✨Different✨ Accommodations for our Autistic Daughter While in Argentina
My seven year old daughter is autistic and in June of 2024, we moved to Argentina for six months. While here, we have tailored some of the accommodations we do for her and are doing some things differently to adjust to our life here in Buenos Aires.
✨Different✨ Accommodations for our Autistic Daughter While in Argentina | Headphones
The biggest thing we are doing for her is having her wear headphones everywhere we go. At first, we weren't doing this and I noticed she was getting really irritable. We realized her irritability was definitely from a lot of sensory overload and it was causing a lot of meltdowns for her. At home in Tennessee, even though we live in the city, it's not even close to as noisy as it is here. Wearing the headphones has really helped her and really reduced the amount of sensory overload she's experiencing.
✨Different✨ Accommodations for our Autistic Daughter While in Argentina | Alone Time
The next thing is making sure she has time alone in her own "house" aka the shared bedroom. In our apartment in Buenos Aires, we only have two bedrooms which means the kids are sharing a room. It was the only thing we could make work for our situation. My daughter is not used to having to share her space. Not having the time to decompress on her own is really hard for her. We've really tried to create that with having times where she's alone in their room, both in the evenings and during the day after he's had a nap. She also has her bed tent in her room so she has a place where she can go at night and feel secluded and alone.
✨Different✨ Accommodations for our Autistic Daughter While in Argentina | Decompress Days
The third thing is making sure we have a full day to decompress after a busy day. When we do a lot of things in one day, have a really exciting day or even go on a little mini trip, we make sure to have a super calm day the next day. On these days we don't go anywhere. I try really hard to not even take her to the store because she needs that time to decompress, really relax and calm down so we can keep doing things the next day. It is just so important for us to have a break in between busy, exciting days. This is something we've implemented on vacations before, but it's not something we do daily at home because we really don't need to. Things are a lot different at home than in Buenos Aires, mostly because we walk everywhere here and take public transit which can be kind of overwhelming.
Those are the things we are doing so far. I'll keep you updated if we add anything to the list the rest of the time we are here.
