Last week's visit we discussed trying to have Ump match hand signals and vocal commands as a goal for him. The therapist and I had agreed to work on sit and situp/beg to start. So that is what we did and it was interesting to see what happened. First of all, River tends to sit anyway, so it was hard to tell if he was following a command or just relaxing. He did do "beg" on command, but Ump still got it confused. Ump wanted to have him lie down and play dead, but he would say "roll over" and give the "Play dead" hand signal. Sometimes River rolled over and sometimes he played dead. Maggie hit on the idea that if she said the correct voice command and asked Ump to repeat it after her, he would use the right word to match the hand signal. He didn't always wait for her and said a different command then he signaled, but when he followed the sequence, it worked well to get voice and hand signal matched. We did it quite a few times in a row, well, maybe about 6, then moved on - to conversation and just petting. I didn't see progress and wonder if it is something that can change or if there is anything to be gained by working on it,but Maggie just said that she expected it to be hard and we can keep working on it. River is quite patient about repeating tricks - why not, he gets treats, so we will continue to work on this if the therapist wants to do so.
There will be a new therapist at tomorrow's visit; so I don't know if we will continue with this. There will also be a college student shadowing us tomorrow, so that's 5 people and one dog. Hope we get a bigger room.
No comments:
Post a Comment