I have been sharing a lot of posts recently on the progress Courtney has been making with her talker. I decided it was time for me to share a video of her in action. In this video her and I are doing a telatherapy session with her AAC therapist. On the screen was a repetitive story. We’ve been using some repetitive stories to work on increasing her word utterances on her talker to 3 words. She’s been able to find most food items on her talker for a while now but the words, “I” and “like” are newer for her. The therapist reads the sentence on the page and then she is suppose to repeat it using her talker. The first couple pages (not shown on the video) I modeled what we expected out of her and so she can see the motor plan to find the words on her device. By the 3rd or 4th page she figured it out! This video is actually the second time reading through the story.

The video may feel like a long 3 minutes of because the processing she had to do for each page. I feel this video also gives a good look at how the symptoms of Autism can really get in the way of everything she does. Her little brain during this task was also focused on something else. When she’s doing some of these behaviors, we are pretty sure her head is in some video she enjoys watching. Yet she was also still completing the task but she was very much distracted by so many other things so had to really work to still complete the activity. The video also shows how much wait time she needs when asked a question. It is so hard to not just jump in and prompt her. You’ll even see how sometimes I probably do prompt her too soon. Most of all this video shows just how awesome my little girl is and how hard she is working to learn how to communicate.

Having a non-verbal child is extremely difficult. Even as she learns to communicate, we are still at the point where I find myself saying daily, “I wish you could just tell me… what you want, what’s wrong, how I can help you…I love you”. Watching her work so hard so that someday can tell me all those things is the most beautiful thing in the world.