Saturday, September 24, 2011

Music & Water Therapy

Wowzers time has flown by once again since the last blog! Life has been busy as usual. I've been desperately trying to get the exterior of the house painted before winter sets in but the rain just seems to keep coming and preventing me from getting any further. I'm hoping in the next week there will be enough breaks for me to get it done! The shed if pretty much finished and I love it! I'm going a dark red called "Chipolte Paste"! I was a tad nervous at first but now its all good. : D


Alistair has been enjoying life. We continue to work with him to help with his progression and he continues to love two things .....water and music. So I added a couple of videos showing just that. We found out lately that the local pool allows us to go for free since he is "special needs" and I'm his "aide" So hey why not! So we've gone several times and he just gets tuckered out which is great. Lots of sensory input for him which is nice as well and helps me change things up a bit but continue to work on his physio. As for music he just loves the stuff. Always lots of smiles and knee kicks and just pure enjoyment. So he continues to have a good hour of music every day while he lays in his crib. His favorite song is by Sharon, Lois & Bram, ♫ One Elephant went out to play upon a spiders web one day.....♫ I can sing it to him and he grins from ear to ear!

We also found out just recently that our hearing aides and FM system is all going to be covered by the Ministry of Children & Families. I believe its until he's 18 which is a huge relief for us finanically. As his hearing aides alone are around $6,000 every 3-4 years! So again another humbling experience of what is available to us out there. Very nice indeed!

Well I must header and get some more things off my too do list.

Hope your all getting better weather then we are! At least its green here!

Cheers Julie







Monday, September 5, 2011

REALLY...In This Day and Age!

So we went to D'Lanos to have a nice Sunday family breakfast. The first thing out of the managers mouth as we rolled in was "you'll have to leave the stroller at the door" (no good morning, no smile, no nothing)...I explained the situation with my two year old son Alistair being low muscle tone, special needs and needing the stroller......His response "We don't have any room" He left to have look and returned with ....."We don't have any room" He was not apologetic at all, actually seemed quite irritated with having to deal with us while the girl at the front desk was cringing. She tried providing suggestions but he wasn't accepting any of her ideas. We decided to try holding him while eating. Although I'm not sure why we even tried to accomodate! I expected the spots left to be really congested. We got to the very back of the restaurant and there was plenty of room to bring the stroller. Even the server thought so. Actually with our stroller in place a couple could have walked past hand in hand I'm sure! Anyhow, Alistair wasn't coping even after we tried the high chair but as usual he slipped out of that one. So I went and talked to the manager again about needing the stroller. His response again was "There is no room" So I said "Are you saying you won't accomodate us ?" He didn't respond, he didn't look at me, there was absolutely no attempt to accomodate us or apologize. The server was extremely apologetic. I couldn't believe it! I definitely let him know I wasn't impressed and that everyday I live with having a special needs child and the fact that he couldn't accomodate us would prevent us from ever returning again. He didn't look at me, didn't respond, didn't do anything.....and I even stayed polite yet curt with my response. As we left, the girl at the front desk apologized profusely saying she had a special needs kid as well....... So lets just say we had a fabulous breakfast at De Dutch. They were very accomodating and there was much less room there than at D'Lanos yet they still were able to squeeze us in. I just can not believe in this day and age that a manager of a restaurant would act so inconsiderate. There is so much awareness with disability and special needs that one would think that there would be some level of attempt to accomodate.