We are home at last!! Our travels began back in early July, when Olem and I had the opportunity to attend the Childhood Apraxia of Speech conference in San Antonio. I can’t even express how comforting and wonderful it was to meet many other parents with children facing similar challenges as CB. I feel I learned so much just from the parents and the experiences they shared. We also had numerous take-aways from the conference speakers. I have a therapy journal started for each of CB’s therapy providers and preschool teachers to post their session and class notes within daily. I think this will help keep all the therapists on the same page and help Olem and I to better target our at-home practice. No clue why I didn’t start one sooner. One of the speakers also provided a large list of speech apps to incorporate at home. She also demonstrated several of those apps during the session and provided tips about how to specifically utilize those apps. I am still working through the apps to determine which ones will work best, but I feel I have a much more solid starting place to work from. I have been quite reluctant to allow Olem to play with my phone or our iPad much, but I think if I provide the right apps at the right time, it can be quite beneficial for him. We also decided to increase CB’s private ST sessions to 4x a week. Even though it will be with 2 different STs, I think this will be the perfect amt for him right now.
One of the biggest benefits of the conference was that it simply lit the fire under our tail ends to motivate us to take definitive action on some of the things we have been teeter tottering on. I think the conference gave me the tools and confidence to make the decisions without having so much uncertainty and/or indecision behind the choices. I made a checklist of actionable items from the conference and have been checking them off over the last 1.5 months. There are still more to go, but I feel confident I will get them done. This reminds me though that I need to go back and look at the provided USB again to reflect and internalize a few more of the ideas/discussions presented.
As soon as the conference ended, the kiddos, the grandparents , Olem and I headed up north to their house for a few days. We then continued traveling up to Michigan for a home swap, and later to Ireland for 5 days, back to the g-parents home for a little while and returned around August 16th. The kiddos were with us roadtripping for everything except for the conference and Ireland trip. They handled the travel quite well, although towards the end, I think it was getting a bit hard for CB. It was harder to get him regulated and he was more impulsive during the last week. The trip was unforgettable though and CB surprisingly did not regress verbally or physically. This is our second home swap and both trips were huge refreshers. On one hand, we have such a great time experiencing the new place and on the other, we appreciate being back home, as well. We definitely plan to do this again next summer, and are even considering a European home swap. I think next year, we will limit the travel to 1 month. With Olem’s ability to work from anywhere since he works from home, this makes it possible to go on a big family trip without the typical expense and with limited vacation time needed for Olem.