A job that's worth the hard parts...

Due to my new pregnancy I've been seeing Doctor's, Nurses, and Midwifes a lot recently. Every time I'm at the doctor's office, it seems to be someone new and they try to get to know me a little by asking me what I do for work. Almost every time I say "I do ABA therapy with kids who have autism," there is some sort of grimace, and a "wow, that's gotta be tough." They are not wrong. It is tough, but the good days always outweigh the bad (which is what I tell them). My job is so rewarding, and even though I still plan on pursuing  a slightly different career of Speech Pathology in the future, I want to work with the same population because it's something I enjoy so much. Weeks like the one I just had remind me of that.


One of the reasons why I love THIS job specifically at the company that I am currently at, is because my superiors trust me. They know I'm not incompetent, and that I know what I'm doing. I'm not constantly being babied or reprimanded for things that I am doing (unlike my previous company). They allow me to be creative and use different methods for these kids to get them to generalize the information we are trying to teach them. That alone, knowing that my supervisors have trust in me makes me feel more confident in my work. When I'm not always second guessing myself, I can focus on the kids and their progress which always seems to help. Which I think is one of the reasons why I am seeing so much progress in the kids I work with.



When working with individuals who have ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), any little victory is a huge one. Daily things that we take for granted can be really tough for these kiddo's and my job is to try to make these things easier for them and do-able in general. For one of my 5 year old kids, we're trying to help him with letter and number recognition (you never realize how many things in every day life we need basic numbers and letters for until you see a kids struggle with these aspects) and attending to things like school work. This kid is a really bright and creative guy, and just doesn't do well sitting at a desk all day learning from work sheets. This week, I tried a couple different things with him. One was all my husband's idea. When shopping he found some "Scrabble Cheez-It Crackers" where all the crackers had letters on them, and he thought this would be good for work. He was right. I took those crackers to work and my kiddo easily recognized 9 letters that I asked him to. Seeing him struggle with his worksheets, to thriving in a more natural setting was amazing. Even with his numbers, I recently found a "color by numbers" which he loves to do and is great at. He makes progress it seems in leaps and bounds each time I see him and I am so proud of him.


Another one of my newer kiddos is 4 years old, and new to the program, but even he is making dramatic changes. From the first day I saw him where he wouldn't let me touch what he was playing with and throwing toys at me when I did, to cleaning up when asked (the first time) and when getting frustrated he simply walks to a corner and sits there by himself (we still need to work on him appropriately dealing with his frustrating by either asking for time alone, or finishing the task first, but still a vast improvement). Even seeing his mom learn from how we phrase things, and how we react to his problem behaviors. She's implementing as much as she can with him at home when we're not there, and even with her other kids! Seeing everyone grow from this process is why I do what I do!

Here are some pictures one of my kids drew of his own Super Hero. On the left is Super Strong Man on the earth (not quite sure what he's saying, but since this kid knows independently how to write only a few letters, he just puts them all together and pretends they say something haha). On the right is Super Strong Man getting the "Bad Guys" to put them in jail.

Telling Our Families

Well after a LONG Christmas break of hiding our exciting news, we decided that we could come back to the Bay Area to tell our family once we had been to the doctors to make sure everything was going well. We had our first appointment when I was 9 weeks along, and got to see our little peanut for the first time, and even heard the heart beat. Our little kiddo was bouncing and moving around like it was nobody's business! After talking with the doctor and after she told me that I was very low risk for my pregnancy. We started figuring out how we were going to tell our families!


I had always dreamed of telling our families by having a picture frame with our ultrasound and giving it to them as gifts. I was able to find some awesome picture frames to give our families and thankfully we were going to the Bay Area to celebrate my Mom's birthday and Ben's sister's birthday, so we needed gifts for them any way (that way the gifts didn't seem too suspicious). For my Mom's present, we put our ultra sound in the picture frame and the picture frame said "Coming Soon" on the bottom. When we arrived late Friday night to my parents house I quickly gave my Mom her present and told her to open it right away (we couldn't wait any longer!). At first she protested, but I was persistent and she opened it. Needless to say, both my mom and dad were very excited, but at first were shocked. We sat down and talked about everything, and then Ben and I went to sleep because we had to be up at his parents house bright and early the next morning to tell them our news.


Since we were going to be celebrating Ben's sister's birthday we got her the present to open. Her picture frame was a picture of her daughter and our niece (Azaileeya) with a picture of our ultrasound right next to it and on the bottom of the frame it said "Cousins". We gave it to Moriah and she opened it quickly, but didn't quite understand. Ben's family looked at the picture and it took them a second to get to the "Cousins" part of the picture frame. When they did they all laughed gave out hugs and congratulated us. Moriah told us later she thought that we had Azaileeya's ultrasound and put it in the picture frame, before she got to the part that says "Cousins".

Finally! Our parents knew and we were able to tell our extended family, close friends and church family, which we did slowly over a couple of weeks. Now every one knew our big news!!