Step away from the white board!

As you know by now, Molly has some significant OCD tendencies, as do most kids on the autism spectrum. We have been in agreement to nip each one as they arise so that OCD doesn't take over her life. If you allow a kid to continue obsessing over a certain activity or pattern, it becomes ingrained and hard to change down the line. So we are constantly nipping one behavior that migrates into the next. Sadly, our job is never done.

So we have been very fortunate to have teams of compassionate people who have helped us do this through the years. Mostly teachers and para professionals...year after year.

She gathered pens/crayons/markers in the early years until her little hands were stuffed and unable to use her modified sign language.

Then she'd walk into a room, then back out, then walk in, then back out....and then finally walk in.

There have been SO many through the years that I have forgotten most of them. You have heard about her using our towels to wipe down the toilet and clean the bathrooms and then rehang the towels. Now she at least puts them in the hamper after use but I have LOTS of towels to wash on a weekly basis.

She is OCD about taking out the trash even if there is only a minute amount of trash in the can.

She recycles everything so don't leave important bills/paperwork on the table as it's going out into the bin in the garage. At least now she doesn't dump half a beer down the drain if you walked away and left your drink unattended so that the bottle can be recycled.

Some of the behaviors would take weeks/months to nip. And there would be HUGE tantrums associated with them as we would take markers away from her, not let her back out of the room once she had walked in, etc, etc

So I will say how amazed I am today....just one day after I got a text from her work at Foundations for Successful Living. "We had some conversations about not erasing every whiteboard she sees....even out in the community". That made me laugh as I find comic relief that others get to deal with what we deal with. Somehow no one else seems as annoyed as we are though! I could just picture Molly running around erasing important "notes to self", schedules, and worst of all probably the menu at Peak Towers where she goes to serve lunch to the seniors that live there. She is SUCH a cleaner and though that sounds nice, there are negative issues that go along with her tidiness.

I posted that comment to FB yesterday and heard from Molly's teacher Jill at her school that she does that there as well the one morning a week that she attends. Then we went to speech therapy and the therapist Barb said Molly erases the board there too!! So now that we are ALL onto her, we devised a plan. Barb added a key to the talker that says "May I erase the board?" and made Molly practice using it during speech therapy last night.

I reminded her this morning about it before she hopped on the bus to go to work.

And this is the text I got today: "I wrote on every whiteboard in the building with notes to Molly and reminders to ask before erasing. So far she has read them and left them alone" :)  I responded: "Wow! That is awesome. She is reading too!! Could you take a picture of it and send it to me?"

Molly, please ask if you can erase the whiteboards. Thank you :)

She was given a visual written message (since the auditory is harder for her). She was given a tool to ask on her talker, which empowers her. And everyone on her team is on the same page in nipping this negative behavior that affects others. Molly is smart and can learn so we don't allow her autism to give her a hall pass or excuse for doing something wrong. What I LOVE is that this new team at Foundations for Successful Living worked with us and took it one step further by writing on all the white boards. YAY team!!

And though she looks utterly dejected, I bet money that at least one of those boards will be erased today when no one is looking! :)