Traction

As NYC looks ahead to a likely storm tonight (woohoo! snow!) I'm thinking about driving on ice. I didn't know the fun of driving on ice until college, when a friend had me drive to a (large, totally empty) parking lot and purposefully induce a slide. It was fun, and freeing, and there wasn't really anything for the driver (me) to do. We just slid.

In my AAC family, we've just been sliding.

Not doing anything.

Don't get me wrong, the talkers are here. We use them for writing, or for homework. We always bring at least one with us when we go out. When Maya tells me that we need to add a word, we add the word. And . . . that's about it.

Sliding.

Whee!

But sliding forever . . . it won't really get you where you're trying to go. It's fun. And maybe when it's snowing and icy you just need to take a break and let the slide take over for a bit. Eventually, though, if you don't lean forward and start driving again, you'll never get out of the parking lot.

And while I won't continue the analogy through the specifics of wheel turning and brake usage, I will offer this: to get out of a slide, you really need one thing: traction.

To get out of a metaphorical slide you need traction, too.

And so yesterday afternoon, in the space between getting the kids home from school and leaving for my night class, I made the first move toward gaining traction. I decided that I was going to model (which Maya has been somewhat resistant to) and that I needed a motivating, simple activity---one quick enough that I would still have time to make dinner and pack for school, yet motivating enough that the kids would have to attend to the talker, because how-could-they-not. Something that would give me the feeling that I had been successful---actively modeled, engaged the kids---while still being totally manageable (because there's only so much time between getting Maya off the bus and running out the door for my class). Just one activity. And a few purposeful minutes of modeling. A little traction.

Solution = secrets and cookies.

First, I told them verbally that I had a secret. (That's all it takes to get their rapt attention.)

Then, I got a talker. And I stopped speaking and started exclusively using a talker for communication. I said things like this:

• I got you something.
• It's hiding.
• You can't find it.
• I thought that maybe we could . . . (then I paused for dramatic effect, as they hopped and wiggled and said "what?! what?!")
• Go to sleep. Repeat whole sentence: I thought that maybe we could go to sleep. (giggles, shouts of "no!")
• I thought that maybe we could slice and bake. (long pause, they started to ask for more info)
• What could we slice and bake? (they are unsure)
• Could we bake a shoe? (No!)
• Could we bake a banana? (No!)
• What could we bake? (Maya said "cake")
• What else? ("Cookies")
• Yes!
• Maybe we could bake cookies (And there was much rejoicing)

(for the record: between each of my utterances I sat back away from the talker, so that if a child wanted to jump in and say something they could. No one did.)

And then, the talker was ignored as we washed hands, grabbed a bar of refrigerated cookie dough and child knives, and got to slicing.

Traction. Just a little bit.

Enough to start the pull out of the slide.

And cookies.

(image is a photo of the talker's screen, taken yesterday afternoon. The screen reads: Maybe we could bake cookies)