Opportunities

For 5 Thursday evenings, Ian had the opportunity to participate in Pete's Pals, which stands for Physical Education Teacher Educators Supporting Physical Activity and Life Skills (whew!) and is supported by Purdue University Dept of Health and Kinesiology in coordination with Faith Community Center.  Each child is assigned a trained clinician (or two, in Ian's case) and they work with the child for an hour in the pool and an another hour in the gym each evening.  Ian had great clinicians and I'm sure you can imagine that he absolutely loved going each week!  Of course, the swimming was his favorite part!

 Ian with Sean and Sarah - awesome Purdue students!

On a totally different note, Ian has had a communication device for this entire school year.  He has "outgrown" it and is very ready to move on.  So, we had an AAC evaluation at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indy this week and he will be moving to an actual computer that has many, many selections for him to choose from in order to communicate.  The gal that did the eval was convinced that he has so much locked up in that head of his (which we already knew!) and this will help him be able to express it.  She was also impressed by how motivated he was to to use and learn the devices.  It will take LOTS of support from a speech therapist and work on his and our parts, but we are excited about the possibilities for him.  He got to try out several different devices at Crossroadsd and loved them all!  The very sad part was explaining to him that we had to leave them all there and wait for paperwork to be done, insurance to be filed, etc, etc.  He actually cried, which is quite rare for him and made me cry, too.  He should have a rental in 1-2 months and will use that for a period of time to be sure it's the right device for him.  The cost is outrageous so we don't want to make a mistake!

This is what he's been using:

And, this is similar to the one he will have:

Exciting stuff!!!!