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Cyndi's Blog
The PA Clover Effect ~ 6.30.2024
Today, one of my Independent Facilitator and Parent Advocate colleagues shared with me that she was able to get Personal Assistant (PA) services for her client by using my Respite template! She called it the PA Clover effect, and my team the Clovers ❤️My partner and I do indeed call our team The Clovers, so happy that our branding and Marketing materials have successfully conveyed that team name 😜
I have personally used the Respite schedule to get more Respite Hours for both my children, Personal Assistance (PA) hours for Cool Cat C, and to manage up to 4 different Respite / PA service providers so our family can have support 7 days per week!
It doesn’t just take a village with Special Needs children, but a whole army of providers, advocates, and other special needs professionals.
I started Clover Advocates to help special needs families, and through getting trained as an Independent Facilitator, I joined a community of Independent Facilitators and Parent Advocates, to whom I have tried to provide training, mentorship and business operational consultations and resources by leveraging my experience as a special needs parent, family consultant and business director at multiple hyper growth private and established Fortune 50 corporations.
Check out Clover Advocates’ Client Resources and IF Resources pages for new templates and other, helpful resources for both special needs families and Independent Facilitators (IFs)! Because I want to help other IFs help more families, I am adding new, easily digestible content leveraging all my experience as a special needs parent, professional IF, and business leader. Families don’t have to do it alone, and neither do IFs!
The Rooster ~ 6.29.2024
Happy Saturday, the first day of the weekend is for sleeping in and relaxing right? Not when you have a Rooster in the house! And I don’t mean the kind that lives on farms, but Little P’s new nickname from her father, Daddy Dog.
From being a reflux baby to ASD and ADHD toddlerhood, Little P has caused Daddy Dog and I (Mommy Panda) plenty of sleep deprivation over the last 8 years. She would wake up every 30 minutes as a newborn, 3x/night as a baby, 2x/night as a toddler, and finally slept through the night at age 5. We tried every sleep training methodology, bedtime routine, melatonin, and even prescription medication from her Developmental Neurologist.
After years of Occupational Therapy and Music Therapy, funded by private insurance and SDP respectively, we finally figured out that Little P needs physical activity and sensory play every single day. Once that is met, she can focus on non-preferred tasks, therapy demands, executive functioning, and sleep through the night! And blissfully, for the last 3 years, she’s allowed us 6-7 hours of sleep. I, unfortunately, need 9 hours of sleep to feel fully rested.
But for the last few weeks, Little P has been waking up at 6:00 a.m., then 5:00 a.m., and last night at 4:30 a.m. She goes to bed by 8:00 p.m. and is asleep by 8:30 p.m., so that is still 6 hours of sleep, and I think that is the amount of sleep she needs…6 hours. Daddy Dog and I, unfortunately, do not go to bed until 11 p.m. to midnight in order to finish all the housework and wind down after the kids are settled! So we drag ourselves out of bed and chug down our first 12 oz of caffeine when the Rooster (aka Little P) wakes us up at the crack of dawn, sometimes while still dark out!
Hopefully, it’s just a phase, and she will return to 7 hours of sleep once the summer is over and school is a full day again! Until then, there’s a Nespresso machine in the master bathroom by our bedroom for the first cup of coffee and cold brew coffee in the kitchen fridge for the second!
I love cheese ~ 6.26.2024
Food pickiness, a limited and restricted diet are no strangers to the ASD parent. My older daughter, Cool Cat C, was a “grazer” as a baby and took an hour to finish barely 2 oz from her bottle. At 18 months, we discovered she loved nothing but rice, pizza, chicken nuggets, fries, and bread. She ate apples and oranges and no other fruit. We couldn’t sneak any vegetables into a smoothie, pasta, or pizza sauce. She WOULD taste the difference. We went through nutritional therapy and eventually got her to eat more variety of fruits, but still NO VEGETABLES except cucumbers. Her father said that she’d just have to get her nutrients from daily vitamins, which was a battle in itself.
As a toddler, she wouldn’t tolerate anything other than chocolate Pediasure, and eventually, she would take gummy vitamins. She drank milk and juice until age 5 and then stopped drinking milk altogether. We battled constipation because she wouldn’t drink enough water or any leafy greens.
Then, around age 8, she finally started trying a bit more variety of foods like smoothies, chicken katsu and rice (instead of just chicken nuggets), carne asada tacos, salami quesadillas, and buttered pasta with LOTS of cheese.
Cool Cat C said she loved cheese so much that her dad got her a shirt that said “I love cheese” and she got tons of compliments on it. She could eat cheesy pasta 5 days a week if I let her. Good thing she did not inherit the lactose intolerance gene from her Asian side!
Aside from cheese, Cool Cat C also loves sweets and baking, and baking is one of the few activities that this almost teenager will do with her mom. Chocolate chip cookies and brownies are usually her go-to, but today, I realized that her love for cheese would probably translate to cheesecake! And so, last night, we made a strawberry cheesecake that took a last-minute trip to the grocery store for graham crackers, 2 tries on making enough crust to cover the entire cheesecake, and refrigerating it overnight before we could try it the next day because we weren’t done making it until 9 p.m, and this mom can’t stay up for another 4 hours until it was done in the refrigerator!
So we made backup dessert, smores on the stove, and called it a night. Then, the next morning, Cool Cat C came out of her room at 11:30 a.m., because she sleeps late and wakes up late these days, as it is “normal biological development” according to her pediatricians, and ate the cheesecake for breakfast. Cheesecake for breakfast? Well, there are sweet breakfast pastries, Porto’s famous cheese rolls, and my mom used to give me leftover birthday cake for breakfast so we would finish it.
Aside from the mother / daughter bonding experience, making the cheesecake together involved social skills practice, executive function coaching, and daily adaptive living skills. ASD parents are never off the clock!
Here’s the finished product and recipe: https://tasty.co/recipe/no-bake-strawberry-cheesecake-dome
Concert Magic ~ 6.23.2024
I finally started this blog to share my experiences as an ASD parent of two children today! Many have lauded the therapeutic value of journaling about my experience, and I have also been inspired by other special needs parents’ blogs, Facebook posts, or online posts. So I thought, I’d give this a try and hope to help myself and others along this journey.
We recently started private piano lessons for my younger daughter, Little P (for her privacy), on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. Her teacher has never taught any special needs children but is so patient and engaging with her. But this week was a break before the school started their summer camps, so they only had make-up dance classes and no music classes whatsoever. I totally missed this scheduled break as I had a million other recurring appointments for my children and myself!
As the receptionist told me this, my face fell and mom fail guilt started rushing in. Apprehension of a potential tantrum due to Little P expecting piano class started rising. As I took a minute to brace myself, I noticed that the room where Little P usually has her classes was empty, so I asked if I could take Little P to the room just to play with the piano a bit. She said no problem, and that’s what we did. I took Little P to her usual classroom and told her that “Mommy would be her piano teacher” today.
Now I do not know how to play the piano at all, but the piano at the school has an amazing feature called “Concert Magic” where you could select a song and the piano would play it no matter what keys you pressed. So Little P got to play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and Row Row Row Your Boat for about 15 min.
We then left the school and across the street to get some breakfast, where Mom fail #2 and #3 ensued. Food pickiness is quite common with children on the spectrum, and my 2 girls are no exception. I ordered Little P the kids' meal mini pancakes and did not realize it was the healthy, whole wheat ones that she would not touch. So I ate her pancakes, packed up my tuna sandwich to go, and ordered Little P some bacon and butter croissant that she would eat. And while we were waiting, she spilled her water cup, and I had to move her to the kids' play area while the server helped me clean up.
And that concludes my Sunday morning. 3 mom fails, but Little P got her piano lessons, played at the kids’ area in the restaurant, and sufficiently fed. Morale of this Sunday morning, think on your feet and don’t dwell on the mom fails. I need to keep it together for the next day!
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