Speed up bathroom time with the "grocery.bag.trick"

Ah, toileting. It's a mixed blessing for those families whose kids are semi-continent and wearing pull-on style undergarments. 

There is the obvious good, which is very, VERY good! It's definitely worth the hassle. Success promotes independence and self-confidence. And it's beyond wonderful to kids and caregivers not to have to deal with, er, unpleasant clean-ups. Enough said.

Then there is the incovenience during those times we need to change out wet pull-on, especially if  foot orthotics are part of the mix. It can become a rather involved to remove the shoes and orthotics in order to take pants off so clean pull-ons can go on. Because then everything after the pull-ons must be replaced in a very lengthy ordeal: pants, orthotics, shoes. For anyone who does this multiple times a day, you know how much time it adds to toileting.


Aha! "grocery.bag.trick!" to the rescue! By sliding the child's foot (orthotics, shoes, and all) into a plastic grocery bag, you now have a delightfully slippery package that easily slides through the pant leg, provided the the hem is wide enough or the fabric has enough stretch.

Sock, AFO, and shoe are all wrapped inside this plastic bag.
Nothing has been removed from the foot.

You can do this one leg at a time if you like. Off comes one pant leg, on goes one leg of the pull-on, back on goes the leg of the pant. Move the bag to the second foot and repeat: pants off, pull-on on, pants on. The child does need to stay seated through this, because the bag is slippery and could cause a fall if she tries to walk with it covering her shoe. Do not allow the child to walk with a bag over the shoe!

Pants, even denim jeans or most knit leggings,
slide off and on over the slippery plastic bag.


If a single bag is confusing, try using a separate bag for each foot, removing the entire pair of pants, put the pull-on over both feet, then put on both legs of the pants. Remove both bags before standing.


This technique has saved us countless hours over the years and reduces the chance for bunching socks inside hurriedly-applied orthotics. When our daughter was small enough to fit into pull-on style underpants with Velcro side closures, life was much simpler. Why such garments are not available (at least at a cost Medicaid is willing to cover) for teenagers or adults, I do not know. But it allows us to exercise our creativity...



And so, the grocery.bag.trick was born. Use it in good health!

Five Tips for Successful Teaching at Home

Parents can make great teachers. We have some luxuries that teachers at school don’t always have...access to our kids when they are at their best and in a wider variety of environments. We don’t have to hurry. We don’t have to start the relationship from scratch every fall. We already know what motivates and delights our kids.

We can use these advantages for boosting our kids’ learning. Whether we support learning that is already happening at school or branch off with our own set of skills to learn, our kids can learn a lot at home. Here are five essential mindsets to make the most of the time we spend helping our kids learn.

1) Expect the best. Children tend to live up to the expectations of those people they value. Believe—honestly believe!—in your child. He’ll pick up on your attitude. Just as important, tell him you have confidence in what he can do. Be his most supportive cheerleader. Brag up your child’s accomplishments to others in her hearing, always ending with, “But then, it’s no surprise. We knew she could do it.”

2) Make learning interesting. Tie it in to your child’s passions. By relating the topic/activity to something child loves, you’ll keep her interest much better.

If she is crazy for penguins, let her practice her reading on books about penguins. Import images of penguins from the Internet into Powerpoint and let her write facts as captions to make a book. It can be as simple as her writing in the missing word in a repeating frame sentence on each page:  “Penguins _____ ....” She’ll remember—and read—“can” after this activity much better than if she copied the word five times on a worksheet!

Shark Toob toys
Work on ordering sizes using her penguin collection, letting her set them in a line from smallest to largest. Use penguin manipulatives to practice adding and subtracting facts to ten (check out all the types of “toob” sets available through Amazon.com using their search feature; Michael’s Crafts also carries them. They come in every theme you can imagine!).

Bring in music. Maybe I’m dating myself, but I still remember grammar rules from “SchoolHouse Rock” songs played during intermissions between cartoons. Oh, and facts about the solar system from an astronomy operetta we learned in 6th grade. Check out SongsForTeaching.com to preview some fun song-fact CDs you could sing together in the car to make good use of that time driving back and forth to therapy. Or type a search into YouTube for “(your topic) songs.”

Make drill work into a game. There are many more ways to practice drill than on worksheets or flashcards! More-than/less-than is pretty ho-hum as a worksheet exercise, but everybody loves a rousing game of War (the new politically correct name is “Top It.” Parents have no idea what that is. It’s just the same good old game of War we grew up loving).  

Touch your head it the number is even, touch your toes if it is odd. Or convert true/false into a Simon Says game; if the fact is true, do the motion. If the fact is false, don’t change to the motion.

There are way too many sources on the Web to list for free online games to practice skills. Just type “free online (your skill) games” into your browser and check out the pages of results! You’ll need to preview them first, because some may require responses that are beyond your child’s capability (i.e.: a child with motor issues might get frustrated with a timed game).

Switch out modes if possible, so that kids get practice at the material in lots of ways. It’s more interesting and it will help them generalize the information later. Sometimes we read a book, sometimes we read the captions on the bottom of a movie (by the way, it’s a great idea to leave the closed captioning ON on your television if you have budding readers at your house and especially if your kids are working on developing rate/fluency!), sometimes we read the words on road signs or cereal boxes.

3) Make learning meaningful. Give it a purpose, a function. Transferring walnuts from one bowl to another is (y-a-w-n) BORing fine motor work. Transferring wrapped candies into goodie bags to pass out to trick-or-treaters gives fun purpose to the same task.

4) Keep practice short but make it often. Do you know what an amazing opportunity sits in front of you if your child needs supervision during toileting? My daughter has memorized so many things during toilet time—sight words, spelling rules, math facts, the order of the planets, anatomy of a fish, you name it! We keep flashcards for memory work on a shelf above the toilet. Working through them 5 minutes at a time, 5 – 6 times a day makes for a great schedule!

If toilet time isn’t an option at your house, try to find some other daily ritual that lends itself to short bursts of practice...often. How about 5 minutes of practice at the end of meals? Waiting for the school bus? In the therapy waiting room?

5) Relax and have fun! Learning isn’t a race. What your child doesn’t learn today, he can learn tomorrow. Take a deep breath—it’s really okay. If something just isn’t sinking in, come back another day, another month and give it a fresh go. Parents have a lot more leeway in this area than the school does so at home, especially, relax. Learning should happen for a lifetime, and so if it something doesn’t click today, you have all that lifetime to keep working on it.  



Learning at home can be very rewarding and lots of fun to boot! Here's a challenge for you...think about what might you help your child learn at home. Did you find any ideas here that might make it successful? Is there something I missed that other parents would benefit knowing about? Be sure to let us know what you are doing!
Also, take a look at Barbara’s blog carnival at TherExtras. She’s asked parents to share what they taught their children...you might get some really terrific ideas there!

Thanks so much for stopping by!


How Far do Encouraging Words Go?

We parents are vulnerable when it comes to our precious kids. It’s hard for us to imagine how other people can overlook their courage and beauty. So when folks say insensitive things, even if they are meant with the kindest of intentions, we rant about their words.

In fact, we special needs parents have a rather unflattering habit of complaining about the thoughtless things people say regarding our kids. There. I said it. And I’ve done my fair share of griping.

I owe the world an apology. I’m sorry for my reckless rants over words that weren’t the most sensitive.

I’d like to shift the discussion onto the ENCOURAGING things people say.

Sure, those gems may come along less often than the thoughtless remarks. But if we look at why they encourage us, perhaps we can become better encouragers ourselves.

My most vulnerable days were when we received the news of our daughter’s diagnosis. Family and friends honestly didn’t know how to respond. But then, I had no idea what they could have said that would have made me feel better.

At the time, everything said to us was intended to encourage, and some of the comments were helpful. Others were less so, but I tried very hard to look past these abrasive comments to the intent behind them. Some days it was easier than others to do this.

But one neighbor gave me the gift of a most excellent response. Over fourteen years later, her healing words still encourage me. I think back to that winter afternoon and it makes me warm all over again.

I had been tidying up picture books from the living room after my daughter had strewn them all over the floor. Quiet tears slid down my cheeks because the new explanation of her odd behavior tied it to issues we couldn’t control. Her need to toss all things vertical into a horizontal position stemmed from sensory issues related to her diagnosis of Rett syndrome. Not that every child with RTT is intolerate of horizontal lines, but they drove her nuts back then. On that afternoon, it felt like our whole world was vertical and we were trying to figure out how to adapt it for Little Miss Horizontal.

There came a gentle knock at the door and I straightened myself up as best I could before opening the door. On the porch stood our neighbor. Our baby girls were a few months apart in age; we were both older professional women who had chosen to stay home to raise these babies. We got together for play dates a few times, but conversation became awkward over time as her little one raced ahead in her development and my daughter’s skills took a backward tumble.

From my tear-stained face, it was obvious something was upsetting me. Our neighbor asked what was wrong and I told her that our daughter had just been diagnosed with Rett syndrome. Her reaction was selfless and genuine and more perfect than she could know.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that. Does it make her hurt?”

The focus, completely on my daughter and her level of comfort, was a fresh perspective that rechanneled my own frightened thinking.

*It wasn’t about me. It was about my little girl.

I had an easy enough time feeling sorry for myself, for my grief and lost dreams and the overwhelming thought of caregiving for the rest of my life. Having someone step in and remind me who the diagnosis was about was a very good and gentle correction.

*It wasn’t about the future, but about here and now.

I was so wrapped up in how we were going to handle the big picture that I lost sight of today.

So many people jumped right to questions about our daughter’s future...her physical and mental potential, her living situation, and, dare I say, her lifespan. Families, especially, tend to think this way, perhaps because they are involved in our lives for the long haul.
It’s kind of overwhelming to think about such a huge picture as a new parent.  To be asked these questions is to be reminded of how of just how overwhelmed we are.

*It didn’t pretend to understand the unknown.

My husband and I had never heard of Rett syndrome before our little girl came along; I’d wager than the VAST majority of the population hasn’t either. When this neighbor honestly admitted she didn’t know about it, I felt less alone in my ignorance.

It doesn’t help parents to pretend we know about something we have little knowledge of. Somehow, faking knowledge trivializes the conversation. It adds an element of insincerity. And believe me, parents at this vulnerable stage need sincerity...desperately.

*It was about my child’s comfort.

The fact that this lady expressed concern for my daughter’s pain level was probably the single most comforting thing she could have said.

As a mother, I want my children to live free from pain. My neighbor’s concern identified with that universal, deep-seated anguish parents have when our children hurt.

After all, there is a reason that hunger relief agencies show not just the haunting faces of starving children in their funding advertisements. They are sure to include the face of one or two mothers agonizing over the pain their beloved children must endure. We may not be able to identify with severe starvation, but we most certainly identify with the desperation of these mothers.

That one little question drew my neighbor alongside me in this new and terrifying role, and I suddenly felt less alone.

Yet she didn’t ask it for my benefit. She was genuinely concerned for my daughter. And that shifted my perspective around so I was free to focus on my daughter as well.

You know, my answer was that no, Rett syndrome itself doesn’t cause pain. And that was a HUGE positive that I had overlooked (mind you, there are a number of resulting conditions that can cause tremendous pain, but we weren’t dealing with these yet). Right then, I felt immensely blessed to be able to give that answer.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to know the right words to say when we learn that a friend’s child has been diagnosed with a disability or been seriously injured. But focusing our encouragement on the child and the child’s comfort can go a long, long way in bringing comfort to the parents.

This kind neighbor will never know how great an impact those few words made. Time and time again they have brought me support and new focus. They have helped me consider what I might say...or not, in the event a child is obviously in great pain...and I hope that those words have been soothing to other families as well.

What encouragements have people offered you that you found helpful? What can we learn from these statements? Please let us know, so we can become better encouragers ourselves.