Who Moved My Cheese?

Last Saturday, we drove our periodic, 2.5-hour round-trip pilgrimage to Earth Fare for Pamela's specialty gluten-free, casein-free foods. We breezed through the produce and wine section, hitting the gf/cf soy and rice cheese. Disaster happened--somebody moved her cheese, but Pamela did not panic. Since I happened to have my camera (what I really need is a headcam or TIVO in my eyeballs), I filmed how we both handled anxiety. You see, in public settings, I often experience anxiety trying to scaffold Pamela enough to prevent her from melting down. I end up overcompensating by doing a tad too much thinking for her in fear of inadvertently pushing her over her frustration threshold. On top of that, I was manning the camera, trying to focus it on Pamela, while guiding her and hopefully avoiding bumping into a stranger.

Pamela felt worried about the cheese but managed to stay calm and neutral while she picked out soy yogurt and pudding. I asked Pamela if she wanted to try the coconut yogurt (a new product) but she dismissed it for being different. I picked up two for Steve and I (vanilla and mango)--WOW, they tasted fabulously awesome! Pamela grabbed a can of whipped soy cream before looking on the other side of the cheese section. I knew she was starting to fluster mildly because she had difficulty spotting the buttery sticks and said, "I'm a detective!" I suggested she could keep looking or ask for help. She chose the former, and we breezed our way through the meat and refrigerated stuff. Pamela exclaimed loudly, "Looked everywhere." That is when I suggested we ask a storeworker, and, having exhausted all other options, she agreed.


Because Pamela stayed cool under pressure, I thought this moment perfect to spotlight for our work on connecting feelings and meaning to episodic memory. While Pamela had no problems with figuring out feelings, she needed major guiding to derive meaning. When asked for meaning, she talks about emotions. She did think of "searching everywhere" as one strategy when you cannot find something but had a hard time thinking of borrowing the perspective of a person she does not know. Even though she remembered the storeworker when she retold the story, Pamela could not remember the woman's role when thinking about meaning. My strategies were:

• Give an example of learning from a situation (touching a hot stove).
• Bring to mind people in the story, so she might learn to think about referencing workers at a store.
• Focused on what people knew when Pamela suggested anyone other than the storeworker: I did not know where the cheese was. David did not know. Grandpa did not know.
• Help her think of the situation as a story with main characters who all had roles.
• Stop the action when she was feeling overwhelmed.
• Generalize from the woman to a storeworker.

I remembered a book Steve bought called Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr. Spencer Johnson and read it for a lark. The story includes two simplistic mice and two complex little people in a maze who face unexpected change when their cheese disappears. This very short allegory reveals how to handle change successfully. After I finished reading it in about an hour, I thought, "Where's the beef?" While I will jot down all of the insights on handling change before I post it at Paperbackswap, I had deeper questions like "Who is the cheesemaker?" "Did the cheesemaker post wall notes on finding cheese that never runs out?" "Is there more to life than cheese?" "Is there a true cheese that will provide joy in even cheeseless circumstances?" "Can the cheesemaker guide them to the true cheese?" "Is there life after the maze?"

Maybe the Chesterton book is working overtime in my brain!

Two Major Milestones in One Week!

This week had two major milestones for Pamela: her twentieth birthday AND reaching Stage 3 of RDI. Stage 3 reflects the dynamic thinking of children between the ages of two and three years old. During this stage, we will be working toward short conversations about what things we did together and our different perceptions. Pamela will learn to take on the responsibility of sharing joint attention, finding out how other people feel, and trying different things for fun. She will be improving her ability to collaborate by working together better, checking our actions, reactions, and communication, and using language to smooth out coordination between us.

Right now, we are poking and probing the foundations for this objective. We are focusing on something very difficult for Pamela: constructing a coherent narrative about past events that include feeling and meaning. Like many people with autism, Pamela remembers incredible details about past events. The first twelve years of her latest autobiography filled one section (36 pages, both sides) of a five-subject notebook. She is starting to sprinkle it with feelings here and there. But, there is very little depth of feeling or meaning attached to the story of her life. Here is a typical entry:


RDI focuses on episodic memory and self-awareness as one of the five core deficits of autism: "the ability to reflect on past experiences and anticipate potential future scenarios in a productive manner. Developing an internal mental space to consider, reflect, preview, prepare, regulate, evaluate, hypothesize and dream." The hardest thing about encoding episodic memory is the emotion (the subjective) associated with the what, when, and how of the event (the objective). What is even harder for our kids is seeing the present as a continuation of the past while previewing the future!

Chat about the Future
One thing I love about how things have been flowing lately (and I give all the glory to GOD for this) and merging into one tapestry. All year long Pamela and I have been working on experience stories (a la the association method) to work on past, present, and future tense syntax. During the week, I preview future events by having her ask and/or answer questions about what might happen, either orally or in writing. Here is an example of Pamela and I talking about going to co-op the next day:


Chat about the Past
We also review past events by having her ask and/or answer questions about what happened, either orally or in writing. Up until now, my focus has been on syntax and language rather than a coherent narrative (remember, these are the baby steps required for a person with aphasia and autism). Here is an example of Pamela and I talking about what happened at co-op the previous day:


As my consultant explained to me the first lesson in our objective (guiding Pamela in recalling feelings and deriving personal meaning from her narratives of past events), I realized we have been laying the foundation for this all year long. Quickly, a plan for this fell into place. Borrowing from Charlotte Mason of tying something already learned with something new, I could cut up the typed narrative of a past event into sentence strips and show her to ask feeling questions (learned a few years back through the association method) about important facts. Then, I could tap into the idea of having a moral to the story a la Aesop and come up with a moral to her story.

I decided to pick an event that I thought worthy of spotlighting and encoding into an episodic memory. Every Wednesday, we always pick up lunch or dinner for Pamela at a drive-thru restaurants. Pamela usually chooses a different restaurant in advance, so we headed to McDonald's to order lunch last Wednesday. We drove up to the drive-thru and saw a long string of cars. My heart sank because I was already running late for a dental appointment and usually Pamela would rather wait or have a mini-meltdown because it was taking too long. I knew better than to suggest we try another restaurant at the last minute. Those of you with autistic children need no explanation! Pamela noticed the very long line too and very calmly said, "Changed my mind. I want Hardees." I thought it important to focus on how beautifully she handled a situation that would have been a crisis for her a few years ago. Here is what she typed for her past experience story:

Adding Feeling and Meaning
I cut up the story into strips and placed them in order. Then I wrote out "How did you feel about" and let her decide about which fact to ask a feeling question. She picked a fact and answered the question, while I recorded what she said in writing. We ended up selecting five facts for feeling questions, and Pamela blew me away with her ability to pinpoint accurate feelings for each situation.

Then, I explained to her how we were going to write a moral to this story and, after going back and forth we came up with this: "Changing your mind is great. You can think of something else." The follow video shows exactly how we worked on attaching feelings to facts and deriving personal meaning to picking up lunch from the drive-thru.

Flabbergasted!

Pamela left me flabbergasted for two days in a row. . .

Yesterday morning, we felt like pinching ourselves. Steve and I woke up at six in the morning, and our early bird, Miss Pamela, was already out of her nest. Steve ran, and she did not melt down! He headed to an appointment at 8:30 before work and left the laptop at home, and no drama. Then, he drove to the office at about nine in the morning, which was late for him. We were too stunned to spotlight any of these moments.

What do I mean by spotlight? I have not clearly explained my understanding of this technique before, so here goes! The book My Baby Can Dance describes spotlighting, or "the art of communicating to effectively encode an episodic memory," in the following way:

Spotlighting is achieved by any type of contrast or noticeable change in an established rhythm. The adult guide creates clear boundaries around a critical moment in an activity, causing that moment to stand out from its temporal neighbors. Spotlighting is critical for development of episodic memories. Spotlighting is all about contrast. Spotlighting involves making sure that some piece of information stands out from the rest.

What do I mean by episodic memory? I find it easier to understand by contrasting it with procedural memory. Many autistic children excel at storing procedural memory, such as Pamela's recall of the day of the week given any date (future or past). Procedural memory "encodes details leading to specific goals" like a script or sequence of events. It activates a separate neural pathway from episodic memory, which selects meaningful details that fit into the big picture and encodes the emotional context with them as episodes falling into different categories. Episodic memory guides people in making decisions in future episodes.

Since I was not sure how well Pamela encoded the memory of being calm about Steve's early morning run and weird schedule, I exerted a special effort at lunch to spotlight those critical moments. First, I thought about the critical moments in which Pamela usually meltsdown but did not: before the run and leaving for the office without his briefcase. Then, I spotlighted those moments in our conversation and focused on the emotion she felt, "Dad went running, and you were so calm" (I smiled and gave her a thumbs up). "He went to an appointment and left for work late, but you were calm and brave." She beamed at me and said, "Not like the crazy lady." (Pamela thinks the Chinese lady melting down at the airport is hilarious.)

Since Steve's schedule vexes Pamela so much, I spotlighted it again later in the day and even filmed it for our consultant. My favorite moment is when I asked Pamela why she was so calm. Pamela started off with her knee-jerk response, "Because I s----," stopped herself, thought for a moment, and said, "Because Dad's going to work today."


Tonight, when Steve came home, he told Pamela his plans to run at 7:30 in the morning and leave for work by 8:30. Unlike yesterday morning, Pamela began to sputter, fuss, and cry; we stayed calm and neutral. This time her reaction was very mild: point five out of ten on the lady-at-the-airport scale. Steve left the room, and I stopped talking and comforted Pamela. I told her that I understood she was upset and rubbed her back. She said, "I'm crying." I replied, "That's okay. You're being brave."

At this point, Pamela must have associated her feeling with that of the lady at the airport. Suddenly, she started laughing and crying at the same time, alternating between thinking about that silly you-tube video and Steve's plans for tomorrow. She giggled so much her tears dried up. I'm not sure Charlotte Mason had this in mind when she talked about changing your thoughts, but it works for me!

Off-Topic Pictures of My Birds Taking Baths or Considering It:

Blanket Pre-Quel #2

Last Wednesday, we did our first preview of a mission to make a no-sew, reversible fleece blanket for Pamela's cousins' baby, born a month early last Friday, and doing well all things considered. On Friday, I wrote a future story (shown above) using the word will for Pamela's association method tablework (or should I say rocking-chair-work). My goal was to preview the next day's trip to Walmart to select two pieces of fleece (a pattern with a complementary pattern). On Saturday, we bought enough fleece to make a blanket for the newborn and maybe even both blanket and pillow for Baby Alive, and, as you can see below, Ariel and the color purple won. We even found a sample Hannah Montana no sew fleece blanket, already made, and Pamela's eyes lit up when she saw a blanket in real life. I hope to start working on it tomorrow since our deadline is October 24.

Previewing future activities works on episodic memory, which F.A.C.T explains as follows:

Episodic Memory
Allows us to anticipate future possibilities, and learn from past mistakes. Memories of success are stored and used to develop perseverance and resilience. Builds motivation to endure challenges. Allows us to prepare for potential future scenarios and expect future uncertainty.

Why is this important? The Pathways Treatment Center explains that autistic children tend to be very strong in storing procedural memory (details, scripts, formulas for behavior). Often autistic children will lock into static patterns in life, such as the order of aisles you take while shopping or the route you drive to the store, and flip out when you deviate from it. They pick up on verbal scripts whether taught explicitly in the form of therapy or picked up from movies and television. Those with high IQs excel in academics because they memorize facts easily.

Autistic children tend to be weak in storing episodic memory, which focuses on the whole, not the parts; the big picture, not the factual details. In this case, the brain stores information in episodes, including emotions. In RDI, we take great pains to find meaningful experiences we can share and build upon. By previewing a future experience in different ways, I am teaching her to anticipate storing a future episode.

Forming an Autobiographical Self

Pamela's memory of her life (autobiographical memory) is somewhat static because she remembers her life in terms of statistics. She is masterful at pinpointing the places and times of events in her life, right down to the day of the week. In her journal in a box, a review of the year 2007, she recorded every day faithfully, regardless of whether or not something special happened. When I study how she reflects upon her life in her autobiography or journal in the box, she writes with an repetitive style and elaborates on very few details. Her writings do not display much evidence of episodic memory, which allows a person to plan for potential scenarios in the future by reflecting on the past. Page 11 of this presentation outlined the three components of this type of memory: (1) raw data about the event itself, (2) the emotion experienced, and (3) the meaning extracted.

Like many people in the autism spectrum, Pamela clearly has nailed down one of the three components of this memory (raw data) but does not think it important to encode emotions or attach meaning to the event. Actually, I think she encodes basic emotions and learns from the past. However, she does not process it as fully as typical children because she does not record it in her journal nor share it with us.

I analyzed entries from her journal to understand better how her memory works. Even though she does not truly remember her earliest years, she recorded an average of 9 sentences per year for her first four years of life. That average jumped to 19 sentences per year for her fifth through seventh years, 29 sentences for her eighth through twelfth year, and 43 for her thirteenth through fifteenth year. Pamela kept a journal for a writing class, which seared the idea of tracking memories into her mind. Since then, she has written an average of 201 sentences per year without consulting any journal or other material. She is still writing 2007 up in two separate places, her journal in a box and a journal received from her Aunt Pam for Christmas. The year with the highest number of entries is the year she kept a journal: 293 sentences for one year. However, if she continues to record two or three sentences per day for 2007 in her puppy dog journal, she will eclipse that record!

Pamela found data about her earliest years from pictures, videos, and things we had told her. Her most vivid written memories come from home videos. When she was younger, she enjoyed going through her old homeschooling records and files as another source of raw data to supplement what she remembers. The first authentic memories I can identify as having no record occurred when she was six years old.

• When we moved to Connecticut, we put some of her videos and toys in a storage locker and made monthly trips to cycle through them.
• When she turned seven, she broke a couple of videos but did not record her emotions.
• Her first recorded emotion was getting sick and throwing up at co-op class when she was nine.
• The next strong emotion was a year later when Steve put some of her videos and toys in boxes in the garage. She wrote, "I was mad." I think this might be linked to earlier memories of storage and breaking videos and could be viewed as episodic memory.
• Her strongest undocumented memories I can find are weekend trips we took in which we did not take pictures.
• Even her most recent recorded memories, recorded as a daily record, do not reveal much emotion nor reflection upon the future.

I have been thinking about what Dr. Laura Berk wrote in Awakening Children's Minds about the formation of autobiographical memory in light of Pamela's written memories, "Similarly, several psychological explanations focus on changes in the nature of memory during the preschool years--from an unconscious, automatic, and nonverbal system to one that is conscious, deliberate and verbal" (page 54). Two milestones in coding memory are to have a well-formed sense of self and an autobiographical narrative. By age four, children usually form a sense of self when they know they are the same person though constantly growing and changing in appearance. Children learn to organize their personal experiences into an autobiographical narrative through conversations with adults.

When I compare this research to Pamela, I find something interesting: her strongest emotional memories did not get recorded until she was verbal and had some language. At age seven, she started using echolalic words freely and spontaneously. By nine, she was better able to string two words together, but not in fully formed sentences or great depth. It causes me to wonder if her memories became more deliberate when she had words to process them.

Of course, the prescription for me to help Pamela attach emotion to memory and reflect upon the past and future sounds very much like Charlotte Mason's ideas. The key is for parents to dialog with children in a narrative manner, or elaborative style, by posing many and varied questions, building on children's statements by adding more information, and verbally evaluating events. Charlotte provided wonderful examples of such dialogs in her book, The Formation of Character. In the chapter called Under a Cloud, the mother talks with her young daughter about the sad day they all had because of the girl's moodiness:

"So my poor Agnes has had a very sad day?"

"Yes, mother," with a sob.

"And do you know we have all had a very sad day––father, mother, your little brother, Nurse––every one of us has felt as if a black curtain had been hung up to shut out the sunshine?"

The child was sympathetic, and shivered at the sight of the black curtain and the warm sunshine shut out.

"And do you know who has put us all out in the dark and the cold? Our little girl drew the curtain, because she would not speak to any of us, or be kind to any of us, or love any of us all the day long; so we could not get into the sunshine, and have been shivering and sad in the cold."

"Mother, mother!" with gasping sobs; "not you and father?"

"Ah! I thought my little girl would be sorry. Now let us try to find out how it all happened. Is it possible that Agnes noticed that her brother's pear was larger than her own?"

"Oh, mother, how could I?" The poor little face was hidden in her mother's breast, and the outbreak of sobs that followed was very painful. I feared it might mean actual illness for the sensitive child. I think it was the right thing to do; but I had barely courage enough to leave the results in more loving hands.

"Never mind; don't cry any more, darling, and we will ask 'Our Father' to forgive and forget all about it. Mother knows that her dear little Agnes will try not to love herself best any more. And then the black curtain will never fall, and we shall never again be a whole long day standing sadly out in the cold. Good-night from mother, and another good-night from father."

The treatment seems to answer. On the slightest return of the old sullen symptoms we show our little girl what they mean. The grief that follows is so painful that I'm afraid we could not go on with it for the sake of the child's health; but, happily, we very rarely see a sulky face now; and when we do we turn and look upon our child, and the look melts her into gentleness and penitence.

One technique in RDI is to spotlight the emotions attached with the event, which the mother in this vignette does. She spotlights the sadness of her daughter Agnes as well as the entire family, evaluating how her sullen moods affect the entire family--a revelation to Agnes. She points out the source of the sadness, too. Whenever the sullen moods, they reminded her of the past to help her evaluate how the entire family feels. In time, all the parent needed to do was sadly look at Agnes to melt a sulky face into gentleness.

Culinary Halloween Horror Stories

Yesterday, I found a great example of how we are blending Charlotte Mason and Relationship Development Intervention. The most challenging book Pamela is reading right now is The Brendan Voyage. Helen Keller's story inspires me to include books that are at the outermost limits of comprehension but worth trying. John Wright, one of her teachers at the Wright-Humason School, once wrote,

Often I found her, when she had a little leisure, sitting in her favourite corner, in a chair whose arms supported the big volume prepared for the blind, and passing her finger slowly over the lines of Moliere's Le Medecin Malgré Lui, chuckling to herself at the comical situations and humorous lines. At that time her actual working vocabulary in French was very small, but by using her judgment, as we laughingly called the mental process, she could guess at the meanings of the words and put the sense together much as a child puzzles out a sliced object. The result was that in a few weeks she and I spent a most hilarious hour one evening while she poured out to me the whole story, dwelling with great gusto on its humour and sparkling wit. It was not a lesson, but only one of her recreations.

What I hope for Pamela is to strike a balance between books in which she feels competent and confident and books in which she spends time guessing at the meaning of words, putting the sense together, and mentally processing. With The Brendan Voyage, she first reads two or three pages and orally narrates each paragraph, one by one. Then, I film her narrating what she finds worth retelling from the entire passage. After that, we take turns talking about what the passage reminds us of and this is where she forms personal connections to what she is reading, shares experiences with me, and fortifies episodic memory. We have wandered down many exciting rabbit trails because of this important step in the process. I want to share with you an actual example of this process:

The Original Passage:

I cooked the breakfast. Then George, who freely admitted to being the worlds' worst cook but is amoung its champion dishwashers, offered to do the dishes on my turn if I did his cooking for him. So I cooked lunch. . . Rolfe persevered until the box of matches ran out, and tha as everyon else was getting hungry, I cooked supper.

What She Narrated Orally:
George was the worst cook. Rolf was sad because the bad food was the worst.

What She Narrated in Writing:
They cooked some bad foods. They ate some bad foods. They felt bad.

How She Connected:


What I love most about this clip is how much Pamela enjoys this conversation in which we both add novel ideas. Pamela reminded me of the day I burned the French fries, while I told her two new stories from my childhood. We are equal partners in sharing new information. I can tell she is thinking about what I said because she guessed that it was a story from Sand Point, she asked what year something happened, and she anticipated that my cake burned, etc. I also love the way Pamela clearly enjoys our conversation through her reactions and facial expressions. She also feels comfortable being blunt about my awful cooking skills (and she is being completely truthful).

Abstract Thinking Cap

Both Pamela and David are concrete thinkers. That means they do much better with practical, specific things: what they can see or touch (or at least, imagine seeing or touching). When David was younger, I worried about how he would fare in high school, which requires more abstract thinking. I started breathing easier last year when the light bulb turned on, and David started getting easy A's on his Math-U-See Algebra I tests. He continues to do well in Geometry, even with the logical aspects of it. While his every day speaking and writing skills are fine, he struggled with grammar (parts of speech and their ilk) until this year! After a couple of choppy lessons to get his head into it, David is doing well with the exercises in Our Mother Tongue. But, that is not the most exciting thing!

Since David is highly random, I did not do much with outlining until this year. David is reading Part I of How to Read a Book this year and will finish it up by twelfth grade. Since this book requires slow reading and abstract thinking, I decided to slow him down by having him outline his readings, instead of doing a typical narration. We used the examples of both topical and sentence outlines described in Handbook of Grammar and Composition. I envisioned major conflicts over having to do a task requiring so much logical and sequential thinking. By week four, David started getting ahead of schedule. He outlines quite methodically, so I have complimented him on his work. This week, I told him to stop when he gets to the end of Part I and he said, "You mean we're not going to finish the book? I like outlining." Well, knock me over with a feather!

Pamela is making strides in sharing what she thinks. Last month, she told me how she broke her arm ten years ago (trying to "skate" on the wet bathroom floor). She also told me that David was the real cheese thief six years ago. Earlier today, she looked at me and said, "I'll be right back!" when she left the kitchen. She did not have to tell me that nor did she do it in stim mode.

Yesterday, while we were baking a dump cake for a BBQ party, Pamela was very natural in sharing her observations. "It's stuck" when she could not open cans with tabs and "It's ready" after the stove beeped to tell us that the temperature was right. At one point, she got giggly and I asked her, "What's so funny?" She said, "I'm thinking about You-Tube" (her favorite clips are about broken video tapes, VCRs, and DVD players). When she was retrieving melted butter in a hot measuring cup from the microwave, I offered to get it for her. She told me very firmly, "No, I'll do it!" (the same thing she said the other day when I offered to help her open a new bottle of catsup). The wonderful thing about all of these statements is that she is willingly sharing what she thinks, which is something she did not do much six months ago.

Secret Window

Pamela and I have thoroughly enjoyed the free toys at The Toymaker. First, we made a fairy wand. Now, Pamela is one horse short of a menagerie. She recently received a postcard in the mail from her Oma (across the street) and little gifts from one of Steve's co-workers (Michelle). I thought making a secret window might be a great way to make a thank-you card, work on cutting skills, and cover episodic memory. We spent the week cutting out the secret window, decorating it with memorable pictures, and gluing the box. Her drawings all reflect gifts given to her by Oma and Michelle.

One of my goals is to talk less (pausing to give Pamela greater opportunity to speak), talk more declaratively, and spotlight my emotions and her emotions. I can see lots of improvement on this front from the video clips from earlier in the month.


Positives: Pamela references me during the conversation and speaks up more than she usually does without me having to prod her. In fact, our exchanges were even in quantity, and we did maintain an 80-20 declarative to imperative ratio. She talked about the attributes of her boxes and gifts, predicted how Oma and Michelle would react, responded to my comments, etc. She expressed joy by clapping!

Challenges: A siren went off about halfway through, but Pamela continued her focus.

Tips: I need to gasp even less when she shows interest. I need to replace the raised voice prompting with declarative sentences.

More on the Video and a Praise Report!

The praise is first! Our church has a pad that we pass around and sign to help them figure out attendance. Pamela signed her name in cursive very neatly. The lady sitting next to her is a schoolteacher, and she marveled at how beautiful Pamela's handwriting looked. Her mouth dropped when I told her that, when Pamela was seven, she screamed when I handed her a pencil! The teacher smiled and said, "You would never know by the way she writes now!"

I have been getting some helpful feedback from friends, so I thought I would share for those of you lone rangers like me! First, I need to think about balance in terms of the amount, length, and pace of my speech. When I make one comment, I need to give Pamela plenty of time to make one comment. By doing so I allow her to be competent in the conversation and hold up her end of the conversation at a pace that makes her comfortable. Nonverbal statements like a head shake or nod count as a comment. That may mean that I have to pause and wait patiently.

Second, I need to make sure to say how I was feeling when I am sharing my perspective to foster episodic memory. The emotional aspect of episodic memory is the area of greatest challenge for many people with autism.

Follow-Up on Videos

I have been more careful to focus mainly on one objective and set up situations to film it. The issue is to be more clear about my signals that I am finished talking so that Pamela does not bolt too soon. I brainstormed this with the help of friends and realized that, when we are seated, Pamela usually does not bolt. If it is almost time for something scheduled or the activity is over, she will suddenly bold.

The plan is to spotlight the end of conversation. For example, I could make a big done gesture and give a breathy sigh. If that is not obvious, I could give a verbal hint paired with the gesture and/or sign. I can learn to watch for her signals of getting ready to bolt and be ready to block her by gently holding her hands. This reminds me of being in musicals in college: I need to practice in front of a mirror and block my part!

On Thursday, David filmed five different segments of Pamela and I talking what a chapter from a book reminds us of. She did extremely well: she referenced me beautifully, made comments, and repeated some of my words as if to help them register better. Sometimes, she reacted with emotion or changed the topic to something related. She tried to bolt a few times, but I let her know I was not finished with me and she stayed with me. I was not as clear as I could have been, so I have objectives for myself, too. I found that asking her a question about the next event worked well, but I need to be less obvious as she improves.


Here is the review I wrote about how these five segments went.

Segment One:
Activity: Talking about The Brendan Voyage Objective: Attention, S1A

Pluses: Pamela makes a reasonable connection between sewing leather and her candlewicking animals. She stayed in control when she was upset.

Issues: Pamela thought I was pressuring her for more communication when I was only telling her more about my memory. She regulated by saying, “Cut it out!”

Tips: I need to introduce the topic with different phrasing when we talk about books. I need to wait a little longer to let her process.

Segment Two:
Activity: Talking about The Winged Watchman Objective: Attention, S1A

Pluses: Pamela makes a reasonable connection between the flood in the story and boats in Sand Point. She smiled, responded with emotion, and showed a strong interest in my narration of the May 1995 flood in Destrehan.

Issues: Pamela stayed focused in spite of the barking dogs and my distracting response to them.

Tips: I need to introduce the topic with different phrasing when we talk about books. I need to wait a little longer to let her process.

Segment Three:
Activity: Talking about The Cones Objectives: Attention, S1A

Pluses: Pamela has an excellent memory. She remembers a Hawaiian ice shaver my sister gave to us when we lived in West Newton. We did make snow cones a couple of times and I am surprised at how much she remembered. She stayed focused on my face even while rocking in the rocking chair. Then we talked about stores that carried gf/cf diet sorbet and soy ice cream. She was ready to end the conversation and stayed with me when I transitioned to another story in her primer book.

Segment Four:
Activity: Talking about The Endless Steppe Objectives: Attention, S1A

Pluses: Pamela makes a reasonable connection between Esther’s days in school and her school and co-op days. Then she went from the bug class in Minnesota to a dead butterfly we found in a parking lot. She was ready to stop, but I continued talking to her about movies because the story mentioned a movie. I told her my favorite movie Chronicles of Narnia and, after much processing time, she told me hers, Amazing Grace. That bowled me over because I thought that movie was stunning and fantastic, but over her head.

Issues: She tried to stim on “Airhawks” but was able to get back on track.

Segment Five:
Activity: Talking about a chapter on Alexander Objective: Attention, S1A

Pluses: Pamela maintains her focus in spite of the hyper-active dog. She makes a reasonable connection between Alexander’s horse Bucephalus and her horse in hippotherapy back in 1995. Then we both thought of Peter Pan after talking about the horse being afraid of its shadow. Pamela remembers reading Peter Pan in Sand Point. Then we transitioned to Wendy and a girl named Wendy, who was a guest at Pamela’s fourteenth birthday party. We talked about her birthday party, too, and the “no puffin” sticker at the Harbor Café.

Issues: The cameraman was bored and rotated the camera at an awkward angle.

More Sweet Moments

I am finding that a great way to practice episodic memory is right after narrating a book. Pamela and I tell each other when a story reminds us of something. Today, we read a story about a skunk, so I told it how it reminded me of our dog Pepper who used to come home stinking after a meeting with a skunk when we lived in Pennsylvania. That alone brought a smile to her face, but she lit up when I quoted a poem she is memorizing for recitation (At the Zoo by William Thackeray), "Mercy! How unpleasantly he smelled!"

Then, I hinted at another animal story that happened in Colorado. Intrigued, she guessed, "A bear?" (There was a bear story, but that was not the one I had in mind). She ventured a few more guesses before I told her about the time our other dog Loa came home with a quill beard after meeting a porcupine. Then, Pamela told me about the eagles with sharp claws in Alaska and the rabbits in Minnesota. We tried to think about an animal encounter in South Carolina, and she remembered the hummingbird that zoomed up to Pamela while she was eating an orange popsicle on the porch. She laughed and giggled at that very recent memory.

Another exciting development is that Pamela is finally able to put together a puzzle in one sitting with much less help. She is better able to match parts, which was a challenge for her six months ago. Okay, we have been doing the same three puzzles since March . . .

Finally, she is getting better at referencing her brother. David hides the locked box item and Pamela has to reference him to find it. On Monday, I had him hide two objects. He was able to communicate to her wordlessly to find another object (he snapped his fingers to catch her attention and turned his gaze to the spot where the other toy hid). Yesterday was a bust because he did not realize I had given him two objects. Today was great! He hid six small objects, and Pamela responded well to him, finding all six fairly quickly.

That Reminds Me of __________ Because . . .

Sometimes, related ideas take time to reveal their connections to me. In early June, I heard about a Go! Chart and the Charlotte Mason Conference and started implementing it immediately. It just hit me this week how the section of the chart in which we talk about what a story reminds us of is interrelated with trying to teach episodic memory ala Relationship Development Intervention.


On Tuesday, we worked with our Go! Chart. Pamela excels at tying a story into real-life situations, but not with other media (other stories, books, movies, songs, poems, etc.). The story was about a bird that fell out of its nest when the branch broke. A boy rescued the bird from a cat, hungering for a tasty morsel.

Sometimes, Pamela makes up real-life situations. In this case, Pamela says it reminds her of St. Cloud: we never saw a bird that fell out of a tree. Her flat face tells me she is inventing this yarn. I pointed toward the window and reminded her of a tree across the street from our house here in Carolina. The branch had broken and fallen to the ground. We found a baby chick and helped it get back on its feet and onto the grass, so it could hide and call for its mother. Notice how her face brightens at that memory! Then, I reminded her of the time a bird got into our house in Pennsylvania, which she remembers--I can tell by her lop-sided smile.

I tried to help her connect to literary memories by hinting about Dr. Seuss. However, she surpassed my expectations by remembering a Tennyson poem called A Cradle Song about a little birdie in a nest! In hindsight sharpened by the video clip, I pushed her to fast in trying to recall the poem. I wonder if it would have come to her had I shown more patience. Then, she remembered the book Are You My Mother? and started to stim, "You must", out of excitement and totally off topic.

Episodic Memory: Take Three!

One of five essential elements of dynamic intelligence defined by Relationship Development Intervention is episodic memory:

The ability to reflect on past experiences and anticipate potential future scenarios in a productive manner. Developing an internal mental "space" to consider, reflect, preview, prepare, regulate, evaluate, hypothesize and dream.

On page 310 of the book My Baby Can Dance, Dr. Gutstein defines episodic memory as

. . . a representation we form of an event in our lives, strongly anchored by an emotional appraisal of that episode, that we use to form a sense of ourselves and to anticipate our future. Episodic Memory is very different than just remembering the details of a past episode.

Definitions like the two above are not very helpful when trying to incorporate lifestyle changes that develop episodic memory. The RDI Protocol states that Memory Journals can strengthen episodic memory, so I decided to make a recipe book that would encourage Pamela to anticipate future cooking experiences. The last section of her cookbook is for material to develop episodic memory. I wrote a very long and detailed experience story describing the exact steps we took and highlighted exciting emotional moments, such as when a pan unexpectedly crashed or when Pamela discovered cocoa without sugar tastes bitter. When I shared it with one of my dear friends who is also doing RDI, she gently hinted that my approach may end up being too static and could end up being another (of many) scripts in Pamela's life. Even my second rewrite was something she kindly suggested we read one or two times and store in a file. I am so thankful for the wisdom she generously shares because I think my third take was a winner!

Since we are flying by the seat of our pants without a consultant, I began to scour the Internet for ideas. On page 11 of a presentation, I found more clues:

This type of memory has three components: the raw pieces of data (the event itself), the emotions we experience and the meaning we extract from the interaction of these two components. Very often people on the spectrum will be able to recount the events that happened and perhaps the emotions they felt at the time, but they will have difficulty tying the two together to form a base of reference for remembering past events and evaluating future experiences.

I definitely had raw data in the form of digital recordings filmed by Pamela's brother David. It faithfully recorded the event itself and the emotions we shared verbally. I found some ideas in a thread at the one of the RDI forums. The key is to spotlight emotions and people! I copied static images from our digital recording, placed them into Excel (because I can line up the images more easily), and wrote a simple title.

Then came the moment of truth about whether or not Pamela has the gaps in episodic memory described by Dr. Gutstein. Pamela and I sat down and talked about baking a cake on her birthday. I filmed it for review later and was amazed at how factual her memory is. I had to draw out emotional highlights of that experience. She began with, "I bake the cake. I can bake. The pans go to oven."

At that point, I tried to draw out her memory of the pan that crashed, which was an emotional highlight of baking that day. She recalled, "Big sound." To tap into her emotional memory, I said, "I laughed. And you?" She replied, "I'm happy. It got banged. I made the cake." Hoping she would recall that she thought it was magic, I reflected, "I thought it was gravity." Pamela did not remember her comment about it being magic (which was the moment her face showed the greatest emotion during our baking).

Another fun memory of baking was when David said the batter looked like mud. When I recalled that memory, Pamela agreed, but showed flat emotions. She also showed a distasteful look when she felt the slimy egg (noticed by David while filming). I commented, "I don't like the feeling of eggs." Her observation was, "It's sticky", but she did not recall how she felt about touching sticky eggs. Then, I made a face to show my disgust, which she interpreted as anger.

I am starting to see how Pamela anchors very little of her memories with emotional appraisal and going beyond the details is a challenge.