Okay, so the story of this video goes all the way back to Thanksgiving when we met with Sandy, the woman who has been assessing Noa’s vision in terms of her Cortical Vision Impairment and helping us do the kinds of work at home that will help Noa use what vision she has as best she can. As many of you know, we’ve been working mainly with a light box, but at my parent house we started out our session just using the white table top and actually Noa did great just with that. Better in fact. She’d been getting kind of antsy at the light box.
BUT the big breakthrough was actually mine. I’d been working with Noa on identifying colors, but I was never sure if we were getting anywhere. Working with Sandy, I very quickly discovered my mistake: apparently we learn to match colors before we learn to identify them. SO asking Noa to pick up a red block, or a yellow block, is too much of a challenge. When Sandy gave Noa a colored block and asked her to find the bowl it went into – suddenly it was clear, she knew what to do!
Thanks to my Mom who on the spot insisted that we take the table with us. Noa has been enjoying it.
Of course the fun thing in this video is that she following my directions, but I’m not not being really clear. I do have other video where she gets it right, but this sort of interests me more because it really shows her trying to figure out what I’m asking, and demostrates how specific I have to be in talking to her.
Noa seems to understand what we say more clearly now. For example, the other day, I asked her to take off her shirt and after asking a few times (without any physical cues) she did it. On the other hand, she continues to have problems figuring out how to express herself when she wants to say “no.” She’ll scream ear-piercingly loudly and then smack herself in the head.
The loud screaming has also come into play with some discomfort she seems to have in her leg… or maybe its her feet… or her bowels. Honestly, its impossible to tell what is bothering her but it is very upsetting and she screams bloody-murder. She did this all the way home from music yesterday and I got numerous comments from friendly people about my lack of mothering skills. That was fun. We have a doctors apt. next week and hopefully we’ll learn something. It’s very upsetting to see Noa in such distress and not have any idea what is going on.
The Land of Noa 