WEEK 13 - SON-RISE DAY 19 - Pretend n PLay

R was diagnosed with Autism 2 years backs. And recently got diagnosed with Apraxia . R is now 4 years old. We started SON-RISE program with R couple of weeks backs. SON-RISE is a Play-therapy program that I am volunteering for . The Play-Therapy is associated with son-rise.org to treat his symptoms related to Autism.When I refer to Stimming , it is the repetitive behavior R does while lost in his world



Besides all other challenges the biggest challenge for R is finding his voice, He just says Baah for everything.




Yesterday I went to R's house to run  play-therapy. R was stimming by crawling on kitchen floor on his back, with his legs bended . I tried several times to make him come down to play-room, but he was enjoying his stimming a lot. Even the pistachios did not worked. Finally R's mom brought the cookie and that made him come down to the playroom.

R is now into "eat" pretend and play game.

We played for about 30 minutes with Pretend & play vegetable cutter. I gave him the vegetable , He will give it back to me to pretendthat I am eating. In between I asked him to pretend that he is eating also. Then I will ask him to cut them and he will cut them using his plastic play knife on cutting board. R even pointed me to all the vegetables when I asked him which one is Tomato,Green Pepper and others :)

R seemed to be done playing with it, So I asked him lets put all of them back in the box. He gave me the cardboard box and now asked me to pretend that I was eating that also. So I laughed and tickled him, Telling "You are being cute silly, we dont eat cardboard, he gave me this smile". He helped me to put all vegetables back in the box, But by the time we were suppose to put cutting board back in, He got up and ran away to dribble beach ball.

God, he has gotten so good at dribbling the ball, He can look somewhere else and dribble it non-stop without missing it. ....His way of Stimming !!

In between he played with me by passing the Beach ball.

R enjoyed another game yesterday, We both sat down on beachball and bounced . He was laughing, I tried to make him look at me. But majority of the time, he was looking away from me. Though he was following my instructions. He wont let me hold his hands or legs. But in between , I was able to hold his hands and we both bounced.

Overall it was a good interactive session. I had so much fun with him, He seemed happier because his mom is back :)