Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

When we were at the hairdresser on Saturday, Julia was looking through a hair magazine and saw the pictures of a very attractive African American man. She told me that it was President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama would have probably felt the compliment -- the young man was much better looking but the facial type and features reminded me of the president as well. I had no idea that Julia even knew the name! I emailed Julia’s teacher and she let me know that Julia's class has been reading about government and the president. Another something that Julia brought home from school! Yahoo!

Julia spent the weekend working on an entry to the Doodle 4 Google contest that her art teacher gave her. The theme was : If you could travel back in time, you would go to . . . Well, that was a no brainer! Julia did a dinosaur themed google doodle. It took her awhile to figure out just what she was supposed to be doing, but once she understood, she had lots of ideas. Ellen, one of Julia’s therapists and I made some suggestions. She really ran with any suggestion and the work is all hers. She did drafts/sketches and made the letters bigger or smaller to fit the page. She took direction. I was especially excited that she could listen to what I told her and take suggestions into account. After she worked on each letter individually, we worked on tracing and did a few versions of the entire work before all of the letters looked good together. And then, I made a copies of the pencil drawing and she colored them until she found the best combination of colors. I would have never thought to suggest this for Julia because of all of the technical demands and patience it required, but she had a blast!

Julia and I worked at the ARC of Dane County Ball on Sunday. Julia is very curious about people who are differently abled and has in the past asked inappropriate questions very loudly. Because we travel more and more in the society of people of all sorts of different ability, Julia needs to learn appropriate social skills. I was not completely comfortable exposing her to those attending the ball -- not for her or for me, but by chance her inappropriate questions could really hurt feelings -- I talked to her a long time before the event and she had a lot of questions for me after the event. But during the ball, Julia was very appropriate and helpful (and a little bored after all of our tasks were finished). She was great about talking to people -- there was one man who is quite challenged who was carrying a dinosaur that Julia has at home. She talked to him for a long time and I saw her listening to him. I don't think that her replies were necessarily appropriate to what the man said, but she is working at the give and take of conversation. I am very forthright with Julia when she asks questions about abilities and challenges, but I insist that she is kind to everyone. And also that people with challenges are happy with their lives.

I also had a report from Julia’s teacher that she did awesome on Friday when the class performed their Hip Hop for the school. She was in the front row dancing and going along with the rest. Oh to have seen that!!