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.

I've talked recently about our life skills list. This is a list of life skills that we've come up with of things that my daughter, a seven year old autistic girl, is able to do with or without accommodations to help her to succeed. The first thing that we did was bathing. Up until this point my husband or I were helping her with washing her hair, but I felt like this was something that she really could do on her own with some guidance. So I wrote all the steps out and put them on the wall in the bathroom here in Argentina. After doing this, I thought about all of the other things that would be helpful to her and other people as well and decided to make a whole life skills download and make it accessible for other people!

Since coming to Buenos Aires, I have had to take the kids shopping on my own a lot more. This is a new experience for us because, in Tennessee, my daughter goes to school and my son naps at home where my husband works, or I can take my son to my parents house or I have the luxury of ordering groceries. In Argentina, though, it's really hard for us to get stuff delivered to us for a large variety of reasons and I don't have the added support, but I still have to get things done so I've had to take the kids out more. We're been going to the grocery store, clothes and toy shops, bakeries, and anywhere else that we need to. Sometimes it's just to give us something to do, but either way they're just in stores more. I noticed that it was really hard for my daughter, and despite thinking that I had sufficiently prepared my seven year old autistic daughter to go shopping, she was still having a difficult time. So I wrote a social story especially for her about going shopping.

I’m going to show you how we’re using our Spanish visual schedule board while we’re living in Argentina with the help of our local Spanish tutor.