Hi! I'm Emily. If you are new here I am a 33 year old mom with ADHD. I was diagnosed when I was 16 years old so I have had more than half my life to come up with coping strategies and systems that help me to succeed. With these systems in place, I'm able to navigate my ADHD in my day to day life. I'm always trying to make our space at home more neurodivergent friendly because everyone in my family is neurodivergent and these systems help me to make that happen. I want to share how I utilize those systems to make our home function properly.

As the ADHD mom of an autistic child, I have made it my mission to make social stories that are neuro-affirming and focused on the viewpoint of the child that needs them, rather than how the child is impacting people around them. Currently, I'm working on transportation social stories. So far I've got airplane and ferry boat and now train! I'm gonna walk you through how I put this together, what it looks like on the inside, and how we use it.

I decided the next life skill that I wanted to work on with my daughter was brushing teeth and just oral hygiene in general. My daughter seems to be struggling with that at the moment, even though she hasn't in the past so I knew it was something that I wanted to work on. I know that she's not the only autistic to have trouble with it, so I wanted to do a social story to go along with it. I already have a going to the dentist social story, but I wanted to make a dental hygiene at home specific social story.

When we went to Uruguay in August, we took a ferry from Buenos Aires to Colonia de Sacramento, Uruguay. Since my seven year old autistic daughter has been on dozens of planes to this point, I thought that she would be fine with the process of getting on/off a boat and boat travel. Unfortunately, I was wrong. So, because of this experience and how difficult it was for her, I decided to create a social story about taking a ferry boat and what that entails.