The Ants Go Marching

Claire says "I got this, peeps!"

There are certain moments in Claire's life that I have learned to live for.  These moments are few and far between, but when they come, they are so sweet, so energizing, that they make every storm and every struggle seem like a minor hiccup.

Imagine winning an Olympic gold the day after scaling Everest and being elected President of the United States.  That supposed feeling of excitement and joy doesn't begin to touch the elation that these moments bring.

Today I was treated to one of them.

For several months now, we have been working with Claire on switch activation.  We hook different adaptive toys up to a button and try to get Claire to hit the button to make the toy do something.  (Click on the link above to see some video of Claire in action.) Claire has long-understood the "cause and effect" relationship that switch toys are designed to teach.  She totally gets that if she hits the switch, something will happen.

What she hasn't had a chance to show us just yet is that she understands she can use her switches to make choices.

Today, she finally got a chance to strut her stuff.

We put a CD player in front of her with 6 children's songs and asked her to hit the switch to make the music play.  Each time she hit the switch, the player would skip to the next song.   Over and over again she kept coming back to the same song:

The ants go marching one by one

Hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching one by one

Hurrah, hurrah

I have no idea why she was so drawn to this song, but by the third or fourth time she skipped through the other selections to hear it again, I was crying happy tears.

She gets it, she totally gets it.

And so do I.