We are at the beginning of the adventure. Apolline is 5 years old. We live in France with her dad and her little brother Augustin who is 2 years old. More precisely in the South of France in Mouans-Sartoux, where the climate is very nice.
We started to work on communication with Apolline as soon as the diagnosis was announced when she was 2 and a half years old. At that time, we were living in Paris. Apolline was in the middle of her regression and many autistic symptoms had appeared: she didn’t look at us anymore, cried a lot, and shut herself up in her bubble. After having discussed with several parents and parents’ associations, we decided to start the Son Rise method.
The Son Rise method is a wonderful method of awakening through play. It is about joining the child in his bubble, with a lot of love and benevolence, to be interested in his passions to bring him slowly to open to our world. We have a wonderful team of volunteers who come to play with Apolline every day, in addition to her rehabilitation program and regular school. This method is an excellent “base” to work on communication. Today, Apolline has almost no autistic symptoms, looks at us a lot, has excellent joint attention, and more diverse interests.
We then trained in AAC. And we started with PODD. Apolline didn’t like it very much. So we took Susan Norwell’s advice and went with Super Core Grid 3. At first, Apolline wasn’t very interested in it. She sometimes screamed when we were modeling and she didn’t want to use it. Then, during the first covid-19 lockdown, some friends came to spend a month at our house. Their daughter Elise was already using her Grid 3 well. Apolline watched her a lot, and then she started.
Today, Apolline uses her computer more and more. She often tells us that her little brother Augustin is “noisy” and she tells him to “shush”.
The next step will be to use the eye-controlled computer Tobii at the regular school.
Thank you so much for all the work done by the team at Rett University who guides us every day.
