Car / Cheese

I HATE when I type a bunch of stuff, then my wrists might glide over some unforseen button or panel on this laptop and I LOSE EVERYTHING I JUST WROTE and I can't find a Back button to recover it. I HATE THAT.

While I was on the phone this morning, I saw Nikko take a play cell phone, put it up to his ear and have a conversation by nodding his head. It's rare that he does this, but I thought it was very nice to see.

After reading more autism boards last night and seeing that other moms have their ASD kids in multiple therapies despite school, I decided that Nikko really does need more help outside of preschool to get his life skills going. I made the effort this morning to call and leave a message for Maria with MGB Services and she called me back. She got my email but didn't respond to it last week. Must be very busy over there, is how I rationalized it. We went ahead and set up an appointment for this Wednesday for her to come over and evaluate Nikko to see what services he can do and how to set up a team for him. It will probably get moving after the holidays. Everyone is an independent contractor, and this helps to keep costs down for everyone. She is aware that many, many people pay out of pocket, which is why keeping costs down is important to them. It will cost $80 for her to come out, but she's not doing a full intake since we've already met and been evaluated by Linda Hoeck. She said we're lucky to have a coordinator through the school already, because this service could cost about $160/hr. Her fee is normally $50/hr. The price for a senior person is $15/hr and for the line people (assuming these are the day-to-day people for Nikko, likely special education students and/or others obtaining degrees in these fields) their hourly rate is about $10/hr. Compared to other companies, these fees truly are a good deal. Maria also told me that a lot of what they do is Verbal Behavior/ABA, which is something I read about that sounded very good. Nikko might do well because it helps kids that are nonverbal.

When I told Denis what's going on, it occurred to me that we will have to stop Ronin's speech therapy so we can allot that $100/month toward 10 hours of ABA therapy for Nikko. It made sense to Denis, so I went ahead and called Mary Leonard our coordinator. I also spoke to Pete and he wants to do a final evaluation on Ronin so he can do exit paperwork. That's fine, even if it did cost us $25 but Pete mentioned that there's something about cancelling services before the 15th, maybe we won't be billed for December at that rate. Don't know. Don't really care, just want to make sure it's all done by January.

In the early evening we had Nemo on TV when Nikko came up to me with the Cars DVD. He shoved it in my hands and I put it aside. He put it back in my hands and I asked him what he wanted. He kept pushing it to me, Ronin chirping in the background that he wanted to watch Cars, but I kept asking Nikko what he wanted. He signed Car, and then while watching my mouth he said, "CAR." Okey dokey! I certainly put it on after that. Then during dinner he was finished with his bowl of mac cheese and wanted more. I asked him what he wanted and he signed Cheese. I knelt down and said Cheese twice to him. He watched my mouth and said, "Cheees." No problemo! Instant mac cheese for him!