Tennessee Vacation: Exploring

A few weeks ago we went to Tennessee for my family's annual vacation/get together. We decided to do something different this year and instead of the beach, we went to the mountains! Where we were in Tennessee was about a 9 hour drive for all of us, so it was a good spot to meet in the middle. Our vacation rental was in the middle of farmland and was surrounded by really beautiful countryside. This was the view of the driveway from the front porch:

The side yard and view of the forest behind us. There were lots of trails through the forest for hiking and a nice creek.

We went for a lot of walks. The weather was so perfect!! Not oppressively hot and humid like it is at home.

One of the buildings nearby had a tree swing that we visited a lot. Usually there was a lot of arguing about who's turn it was :)

Exploring one of the trails:

We found the creek! We didn't know where it was exactly and while we were looking we ended up in a woman's backyard while she was feeding her chickens. She told us where it was and Rett decided that his new goal in life was to "catch a chick". He was dying to chase those chickens!

We got down into the creek and looked around for crayfish, salamanders, newts, or anything else we could find. Anthony found a dragonfly that didn't mind sitting on his finger. Seriously, he really is Dr. Doolittle!

There was this neat wooden bridge that goes over the creek. Rett kept giving me a heart attack by running ahead of me and running over it. All I could think of was him tripping and tumbling off of it!

We caught a cool looking salamander.

Anthony caught quite a few crayfish and wanted to cook them for dinner. The next time he went to the creek he only found one, so he put it in a sandwich bag in the fridge. A few hours later, my sister opened the fridge and found that he had escaped! They were not happy with Anthony :)

The creek goes right over the road and I was amazed to see multiple cars just drive right through it. Regular cars, not huge trucks!

While we were at the creek, one of the cars stopped and invited us to visit them up the road and see their alpacas and other animals. The next morning we walked up the mountain for a visit and they were so nice! They showed us their garden, goats, donkey, alpacas, and their chicken set up. They even let us help them collect the eggs and gave us some to take home.

James was excited to ride the donkey, but Rett would have nothing to do with it. He had eyes only for the chickens :)

Rett finally got his wish and chased the chickens as long as he could. He was so happy! And determined that he would catch one. Didn't happen.

At first we kept telling them to stop chasing the chickens, but the owner said that she thought the best activity for kids was chasing chickens, so we let them go after that.

On our way back down the mountain, the owner showed us this shortcut of a path that made it so we didn't have such a long walk back to the house. She said it was their "secret path" and her kids had placed little fairy houses along it. It was so cool!

The sun setting on the front yard:

The first or second night we were there, I was upstairs with James reading him a book and trying to get him to go to sleep (getting kids to sleep on vacation is seriously the hardest thing ever!!) when Anthony came into the room. He said, "We have a problem." I started thinking, "Oh man, what happened now?" when Anthony said, "There are fireflies!!!". He knew we were trying to get James to go to sleep, but he just couldn't pass up going outside and catching fireflies with him. They were out there for at least an hour if not more.

No surprise, but James turned out to be a champion firefly catcher. There was always one in a jar for the rest of the week.

Anthony showing James one he caught:

We also got a fire going for smores one night. James would put the marshmallow on the stick and then eat it off the stick without putting it over the fire. That's how he rolls.

Bike Ride and Astorga Family Visit

One beautiful evening we took the boys to the bridge trail to walk and ride bikes. Rett and James had to bring their big stuffed dogs of course!

Happy and the kids came to visit! We had so much fun playing with them, it is always a blast when they come into town. James loved having someone to play with at the beach.

They came with us to one of James' soccer games. (Did I mention how glad I am that soccer season is over???). We accidentally got there 30 minutes early because I got the game time mixed up, but everyone was a good sport about it.

Nolan and James holding hands on the way back to the car. So dang cute!

Everyone got together at Mimi and Papa's for a pool birthday party for Teya. It was so much fun! Rett wasn't a fan of the pool, so he sat in a chair and watched Cars but James loved it. He tried wearing his floaties for the first time and actually let go and swam around by himself. So awesome!

Rett enjoyed the cupcakes :)

The beautiful birthday girl!

Rett was having fun hugging Dallin while he walked around, pulling Rett with him. Seriously, the best cousins ever. If we could just transport them back to Florida whenever we wanted to, life would be perfect!

One of the days we all got into the boat for a trip to "pirate island" as James calls it. We explored the island for a little bit.

We found a lot of dead horseshoe crabs!

James and Nolan had the best time finding hermit crabs and then handing them to me to hold while they found more. When they weren't looking I would just throw them back into the water :)

Rett got a hold of someone's orange peel and he couldn't put it down! He kept walking around and smelling it.

Dallin made an enclosure for hermit crabs and the boys loved finding more for it.

Checking out some creature in the water.

On the way home, James was telling Nolan about something and Nolan was looking at him and listening so intently :) Cousin love is the best!

End of May

We finally got to go blueberry picking for the first time this year! We were so excited! The bushes were so full, it didn't take us long to fill our buckets. We almost didn't have enough cash to pay for it all!

 Rett didn't stop eating blueberries the entire time! He was in heaven!

 Look at all those berries!

For Mother's day Anthony told me to pick out my present, so I picked these Harry Potter textbooks from Barnes and Noble. Best present ever!

For some reason, the kids in James' class became obsessed with who is marrying who someday and who loves who in class. James decided that he loves Mackenzie (who goes by Mack) and he wanted to write her a note to tell her that he loves her and that he wants to marry her when they grow up.

When he actually had to write it all out, he decided to shorten it :) He gave it to her on the playground the next day and he said she loved it so much that she chased him around the playground. So cute!

We went to Chuck E Cheese and Rett had fun on the slide. He actually enjoys going now!

We are getting creative with James' home therapy. We are supposed to integrate crashing and falling into our daily routine, so this is what we came up with.

We decided to have family home evening in a fort under the dining room table. James gave the lesson by telling us a scripture story and then we played our crocodile tooth game where you take turns pressing down the teeth until it chomps you. Then I taught James how to play rock, paper, scissors. We had so much fun!

James needed a haircut, so we had a discussion about the options. He hates having me do it with the clippers and doesn't mind going to a hair salon where they can do it with scissors (I have no skill cutting hair with scissors). I've started giving him the option of using the haircut money to go to the hair salon, or letting me do it for free at home with the clippers and using the haircut money for a toy. All on his own he came up with the idea of wearing his safety goggles during the haircut so that the hair wouldn't get in his face (the part he hates the most about clipper haircuts).

It worked great!! He was still and quiet the entire time I did it and I was able to get all the parts so much better than usual because he wasn't crying and moving around. I did everything I could around the goggles strap, then I moved the strap up and got underneath it. This was such a win for us!

James' Occupational Therapy

After James' initial occupational therapy evaluation, we talked to our insurance company and they said that they would cover services for him if we went to a place closer to us in Daytona. So I contacted the new place and ended up playing phone tag with them for 3 months trying to figure out how to get him on the schedule for another eval (they would need to do their own). It turns out that no, our insurance won't cover the services anywhere we go so they didn't know how to handle us no matter how many times I told them we would just pay out of pocket. We finally got an appointment for his initial eval at the new place 3 months after I first contacted them. One month after that I called and figured out where they sent the eval results and I didn't like the report. It was definitely not as thorough as the first one and the treatment plan focused on things like handwriting, which is not high on our priority list (emotional regulation, impulse control and motor planning are definitely at the top right now). So, I called the first place we took him to and got an appointment to start his treatment the next week! I was so happy! After all this waiting and red tape, we can finally start therapy 6 whole months after his diagnosis.

The office is an hour away from us, so his appointment days make for a long afternoon. He has had two appointments so far and I couldn't be happier with it. The occupational therapist is really helpful and patient and is great at explaining things. The more we go, the more I am learning and understanding about James and every time I bring up something I have noticed or am concerned about, his therapist says, "Oh, we can make a plan to work on that!". So wonderful!

One of the interesting things she explained to me is that with sensory processing issues, the brain doesn't do a good job regulating the input. So instead of being able to stay at a calm equilibrium you can process too much and be too sensitive and want to retreat (sensory avoiding), or you don't feel enough sensory input to feel normal so you crave more and more and more (sensory seeking). She said she can tell that James is sensory seeking, which is when he gets overstimulated and just goes hyper and wild seeking more and more input to regulate himself. So to calm him down, you actually have him do activities that give his body a lot of sensory input, like jumping on a trampoline, swinging, or crashing into pillows. Seems kind of counter intuitive at first that all that activity is calming, but I've seen it work first hand!

Getting ready to jump:

We've also started the Wilbarger protocol, which is similar to what we did in the beginning with deep pressure massage. You use a surgical brush to apply pressure to as much of the skin as you can to lightly stimulate the nervous system and then you do joint compressions on the joints in the extremities and the torso. It is helping to retrain his body to not overreact to light touches from his clothes and from people, and it also calms down his overactive nervous system. We are supposed to do it every 2 hours, but it has been hard to be consistent. Hopefully once school is out and we are back to our regular routine we can be more diligent about it.

So at James' second appointment, he was having fun and doing the different activities she had planned for him, when all of a sudden he laid down flat on his stomach on one of the gym mats. After a few seconds, he got up and came over to me and said, "I gotta go poopoo." Now this kid flat out refuses to poop anywhere but at home with his own potty seat. One time on vacation at my mom's house he cried and screamed for two hours on the toilet because we didn't have a potty seat, then he held it in for another 12 hours until we got back to our house.

With this in mind, I'm thinking, "This is going to be interesting" as I took him to the bathroom in their office. He saw that they didn't have a potty seat, just a regular toilet and as I am explaining to him that he will have to use it anyway, he looks up at me and cries, "Ahhhh!!!" because he waited too long and everything was explosively coming out! Thankfully they had a cleaning supply closet in the bathroom, so I could spray down everything (including myself!!) and clean it while he sat on the toilet. After he was situated, I went out to the car and got the bag of spare clothes I keep in the trunk where I got extra pants, shirt, underwear and socks. Yep, it was that bad that we needed new socks. By the time he was redressed and we were ready to leave the bathroom, we were both laughing about how crazy it all was. Seriously epic.

When I told Anthony about it, and then my mom later, James would make the same face. I would say, "Guess who pooped their pants today?" and James would make the face and point at himself. Priceless!