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Need Help Keeping Up With Therapies,activities,pretty Much Everything!?!?
A MyAutismTeam Member asked a question 💭

Well, I am new to this website and we as a family are new to Autism,Summer was diagnosed 3 months ago.She started OT today. She will have 4 therapies a week starting next week. After her appointment today,I felt overwhelmed. I learned SO much in 1 session....and I have to remember it all and be the best I can be for my baby. I just want to know how other parents do it? How do you keep up with therapy,activities,appointments,etc.? I need ideas! Any advice would be great. THANKS!

posted October 30, 2012
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A MyAutismTeam Member

I'm in your shoes... 3 Speech, 2 OT, 1 PT, plus preschool and horseback riding, plus doctor appointments and the occasional play date. My strategy so far has been to schedule everything for my child on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and reserve Thursdays for errands and Fridays for my own personal doctor appointments or meetings. You can choose to pull her out of school one or twice a week to accommodate important stuff like therapies. I get counseling every two weeks and I'm still trying to find an open time slot so I can do yoga once a week. So I guess my advice to you is just get on a schedule, and be sure to include time to do chores and also time to relax!

posted October 30, 2012
A MyAutismTeam Member

Slow down :) you will learn solo much more from your OT. We have four sessions a week as well as some sessions we do on our own when Cam doesn't have a formal session. I all sway try to make sure that for every session of therapy he get a fun activity, the sessions are a lot of work for him.
I also keep a notebook with ideas for activities he loved at each session and try to repeat them with him at home. I try to plan our day so that there are so sensory activities spread out.
Also, make sure you don't drive from therapy to therapy. They are kids and need time to play and relax, so as much as we want to load them up, they do need down time, they need time with us. We were lucky to find a place that offers multiple therapies, so we are able to do OT and speech back to back which help him to stay focused.

I hope this helped a little bit :)

posted October 30, 2012
A MyAutismTeam Member

I keep an calendar handy that goes with me everywhere. In that at appts or anything, I can take notes. Other than that, I write up a daily list of what we are doing and what I would like to do. I found this to be the best way for me to stay organized. Also, just keeping the same appts and such on the same day and the same time really helps because it gets to be the "normal" for that day. Hope that helps.

posted October 31, 2012
A MyAutismTeam Member

I keep a notebook of all of the different people we see related to his autism and all his different therapies. So for example we have tabs for CDRC, which is where we had him diagnosed, speech therapy, autism counselor, and school. I have notebook paper in each section so I can take notes on each therapy and whats going on. I also have a day planner keeping track of all his appointments, I also have a smart phone with a calandar and I mark each appointment and set an alarm for the day before as well as an hour before so I can keep track. I have found the note book invaluable and have had to increase its size with all the information Im recieving, but its great because if you have any questions about something that happened at each session, instead of freaking out over forgetting, you can go back and reference it in your notes.

posted October 31, 2012
A MyAutismTeam Member

We just finished a whirl-wind year: 3-ABA/week, 2-Speech/week, 1-OT/week, on top of 4 days of preschool. For a while we had 5 days of ABA, but it was too much. We were all happier to scale back and keep Fridays as 'mommy day'. Only emergency appts are scheduled on Fridays, otherwise it is a fun day. Sounds wierd, but you need to schedule in 'fun' or at least the opportunity for fun. I made sure to always have a break between sessions (except one that was back-to-back with same location.) Make sure you take time for yourself, even if it's 30minutes each day to do something...or nothing! In my spare time...haha...I kept a behavior log for my son. This was very useful to not only gauge how therapy was working, but also to be able to identify if he was more prone to certain behaviors on specific therapy days. Hang in there, and take it one day (one hour...one minute) at a time.

posted October 30, 2012

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