A New Way to Wind Down

 Levi has a really hard time winding down at night. Sometimes he'll stay up into the wee hours of the morning. 80% of the time, someone is going to go without a significant amount of sleep (usually Trevor and I...but over the last couple weeks, Levi's brother, Christian has been helping out). We've tried lots of different things, but I think we've come up with a solution. We've moved the crib out of our room and put it out on the landing. LindyAnn is 6 months and has never slept in it. Because of her heart surgery, I just haven't gotten there yet. For now, we'll keep her in bed with us! :) Then, we moved the futon into our room, where the crib use to be. So, Levi is sharing a room with us. It's better this way because if he gets up in the middle of the night I will definitely hear him.

So, we went through some rough nights at first. He still wanted to stay up till 3:00 am.

 Trevor came up with an idea in an effort to help Levi wind down and to break his stimming cycle before he goes to bed. So, what he's doing is when the house starts to settle down, Trevor will spend about an hour with him, one-on-one. I think Trevor is onto something. So far, it seems to be working. Last night, Trevor coaxed Levi to throw a light-weight ball back and forth for about 20 minutes. This is always a great achievement for Levi because his attention span is hard to keep. The trick is for Trevor to stay animated enough to keep his attention and Levi loves it. Levi decided after a while, that he just wasn't interested in Trevor's game anymore, which we expected. Levi at this point needs to have a break. One of Levi's favorite stimming activities is flipping books. So,Levi grabs one of his favorite books (an old Strong's Concordance,HA!) and starts flipping away. Trevor grabs one of the "flippy" books, lays on the floor about 2 1/2 feet from him, and flips away with him. For the first couple minutes, Levi didn't even notice him. Then I started watching him peek over at the corner of his eyes really fast. Trevor became increasingly interesting to Levi. After a few minutes of Levi sneaking peeks at Trevor flipping his book, he slowly "slithered" over to Trevor, with his head directly over Trevor's book and watched him, as if he thought maybe there was something more interesting about Trevor's book than his. Then he layed his head down while looking at Trevor and started stroking his face and smiling at him. It was so precious that I had wished I had captured it all on video.

 This is just so big, because one of the aspects of Autism is that these little guys just don't find us (people) very interesting. This is one of our goals. To be so interesting that he wants to have relationships.

 We'll learn to use this technique more effectively at the SonRise Program. We have about 10 weeks before we go and we are brimming over with excitement.

 Here are some pictures from last night, right after Levi crawled over to Trevor.

Angela, Levi's Mommy