Marie Curie: On the Spectrum?

Sorry for the glare, but I was enjoying reading an article about Marie Curie in Smithsonian at the airport so I snapped a photo to remind me. She was fabulously brilliant and has changed our world, with the added challenge of doing it all in a time when women were not welcome in science.

It sounded like she was most comfortable in her laboratory and had a hard time with crowds, attention, etc. My guess is that if she had been alive today she would have ended up diagnosed on the “spectrum”, high-functioning of course, but nevertheless demonstrating difficulty with social skills. I imagine many of our current scientists and a disporportionate number of those with PhDs would, in today’s diagnosis-happy climate, be diagnosed with Asperger’s… brilliant, hyper-focused, amazing people, that prefer their work and labs over social situations.

One of the comments in the magazine is that Marie and her husband “renounced” pleasure for science, but I think their pleasure WAS science.

We all have our gifts. The key is recognizing these gifts as strengths and working with them. 🙂 It doesn’t make any of us any better or worse than others. Just different, and that’s okay! Remember, we are all unique, just like everybody else, to paraphrase Steven Wright…

More Off-Topic from Birmingham….

   
You all have to deal with me a little longer with off-topic Birmingham posts because I am trying to show off my balance of occupations which is super important, okay? I’m an OT and I blog about OT but I like occasionally blogging about non-OT. 🙂
The first picture is just such crazy texture. It was my rainbow hair sparkles in a Sephora black and white plastic bag, with my new vintage amberish necklace on top with one of Orli’s sweater therapy clips and it was just a riot of texture! The second picture is the stuff I am bringing back with me from Orli’s SweaterTherapy collection, for my aunt Teresa to sell at her hair salon in Carlsbad, CA. 🙂

This is Laura’s (my friend Tana’s sister) cat Bennie, a Maine coon. He didn’t mind the sweater too much. Sorry for the mess, we were going through products and he tried to help.

Check out the CHOCOLATE FETTUCINE we made. It’s chocolate crepes cut into thick noodles, with a drunken chocolate sauce of basically chocolate and gran marnier and a few other things, and then heavy whipped cream. Amazing. Decadent.

The next picture is Orli and Tana having some fun with the mannequins, or shall we say womannequins. 🙂

   
We went to a cool store called Charm in Birmingham, and I think a knitting mafia or whatever they are called, must have done this tree. 🙂

Orli and I doing creative idea thinking at a coffee shop…
LOVE LOVE LOVE Laura Stacey bags that she hand batiks. I use mine all the time. This was at the Birmingham’s Farmer Market. Expensive but hardy, beautiful, unique, and worth it.
     

Tana the physical therapist aka Miss Sweetness as she has deemed her Miss Awesomeness offshot title to be, with her sunflowers, Orli sweater, and Laura batik bag….

Tana and I being silly in our new SweaterTherapy sweaters, posing for Orli late at night! 🙂 Hers was called “Pink Palace” and mine was “Lollipop”….They are nice and heavy and warm and sooo cute. We look like elves!

At Charm the store they had this praying mantis holding earrings which I really liked but I felt sorry for him, having to hold those all day, I bet his poor little praying hands got tired. Do you guys remember me writing (maybe I only put it on Facebook?) that I had a praying mantis in my bed recently?!

Finally, a picture of the baklava Tana made me for my (belated) birthday. I don’t like baklava you get in 99% of restaurants or stores, but I loooove homemade baklava that is drenched and wet with honey! Yum!!!! I ate ten thousand pieces.

Okay. I am CLOSE to done with utterly off-topic posts. I’m sitting on the airline writing these up so I can get them put away and move on!

Over-time (OT) and Off-topic (OT)

   
Bear with me, I get to be a little off-topic since I’m on break. 🙂 While I was in Alabama my friend’s mom made me a shirt based on one that my friend Orli originally made. We hit up a fabric store and I selected this lace, then basically you cut out a neck, reinforce sides, and add a seam near the body to make the bat wings….The other day one of my little girls I work with asked me out of the blue “Is sewing OT?” I was like…yes and no. It doesn’t HAVE to be OT, but it can be used as OT in that it works on a lot of great skills. I want to learn how to sew basic things. One of my goals as a thirty year old is “30/30/30” in that I want at least thirty minute basic lessons in at least thirty different things while I am thirty. Things that are pretty straight forward and used to be taught in home ec, but we don’t have home ec anymore… what I learned from this experience is that sewing is not rocket science but it’s not easy either. 🙂 Or maybe it is if you know how to fix things that go wrong…when I get home I want to go look at our old sewing machine and see if it’s useable.
   
I performed rocket surgery aka battery surgery on this endangered tiger on this old stuffed animal at my friend’s house. It was hit or miss, he flat-lined a few times, but ultimately pulled through. His eyes glowed with pleasure and he purred loudly after he woke up from his anesthetic. It was a little scary as you can see.

   
In case you all were wondering, LESTER IS THE CUTEST CAT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. But his one and only goal for 2013 (besides improving his ability to make us alcoholic drinks) is to end up in the 2014 “Bad Cats” Calendar. I skimmed the 2013 which I got for his mommy, and I have no doubt he can make it. Just need to do the legwork of submission. By the way, that Santa on his back has been the one toy he has had for at least like four years? And he loves it. He plays with it all the time.

Lastly, I have to tell you all, I love Trader Joe’s with a passion and I want to marry Trader Joe, but whoever invented their “sea gummies” was likely a dolphin in disguise or at least at heart, because I can’t imagine any human accepting that taste. It was soooo fishy that I had to spit it out and rinse my mouth out, gagging. BLEH!!

Sharks and ducks, OT game

Working on a shark game…trying to find tiny things that float that the shark can eat! No luck so far….may have to go to a fishing store. I found some larger ducks that float…the shark could bite them but couldn’t fit it entirely in the mouth. Guess that’s okay. Oddly enough these ducks float head-down, butt up….may make for some good laughs? I am thinking good for a quick choice time activity on a hot day 🙂 A large container to hold some water, a few ducks, and a shark, and you’re set….

World OT Day: OT24x

http://ot4ot.com/ot24vx2012/

Make your letters fun!

A little guy and I were working on a rough draft of deciding how to make a laminated visual strip for certain letters (prone to reversals), as well as using his awesome creative powers to decorate letters, including his name. 🙂 Sometimes writing letters is way more motivating if you get to “play” with them after. I think we forget to make letters fun. We can think of letters as having quirky characters just like animals and people or being part of something cool, and make them more appealing. “L” doesn’t have to just be two lines. It can be a tower! It can be a pole! “U” can be a bathtub, or a smiley face. I liked his idea for “H” was a hippo 🙂 Mom gave me written permission to post this in case anyone is freaking out over a first name being shown… 😉

OT on OT: Random thought for the day

OT on OT is my new label for ‘Off-Topic on Occupational Therapy”…..

Bridging Flexibility and Imagination through Board Game Creation with Highly Preferred Characters

I have a child who is not big on flexibility or imagination. I think he has a great imagination, but for whatever reason accessing it can cause him anxiety. So I took my Super Mario stuff and a corkboard and we started to develop a board game together. We used these random cardstock strips (reject paper) for the rough draft version and we used Super Mario stickers for different types of issues, plus Super Mario characters as game pieces, and we turned a “Snerdle” box (Snerdles are Super Mario candies you can get at Party City that come in a “Question” box and they are verrrry popular with my OT kiddos) into a dice by using post it notes. We were working on deciding which handwriting scenarios you did with with issues, ie maybe certain stickers/rolls would cause you to have to write a word super dark or super light etc as the point was it was a handwriting game. I felt like it was a nice bridge to encourage imaginative flexibility in a safe way.

Pistachio shell art/imaginative play

So read this ad I found in I think Smithsonian magazine about the importance of brands. It basically says exactly what I hadn’t yet known to voice, but felt. That it’s about starting a “cultural uprising” and that’s part of what I want to see with Miss Awesomeness – an awareness and push for more imagination and creativity in our daily lives, children and adults alike. I realize there are plenty of people out there already doing just that, but I want to add my brand/voice to that clamor and maybe one of these days we’ll hit a critical mass. 🙂 ANYWAY, I saw this ad and toko a picture of it at the airport, but I felt it matched perfectly something that Tana Banana aka Miss Sweetness showed me today (according to one of the OTs at the hospital she works at, she is a “closet OT” hahaha).

Anyway, she was playing a little girl at a recent festival and they were eating pistachios. At the end, rather than just throwing the pistachio shells away, Tana got out markers and she and the little girl decorated the pistachios, turning them into a family. I LOVE THIS! This is EXACTLY what I am talking about! Take the resources around you ( a la Recycling OT, lol) and use it with imagination.
In this case it was also great fine motor and visual motor work! But the kid would just know it was fun. And I bet you money she NEVER sees pistachio shells the same way again!
 

Give-away mishap ;)

Updated 1130pm Friday – so I never did get around to posting details of the items of this particular giveaway, but sounds like you guys will survive until I can. Just post on this and I promise you’ll like what you get!
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Hey guys, my Thursday PenAgain giveaway (that I’m doing myself using pens they sent me last year) did not happen because I spent the entire day on a plane and didn’t have time to do it before I left! (By the way robbers, I have roommates that are still home so don’t try any funny business! My mom will SHANK YOU!) Cough…