Patience, My Young Catch-a-Fly!

When you have a special needs child, patience brings on a new meaning.  Most parents know the importance of being patient with any child, and I think this is something most people struggle with from time to time, but when you have a child with special needs, sometimes counting to ten isn't quite enough and you end up mentally counting to about 27 before you are calm enough to handle a situation.
Something that Imma struggles with is containing her emotions.  If she is happy, she is extremely happy!  And luckily, she is happy most of the time.  If she is angry, she is unbelievably angry (remember my earlier post about, "Get out of here, my face!"). But when she is upset, she is often inconsolable.  And this makes being her parent even more difficult because sometimes it breaks my heart and there's literally nothing I can do to make her stop crying and nothing I can say that she will remotely understand.
Imma understands about 60% of what is spoken to her.  It used to be more like 10% so this is huge progress but it is still difficult to make her understand that something is "okay" or "we can fix it." She struggles a lot with abstract concepts and parts of speech that are not essential completely throw her off.  For example, if her teacher tells her, "Imma, go put your backpack away in your cubby."  Imma will probably only understand, "Imma. . . backpack . . .cubby."  However, the rest of those words are still rolling around in her brain and she isn't able to process the rest of the sentence because she's trying to figure out the words she didn't know. She's thinking, "Did she say, 'Imma don't ever put your backpack into your cubby' or 'Imma I'm going to put your backpack into a different cubby' or something else?"  Consequently, whenever you speak a phrase to Imma that is unfamiliar, it takes her a very long time to figure out what she is supposed to do. And what do most people do when they say something to a child and get no response?  We repeat ourselves, of course!  So, as we repeat ourselves, the message in her brain gets even more jumbled.  Now, she has to sort through two sentences.  And chances are, we didn't say the second sentence exactly the same as the first one, or we threw in another sentence, such as, "Did you hear me?" Now, there are a lot of words rolling around in her brain and she only knows what three of them mean so she's trying to sort through all of that and figure out what she is supposed to do.  Can you imagine what this would be like?

Imma's cubby at school

Let's look at an example. You are sitting at your desk at work and your boss walks in and says, "I . . .you . . . .report. . . .Friday."  Of course, you are asking all kinds of questions now.  What report?  Am I supposed to make a report?  Is my boss going to make a report?  This Friday or next Friday?  In the meantime your boss says, "You . . .me?"  What about you and me?  Are we going somewhere?  Then your  boss says, "Report. . .desk . . . Friday."  You found a report on your desk on Friday?  I need to write a report about a desk on Friday?  Clearly you can see that it is not easy to live in our world when you have a language processing delay. Luckily, Imma's amazing teacher has figured out that phrases like, "Imma, cubby!" while pointing at her backpack usually get the right response.
But many times, people, including her parents, use phrases she just cannot process. Often times, this can lead to meltdowns that we cannot verbally console.  There's no amount of,"It's okay," or "It'll be alright" that can get through all the jumbled up messages when you can't understand the message and your brain is already full of words rolling around.
So, what do we do?  A lot of times counting helps Imma to calm down.  Counting is consistent.  She knows what number I'm going to say next.  She knows what it means. It's predictable.  It has a pattern.  She likes it.  Sometimes rocking helps and stroking her hair.  A lot of times I have to fix the problem. Today, she dropped her cookie on the floor.  She cried and cried.  I picked it up and wiped it off and made sure it was clean, though I'm sure it probably still had germs, but without another cookie to replace it, it would have to do.  She  started eating the cookie but continued to cry. Her brain still hadn't processed that the event that had made her cry was over and she could be happy again.  Sometimes she is upset and I'm trying to explain something to her but she's so upset she can't process.  For example, she thought she had to go to school today and I tried to explain that we aren't going today, it's tomorrow.  She kept saying. "I don't want to go to school!" and I kept saying, "Not today, tomorrow." But it didn't make any difference.  She was hearing what I was saying but wasn't processing it.  Finally, I just started saying, "Okay," and after about ten more minutes, she moved on to something else.
And distractions also work, to a point.  They worked better when she was younger.  Sometimes I can "break a loop" if you will by giving her something else to do.  And it really is like a mental loop where she just can't let go of a thought in order to move to another thought.

This self-portrait is a good example of how Imma see's the world sometimes.  Off balance, out of focus, not centered.  

So, what is a catch-a-fly? A butterfly.  She likes to catch butterflies.  These two words have gotten so jumbled into her brain that she does not understand that the words are separate.  It's a "catch-a-fly," not "catch a butterfly."
Patience is something I pray for everyday.  I can never have enough.  If I was living in a foreign country where the only words I understood were essentially nouns and sometimes verbs but rarely adjectives, adverbs, articles, etc. I would hope everyone would have a lot of patience with me, too.
What tricks have you learned for helping calm your upset child?