Wednesday- What To Do About Your Brain Injured Child course

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What To Do About Your Brain Injured Child Course -Wednesday

Wednesday morning I got up and tried to make myself a shakeology shake in a water bottle. I drank it but honestly it needed to be mixed in the blender like I do at home. Quietly I went downstairs and quietly slipped out of the house. And I was off to day 3 of the What To Do About Your Brain Injured Child Course.

I arrived early, so this is the one time I had a spare moment to vlog. I really wanted to be able to vlog every night about what was going on that day, but honestly I was so exhausted by the end of the day, that just never happened.

Topics we learned about on Wednesday:

  • What the IAHP has learned so far
  • What the IAHP does
  • More about Diagnosis
  • Introduction to the Institutes for the Achievement of Physical Excellence
  • Patterning Whys and Hows
  • Patterning Demonstration
  • Mobility Demonstration and Opportunity to try crawling and creeping.
  • The Floor as the Way of Life
  • The Primary Human Development Program

We spent a lot of time looking at brain development and growth. How the world looks at the brain as something unchangeable. If its damaged, its damaged and there is nothing that can be done. You are hopeless.

We learned about how the brain is always changing. Brain development can be stopped, it can be slowed down, and best of all it can be sped up. We also talked about how this process works.

Star of the Week

I’m excited to say I have meet one of the IAHP Star of the Week in September. The video above is shared from the IAHP Facebook page and this was part of our Physical Program presentation(Sadly since this post was originally written, the video was taken down). Maria was such a trooper showing us how she does her programs. Her parents had taken the What To Do About Your Brain Injured Child Course, and were now part of the intensive program.

Creeping & Crawling

We also had two students from the International School come and demonstrate creeping and crawling. They also lead the groups when it was our turn to get down on the ground and creep and crawl too.

When it was time to learn about patterning, 3 patterning tables were set up at the front of the auditorium, and three children volunteered to allow us to pattern them.

The God Awful Position

Douglas Doman also spent some time explaining why W sitting, or as they refer to is as “the god awful position” is bad for children. My boys rarely sit like that, but now the rare time they do, you can bet your lucky stars I’m on them ASAP to correct their position

My kids are very physical and active. Even though both of them were late crawlers and walkers. So I wish I had known about a lot of this information when they were younger, it was no longer relevant to us. However, I can now see that even at this stage patterning would likely be beneficial for both of them. Right now that is not in the cards for us. However, I can see us investigating this further in the future.

Primary Human Development Program

We were taught about the Primary Human Development Program. I had purchased the PDF of this program a while back and thought I wouldn’t learn much from this part of the course. However I was greatly surprised that this lecture cleared up what I knew and has given me more tools in how to run this program in my home.

Things like:

  • excellent neurological environments vs devices and environments that inhibit or prevent neurological development were discussed.
  • Inclined floor techniques to help non-crawlers become crawlers
  • The anti-roll device to stop kids who have decided that rolling is a quicker means of transportation from rolling. Then they have to crawl and creep to get to where they want to go. While rolling is an effective method to move from place to place, it is a developmental dead end. Whereas crawling leads to creeping, creeping leads to walking, and walking leads to running.
  • The anti-sit device to prevent the child from sitting in the “W” position.
  • How to keep records and graphs of your Primary Development Program

The Reassessment of the SIDS Back to Sleep Campaign

The Reassessment of the SIDS Back to Sleep Campaign was also talked about. If you would like the read the reassessment that we were given you can see it HERE. However my understanding is that this was a huge human experiment, and from this paper it seems the risk of a baby sleeping on their back might out weigh the risks of SIDS. Since this campaign more children are requiring helmets to correct the flat spots that happen when small children lay on the back of their soft skull for too long. Also developmental delays from missed opportunities from lifting there head and being able to use those random movements all babies make to move around.  There was also talk about sleep disturbances while the child slept on their back. This makes a lot of sense to me! I use to swaddle my babies because their random movements while on there back did nothing but startle them awake. Now had they been on their tummies those movements would have lead them to move around their bed instead, and they would have been less likely to startle awake.

Busy Day

Overall this was a very informative day. I went back to my room that night at the host home and did my homework. That being said, my boys are very active, running, jumping and tumbling. I still walked away with a lot of great information. That being said I know several of my classmates with wheelchair bound children benefited even more to this days information.

McDonald’s in the USA vs Canada

After class I ran into McDonald’s to grab a chicken sandwich before heading back to the house I was staying at. I was so tired and just wanted something quick. It was disappointing, I really should have went to Subway or something like that. For some reason McDonald’s in the USA taste completely different then in Canada.

Like Minded Host

When I got home it was quite late. I chatted for a few minutes with my host. We talked about vaccines and how her and her family were treated at their last doctors office. Afterwards she was able to find her kids a wonderful holistic doctor. She as passed down a book to me about vaccines that she had picked up from the IAHP bookstore a few years earlier. That was just so thoughtful of her.

I headed upstairs, had a hot shower and started on my homework. I knew it was too late to talk to Wesley as it was way past his bedtime. So I did my homework before calling home so I wouldn’t feel rushed hearing about how things were going there.