Meditating as a NICU cuddler

Heavy clothes, calm bodies? Blast from the past

One more picture from the Marie Curie article in Smithsonian 🙂 Look at how heavy their clothes were. I wonder how scratchy they were. I’m guessing that perhaps, if nothing else, the heaviness was calming, even if uncomfortable texture wise! No seamless undies back then!! 🙂

I was recently reading Songs of the Gorilla Nation and she was talking about how she always wore leather and dark sunglasses, because the leather was so weighted and calming, and the sunglasses reduced input, etc. I thought that was fascinating because I know we all have seen people in um, unusual or interesting get-ups, and made assumptions. But we all know what they say, when you “assume” you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”….lol

I want to write more soon about sensory profiles….we all have them!!

Does music help attention? Does white noise help attention?

Something I saw in I think Smithsonian magazine about using music to help your brain. I liked what they noted about people with attention deficits and how they may calm down in a paradoxical way – ie how taking the equivalent of speed calms them while it “speeds” the rest of us up. Very interesting neurologically.

Anyway, the thing about anxiety – that USED to be the case for me, that when I was frequently (severely) anxious, I listened to Enya while lying in a dark room and practicing diagraphagmatic breathing. But eventually when I thought of Enya it made me anxious because the two became so linked. So then I could no longer listen to  Enya without that association of being panicked. So sometimes it turns on you! My new favorite is Native American Indian flutes, the Canyon Trilogy, by R. Carlos Nakai. Many of my kids in special ed also really enoy it.

This reminds me that I want to do a post soon about white noise. Some studies have come out showing that white noise or classical music can be very helpful for concentration for SOME PEOPLE – especially those with ADD. But for those with “regular” concentration, it can actually be harmful to our attention. When I was in 7th grade, we had a history teacher who was big on playing classical music during our tests. He had good intentions and I know there were/are studies showing classical music helps. But it was a novel stimulus and I know for me it actually made it much harder to concentrate. Try white noise apps for your OT kiddos with ADHD to use while working, and see if it seems to help them out. (In our district our 3rd graders and higher have individual iPads so it would be easy for us to implement but maybe not so easy in most districts). But be careful of using classical music/white noise with ALL children. Better to use as a case by case basis.
Oh. Guess I don’t need to write a new post about white noise, I just wrote it. 😉

Volunteering in the NICU :)

Board copying the longest words in the English language :)

Toys'R'Us has a Differently Abled section

Top Ten Most Popular Baby Names of 2012: How easy will they be to handwrite? :)

According to BabyCenter.com, the most popular 2012 baby names are:

Male Names, starting at most popular:

Liam, Ethan, Noah, Mason, Jacob, Jack, Aiden, Logan, Jackson, Lucas

Female Names starting at most popular:

Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Ava, Isabella, Mia, Ella, Emily, Lily, Chloe

How does this relate to occupational therapy? Any occupational therapist who has ever had to teach handwriting and teach a young child how to write their name, knows how crucial teaching a name can be. It’s often the first thing the child starts writing, starting in preschool, and has to jot hastily down on every piece of paper for the rest of their lives. 

For ANY child, special needs or not, a short name (or an easy nickname) with primarily vertical lines and at best a few curves will be easiest. Diagonals are the trickiest and require more developmental maturity than vertical and horizontal lines. And some letters are more prone to reversals than others such as b, d, p, q. 

When I look at these top tens from a Handwriting Without Tears standpoint, none of them look too bad for a child with special needs to have to write. For Isabella, I’d vote for shortening it to “Bella” rather than “Izzy” because it is a really challenging one, two z’s and a y! Diagonal city!

If I had to name my child and knew in advance they would have significant special needs, I’d possibly try to find a 3 to four letter name that started with either a capital E, F, T, or L, and then had just a few simple lowercase letters, ideally avoiding b, d, or diagonals. (For example, Ella was a great one! Big line down, little lines across! Little line, little line! Magic c, little line! Even better would just be “Lila”.)

I often come across parents who lament that they would have named their child something differently had they known how much trouble the child would have handwriting! Realistically I’m sure if I truly had a perfect name picked out already then I would just go with the name I want and either give the child a nickname or just work a lot with my child on learning how to handwrite it! I’m not a HUGE fan of nicknames though, because they complicate things a little bit for a child with special needs, having two names to respond to and/or recognize and/or explain.

The most challenging name I ever had to teach (while working as a student occupational therapist in rural Mississippi at a pediatric clinic) was unique enough that I won’t share it, but I’ll give a fake name equivalent instead to explain – Ja-ni’queaL- the child’s name had an uppercase letter both at the beginning and end of the name, plus a dash, plus an apostrophe!

Hope you enjoyed my thoughts on the top most popular baby names of 2012 from a pediatric occupational therapist perspective!

 Image came from Handwriting Without Tears

The American Academy of Pediatrics says recess is really necessary. CONCUR!