The Holiday weekend

Nancy posted a quick note yesterday about some of the activities over the weekend. I thought I would add my tuppence worth as well because I think the work with the barrel and with Sean pointed up a shortfall in the way I was thinking about this and helps illustrate for me, once again, that dealing with deafblindness is sometimes not as straightforward as I would like it to be.

When I first thought of the idea, last week, it seemed pretty clear to me that getting Sean to correctly straddle a barrel and getting him to do it comfortably would be a great way to put him on the path to getting up on a horse. It all seemed as clear as daylight to me.

So I collected up one of the barrels we had that had been blown down to the end of the pasture, got it set up and on Sunday Nancy I and Sean went out to the barrel to have some fun.

When Nancy and I has talked about it I had sub-consciously thought that just getting Sean to lean forward, put his hands on the barrel and then swing his leg over would take but a moment.

I am sure that you, the reader, will be ahead of me on this. The first reaction from Sean was, I think, "why the hell should I do this?" Of course he lacks the sign language to be able to express that exact thought but the sequence went;

1) Sean went along with standing next to the barrel, he allowed us to place his hands to the 'front' , he allowed me to help ease his leg over and he sat on the barrel. Success!! Nancy and I smiled at each other, this was going swimmingly.

2) We tried to get Sean to 'dismount' - ie do the reverse of what he had just done. Nope. No way. He got off the barrel the way he wanted to do it which was to slide his leg over in front of him. Rats.

3) So, Oh well, we start out to try again and this time Sean does not want to swing his leg the way we want him to, he wants to do it the way HE wants to do it.

Now of course Nancy and I know that this will not work for getting on a horse. But I suddenly realized this morning (well no-one accused me of being a genius) - I know why I want him to do this exercise. But Sean has no idea why he should be doing it. And we lack the framework of sign language that would enable us to explain this sequence to him.

And that, in a nutshell, is one of the major hurdles we face with Sean - no matter how grand and exciting the final activity may be, earning the intermediate and more mundane steps that lead up to it can be pretty boring. nancy and I lack the skills to be able to explain so we need to work on making each step fulfilling in and of itself.

Sometimes this dense Dad needs to remember that what Sean sees is not necessarily what I see.