involving movement of the arm at the elbow (finger movements alone were poorly differentiated if pumping at the elbow wasn't included in the movements, then became differentiated after we did count this way), directions relative to the body is our first sense of direction and orientation, so why not learn any positional concept through body movement, such as arms being the clock arms?
2. the Anat Baniel Desk trainer series at anatbanielmethod.com is a really handy source of sitting lessons you can do with your kids and yourself, esp your autistic or otherwise developmentally delayed kids. It's pretty self-explanatory for new people and is designed for the general public.
3. I realized I can teach these lessons by internet conference call with a phone, tablet or laptop open!  If I can observe you and you can observe me, I can do the lesson with you and pause the video and add intermediate movements you may need when you're not getting something, or make comments addressing what people are doing at home.  While I cannot actually do hands-on work unless you're in Milwaukee WI or in one of the select cities I visit, such as Cleveland OH, Chicago IL, or a few others, I can see what you're doing and offer customized movement suggestions and comment, feedback, demonstrate, etc., and can do this with your autistic child and you both there as I'm doing for myself and my child, or just for individuals, couples or groups. 
4. You get smarter while helping your child connect and get smarter too!  ABM helps all levels of people, and all participants, whether you're the child or the person leading the child through the movement lesson.  I have had a variety of insights and ideas of how to do what I have done for years one way, better and move efficiently, just pop out effortlessly, within 1-10 days after doing lessons, and I have to keep asking myself why I didn't think of that before.  (I'm also following the Medical Medium's celery juice every morning, reducing fat, eating more vegetables and fruits, eliminating chemical contaminants and "frankenfoods", and eliminating foods that stimulate chronic viruses - dairy, eggs, gluten - so ti be fair it may be either or both that cause the improvement - see another post to follow about this).  

Contact me if you want more information about how to start incorporating Anat Baniel Method into your autistic child's recovery plan, to help with your child's cognitive development at any level of ability, or to increase your own cognitive abilities, reduce risk of injury and improve your athletic and other movements, and youthfulness as I am, too, while helping your autistic child.

"Flying Trapeze" song, Anna does amazing walking on trapeze straight, heel-to-toe on the lines in the floor, despite having legs out to the side for the last decade or more!

I've been doing ABMN lessons (Anat Baniel Method® Neuromovement®) consistently now for about 2 weeks, after doing lessons only inconsistently before, and getting more progress from the inside out from her, as well as coming up with some really inventive and useful lessons for and with her on-the-fly.  

Our daughter has giant problems putting her legs near each other after years of begging, ordering, coaxing, etc..  It's part of the mental scars of her autism in combination with crippling pain from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that has gotten all screwed up in her brain and we cannot convince her otherwise.  When she used to cross her legs for years when she wouldn't poop more often than once every 7-10 days and it was just torture to see her suffer but resist pooping that would end it (when she eventually did, she felt great and we were always al relieved, and then the horrible descent into madness of her fighting pooping and us fighting her began again...)  Now that I've cured her IBD (I need to finish writing the book, I know, about it, or make a video anyway - contact me if you want me to do so - i.e. if you'd actually buy it if I do, at [email protected]), there is no reason she couldn't walk normally, but she's saying now that she's afraid if she doesn't have them widely spaced apart, she is going to have trouble pooping and potentially have it all get super painful and backed up again.  It's crazy, and I go crazy trying to get her to change about it and she won't.  she has injured her feet and toes banging them on corners and walls all over our house and has gotten her feet kicked and stepped on in the kitchen because they stick out so far its hard not to hit or impact them, yet no willingness on her part to change.  I have some video I'll post at how oddly she walks - swinging her pelvis circularly around her body rather than a true swinging gate, with her legs frozen out to the side of her hips. 

I have tried many exercises that include crossing the midline and she absolutely won't do it, but today I was measuring the width an length of a variety of spaces in our apartment gym area, and tried to encourage her to do so - autistic people love repetition with some slight point to it.  and shockingly, she joined in, putting heel to toe, measuring by feet (my feet and hers are about a foot long with the shoes on).  This was like the police making you walk a straight line to tell if you're drunk - walking on the seam in the flooring in the athletic are of our gym in both directions, then we measured the large deck the same way, having her put heel to toe - one foot in line with the prior one, and counting.  I have NEVER been able to convince her to walk in a straight line, even close to it, and today she was walking in a focused and diligent way for hundreds of steps!  

I also noticed some cognitive improvements, such as she said "recently" in a sentence unprompted, and a few super subtle but clear as a bell spontaneous modifications to her thinking today.  We've mostly been doing Anat's "Desk Trainer" series of 5-10 minute lessons designed to be doable while in a chair at work, and have modified and adjusted the timing and content since I - being an ABMNM practitioner, can see opportunities and areas she may need to slow down and work on, such as pausing the video (at anatbaniel method.com) and having her work on rounding and arching on the "pelvic clock", picturing the 12 a the front and 6 at the back.  

I finally REALLY ACCEPTED Anat's statement, "if she would, she could" and stopped trying to get her to do more differentiated speech if she was not progressing, and going back to basics of the brain managing the body's larger areas better, and only then being able to refine already refined movements such as cognition around language, when she can't manage her pelvis and ordinary gross movements well at all.  Knowing that if I don't help her brain get more differentiated, all the arguments around how her having her get hip problems later, hurting herself, etc. - I might as well be telling an infant how to drive - it just has nowhere to land.

So today as we were walking variously holding hands on those lines as I sang "He moves through the air, with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying trapeze, his actions are graceful all the girls he does please, and my love he has stolen away!" and Anna was happily walking around on a straight line all over the deck it was like a miracle!

I then led her to the high-edged planter boxes and we leaned on it and lifted our legs in space, and I directed her into variations with straight and bent lifted leg, then folded leg trying the reach around us behind us, then holding to the side and listing the opposite leg and seeing how close each hand vs. lifted leg met up, noticing differences between sides, all variations and distinctions that feel the brain and give it choices. 

I'm really embracing and integrating ABMNM lessons with her and hope to bring those who follow my posts videos of us doing lessons at home that you can try at home!  

Plus it's making me more mentally focused and organized!  Thats for another post...

(Contact me at bar[email protected] if you want to try ABMNM lessons remotely!)