Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Hooray for the government!

Never thought I'd say that!

Today we officially got the go-ahead for our therapy payments. So we have $6000 to spend before June, and then another $6000 to spend for the next financial year.
With the RDI and OT we have planned for the boy, we shouldn't have any problem burning through that 6 grand before June. We're trying to power through those initial 10 parental education modules so we can get onto doing some actual stuff with him, but man, these modules are like going to school and doing homework! And who wants to do that after a busy day at work! But it's gotta be done....especially now since we need to burn up this $6000 in 5 months. Yes, whatever you don't use before June doesn't roll over.

Thanks Kev.....I knew you'd get something right sooner or later.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

I'm a hopeless blogger


Ok so it's a new year and so I guess I should be doing this blogging thing more often.

I really don't see how some people can write their blogs every day. They must have too much time on their hands, or no life. But then I see blogs of parents with autistic kids who write these huge passages of text every day. Who knows how they fit the time in. I'm not Bloggy McBlogstein. I can't write in a blog every day. I guess I prefer to let a bit build up, then blog it.

Anyway...see that picture up there? That's Northbridge, in a suburb of Sydney called, funnily enough, Northbridge. I've rarely driven across it in my life cause I've never really had to visit that area before. But now I do quite a bit. To a lot of people, it's just a nice old bridge to drive across. But to me now, it's the grand entrance to Autismland. Cause that's where our RDI therapist's office is.

We've started our parental RDI training. Before we even start interacting with the boy, us as his parents have to do an intensive online course to develop our basic understanding of RDI and what is expected of us. It involves watching & reading masses of information about RDI, and then answering questionnaires after each parental module about what we'd just read or watched. The therapist assesses our answers and we progress to the next module. I think there's about 10 parental modules to complete, each about an hour each - not including the time to fill out the questions afterwards.

That's right, we've gone back to school!