Vacationing with Special Needs: With pictures!

My husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to piggy back onto his sister's family vacation to San Francisco two weeks ago.  This was our first attempt to vacation with Noah and I was full of anxiety up until we had our car packed to the hills with luggage and were on the road heading from Utah to San Francisco California.  So many memories made and a vacation I will never forget.  Each day was packed with adventures and experiences and lessons learned or ideas and questions to Google once I got home :)  I wanted to highlight certain aspects of our trip that I found to be very enlightening and rewarding for us and our sweet Noah.

Road tripping it seems to be a very daunting and long undertaking for any family with a baby but in fact it actually became the PERFECT environment for vision therapy for Noah as well as working on his awareness of his hands and face.  I sat in the back with Noah for the entire trip (my hubby playing our hot chauffeur) with a full bag of toys and gadgets I could use and play with Noah.  He was stuck strapped into his car seat which made it so that he had a very limited environment with very few distractions.  This allowed him to really work hard on the same task or toy for hours really.  Nothing works better for ACC kids than repetition and this offered a wonderful way to make the time fly by as well as allow Noah to work on things.  In the end he learned that he has two hands that can come into mid-line (center of his torso) and he discovered fingers :)  He also learned that there are toys light enough for him to pick up (even for only a second).  What I learned is that I could make many toys out of one bag of stuff and use my imagination to create therapy aids for Noah.  Up to this point he was unable to grasp pretty much anything.  By the time I was done with him he could grasp a few things for more than just a couple seconds.  Rewarding!

This one makes me laugh

attached wrist rattle

rattle free...grasping on his own!

Play-Dough fun

Razbaby teether

My first trick of the trade was to take a wrist rattle, attach a metal bell to it with a safety pin, then once it was attached to Noah's wrist I then slipped the bell inside of this plastic web looking ball toy that cost me $3 to purchase and after about an hour of showing Noah how to use his fingers to get them stuck in the web of the ball I was able to take the wrist rattle off of him and he could use his fingers on their own to grasp the ball.  This sparked many ideas for me and off I went to figure out different ways to stimulate him and get him to figure things out. I then tried to attach this webbed ball into his binkie....um....looked funny and he just didn't get it. I am still trying to work on this one.  I think I am on to something though :)  After the webbed ball stuff I moved onto play-dough.  Did you know that play-dough offers the best "gripping" stuff ever invented.  All I did was mold some play-dough around a few of the toys Noah has never been able to gasp onto and presto!  He was able to grasp them :)  Yay! In addition to the play-dough I had picked up two pacifier looking things.  One was called a Razbaby teether and the other one is called a Tommy Tippie Gummy.  These little gems are perfect for stimulating their oral senses and I would play with them before Noah would eat and it would get his saliva going and stimulated his hunger.  He loves to chew on the handles too.   



After many hours of playing "working" with Noah this was our final outcome.  Mind you this was after a few days and over 20 hours of working with him throughout the vacation but I am SO happy with the results. Please do not mind my dorky baby talk voice as it cannot compete to the cuteness of Noah's adorable coo's and squeals.

keeping warm

soundly sleeping or over stimulation?

San Francisco offered the absolute best climate conditions for all of Noah's symptoms.  It was a cool 65-72 degrees each day which allowed us to keep all of his ice packs and coolers and fans back in the hotel and lessened our heavy packing each day.  We were also able to wrap him up in blankets in his stroller and I was finally able to really use my baby carrier pack that I have not been able to use much because he gets too hot in it.  It was the first time in my entire life that I was thanking God each night and celebrating each day for the cold weather.  All this coolness awakened something in Noah that I cannot describe.  Ever since he has been a totally different baby.  More engaged and interactive.  I love it.  It may have been all the stimulation of the big city as well.  There were so many sights and sounds and smells (oh the smells good/bad).  Noah was perfect on the whole trip...even walking across the Golden Gate Bridge with not even a single fuss and man was it cold on that bridge. Along with the bridge San Francisco offered us many free or inexpensive adventures that were much appreciated on our very tight budget.  We got to meet the "bush man" and the "silver man".  We got to taste all the fresh seafood from the local street vendors (which happen to be really tasty and not gross at all).  We walked the piers and saw all the funny sea lions basking in the two minutes of sun that came each day.  Noah got to taste a ginormous peach that we bought from a fruit stand that was literally the size of a softball.  All the trolley and bus rides were hard to carry his stroller on however with as many people as we had in our group it took us seconds to hand off each bag, collapse the stroller, tuck Noah into my carrier pack, and load onto the vehicles.  He enjoyed these rides as they lulled him to sleep and we got to see all the fun sights of the city.

can we count this as his first time touching the beach?

The Beach...oh the beach.  Northern California beaches are not warm...at all!  We expected this but it did not provide the best situation for Noah's first beach experience.  Once again on the road we decided to take a small detour and go see Santa Cruise to basically bring back some of my childhood memories.  It took us awhile to find parking, then to get Noah all situated for the long walk to the beach, and then to unload all of the many things you need for a baby to go to the beach with.  It took us ten minutes of walking to get there, five minutes of tripping in the sand to find an open spot, two minutes to unload all the stuff, one second of Noah's foot touching the sand....and then WHAM!!!  One force of wind came through at the exact same time Noah filled his diaper and the combination of the sand in his eyes along with whatever was waiting to surprise us in his diaper and we were in for a full fledged scream-a-thon.  It was NOT the first beach experience we had hoped for.  After trying to settle him down and not being able to we had to pack everything up and head back for the car.  So long beach....so long Santa Cruise waves and watching the rides on the pier....so long childhood memory remake.

Beach trip failure

still not happy in the car

 

Aquariums are wonderful....enough said!  Such a calm environment for us as parents and a perfect place for strollers.  You can go anywhere in these places with strollers and Noah liked all the sounds of kids laughing and we are pretty sure he liked the jelly fish rooms with their neon colors and soothing background music. 







At the end of our vacation and the many many hours driving and sight seeing we got home and just vegged out on the couch and all of us fell into a very deep slumber.  It is such a perfect feeling knowing you just experienced a grand adventure and made many memories and reached many new milestones.

We were ALL exhausted!!!!

This is what I wish I was still doing.  Even though it was cold and I was wearing a hoodie and the hotel could be compared to the Bates Motel...it was still on the beach and the sun sets were gorgeous!