Insert meaning here.

I recently had a kid who needs to work on strengthening in extensor positions, ie if he holds his arms out straight in front of him like a zombie and I push gently, gently down on his arms, they fold up immediately. No strength. When I just had him do it over air….nothing. But when I told him my co-worker who happened to be near me, was an evil monster with burning skin that would burn him if he touched it, and then had her put her arms out, he had to put his arms over hers (about a foot higher)  and i tried to press down….THEN he could resist against me so he wouldn't touch the evil monster burny skin 🙂 (Obviously he knew it was a game, I didn't traumatize him for life)…. It's all about the story!!! It has to have a meaning….and for little ones, the meaning is usually in the form of a game. 🙂

PS – There is no rhyme or reason to the next few weeks of scheduled postings….totally miscellaneous. Whatever i felt like. Just finished writing up some big reports – the possum in my bedroom kinda distracted me a while so now it's past 1am and I have to be up at 6am for another busy, busy day. Better try to get some sleep.

PS2 – I just discovered Draw Something (app on iphone) and I loooooooooove it. I'm a little slow to join the crowd sometimes but hey I get there eventually.

PS3: I think I mentioned this but I plan to get through emails/comments while I have a day or so in Alabama alone.

PS4: AOTA CONFERENCE IS IN SAN DIEGO NEXT YEAR WHICH MEANS PARTY AT MY HOUSE WHICH MEANS IF YOU READ THIS BLOG (and uh, you are an OT or OT student), YOU BETTER COME TO SAN DIEGO NEXT APRIL OR I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU AND I MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE HAD A LOT OF COFFEE EARLIER TODAY

This possum is in my bedroom and now hiding under my dresser. I have meetings in morning. Must focus on work 

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

DTVP-2 work :)

One of my little guys working on the DTVP-2 for an initial OT evaluation….he can’t lift his hand up once he starts and can start either way. We need to work on his grip! At least he is stabilizing! The Developmental Test of Visual Perception-2 has 8 parts to it. Four of them are visual motor, and four of them are visual perceptual. You alternate, so Test 1, 3, 5, and 7 involve a pencil and a paper booklet while 2, 4, 6, and 8 are from a book and the child just points. It includes staying within lines, copying forms, copying grids, and one timed test for the visual motor parts. For the visual perceptual parts the child is usually pointing to an answer and each test has roughly 20 questions (it varies slightly). Each test has a point where you can stop if the child is consistently missing. I know my kids almost always do worst on the visual closure subtest, and frankly, I find it challenging as well. There is ONE subtest that I really hate scoring, a visual perceptual one, because sometimes there is like five answers for a single question, and you have to keep track of it all.  Other than that particular subtest, I feel it’s relatively easy to give/score.

My BIGGEST professional issue….

Every time one of my OT kids says “Guess what?” I DESPERATELY want to say “Chicken Butt!!”

🙂

Random OT update

 
This picture is of me holding a beloved sloth in Peru or Brazil or Colombia on an island off the Amazon River in the Amazon Jungle, the fall before I started this job. I am about to finish my first full school year! 🙂

I changed the title of my blog because I honestly could never remember the title of it, plus the parentheses were a pain. Anybody have any thoughts on the matter? Because we know it’s as important as world peace….No? Okay moving on….this is going to be my random update.

I have five days of work left (would be 10 more, but I’m leaving early for a special trip). In that five days, I have about 10 days of work left, including SIX IEP meetings, one of which is an initial, two are triennials, and four are annuals. Two of those meetings promise to be quite….invigorating, shall I say. I’m also going to try to see ALL my kids one last time, if at all possible, even if just for a few minutes, to check on their goals for final progress reports and to say good bye to my little ones!! ANYWAY besides basic work I have to catch up on all documentation/logs for the year, close up everything, blah blah blah – busy busy busy week. And prep for the trip! Luckily I have next weekend to pack, finish shopping, etc.

So since I do have SO MUCH WORK TO DO, I’ve decided to blog. AHAHAHAA. My classic procrastination tool. But I also feel like this blog is part of my professional identity, even if it is quirky, so I feel like in a way, it is my job, but in a good way. But since I’m going to be abroad for a month, I am scheduling posts for while I am away. Most of them are short, one picture, one caption posts – all my serious ones will have to wait! I may bring the serious stuff with me to Alabama for before/after the trip, to try and do while my friends are at work.

Hey Cookie boy – you will get your cookies soon, I haven’t forgotten.

Miss Awesomeness – OT branding

I don’t know if all y’all have noticed that the blog now links to missawesomeness.com….not sure if that affects your RSS feeds or not. I eventually want to try to build up missawesomeness with products etc as I have lots of inventions….just haven’t gotten them all the way to production yet. It’s part of my future though, LOL. My talented friend Kellie of fuelhaus.com (branding company) designed this logo for me….she was showing me its rough draft hence the little eyedropper tool in there….I love it. 🙂 I want to maybe have Abilitations sell my inventions, but I’m concerned about the future as eventually I’d love to host my own products and perhaps those of TherapyFunZone.com! Tonya of that site is my online OT website mentor as she gets tons more page views than I do….although I’m getting up there. I think last month I had almost 10,000 page views! 🙂  And I’m finally over the 300,000 mark! Of course it took me 5 years to get there, haha. Oops off on the tangent. Back to Miss A….

I have a lot of kids who either call me Miss Awesome or Miss Awesomeness…they remember it way better than Miss Karen…and a lot of their parents and/or teachers call me that too. The other day though I was frantically loading stuff into my car because I was acidentally blocking end of day traffic (long story, I would NEVER do that normally, I think it’s evil) anyway – I finally realized a kid was saying “Miss Awesome” to me repeatedly and turned around and he was just wanting to say hi. I was like awww lol. And when I walk into this one classroom for my kid all the other kids say in a chorus “Good morning Miss Awesome” AHAHAHAHA….

Of course plenty more call me Miss Karen and there are many many times in which I am NOT miss awesome. Like on Thursday morning when I was on day 2 of a juice cleanse that I was doing with a few co-workers. Man, I’m a pretty nice person, but it’s a good thing I didn’t have access to weapons that morning!! Sugar withdrawal = headache = not a nice person. Just kidding, kind of. I was still appropriate but internally, whooie.

Typingweb.com for OT – free accounts

Typingweb.com – thanks Cheryl for the tip 🙂 Can be a little perceptually c

Crazy eye make up…help kids with autism look you in the eye :)

I’m a fan of crazy eye make up! Lately I’ve been tired/stressed so not so much, but I do try to wear wacky eye makeup, my kids love it and will look me in the eye 🙂 One time one of my kids hated the ugly yellow I was wearing that day (a mistake I didn’t have time to remove) and it was hysterical. A good way to get children with autism to look you in the eye. If I don’t wear sparkles, sometimes my kids (typically little boys!) will ask forlornly, “no sparkles?” awww