How We are Prepping Our Daughter for 6 Months Out of the Country
My family is going to Argentina for six months. We are leaving in the beginning of June and coming back in the middle of December. We are going for my husband's job and we're pretty excited about it! The question I've been getting a lot, though, is how are we preparing our daughter for this big change and this trip? For context, our daughter is seven. She is autistic and change is hard for her. I wanted to share a couple of things we are doing to help her with those transitions.
How We are Prepping Our Daughter for 6 Months Out of the Country | Having Specific Dates
We have known this was a possibility since August of 2023 and initially told her at Christmas time so she could start to get used to the idea. We have tried to include her in our research to give her as much notice about the activities we're going to do. The biggest hurdle we've had is not getting our visas until two weeks before we were supposed to leave and couldn't book our airline tickets until the day after that. Since we didn't have an actual departure date we could count down to until two weeks before we left, I had to do a lot of generalizing. We have the same issue for coming back, we don't have an exact date she can count down to. We decided to tell her what week of June we're leaving and the week we will be coming back in December. and the date and we're coming back the week of December. The one firm date I've been able to give her is the date she starts school again in Tennessee. She is very attached to her school so firmly knowing when she can go back is a huge help. She knows she's going back to school on that date and will see all of her friends again.
How We are Prepping Our Daughter for 6 Months Out of the Country | Keeping Up Routines
I have done everything I can to continue her routines. One of those is her clothing choice boards. Obviously we can't take all her clothes so she helped me pick the clothes she wanted to take. I made new choice boards with her Argentina choices. This helps because she knows what's being packed, what's staying here and what options she's going to have to work with.
To actually make the clothing choice boards, I start with the download in the shop. It's only $5 and you get six different versions of the actual choice board. You can customize for boys, girls, kids and adults. I take pictures of the selected clothing and remove the background on the image. Then, I size it down to fit into the spot it's going in. Once everything is formatted, I print them. I like to print them at 70-75% size wise so they don't take up the whole page, but they're still big enough you can clearly see each image on the page. I like to use thick paper when I'm printing these. I have found that once they are laminated, the thicker paper tends to hold up better than regular printer paper.
I get my laminating machine out, plug it in and start heating it up. Heating up a laminating machine takes a few minutes so I want it all ready before I start cutting everything. Since they're only 70-75% of the page size, I trim them down so when I'm laminating I don't laminate blank paper. Once they're prepped and ready to go and the laminating machine is heated up, I put them into the laminating sleeves and feed them through the laminator and trim down the excess lamination. The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.
How We are Prepping Our Daughter for 6 Months Out of the Country | Social Stories
I also made a social story about the concept of the trip in general. There are some parts of making this specific social story I'm not going to share on the internet because that's too much identifying information for my comfort level, but you'll get the gist of it. Social stories have helped my daughter a LOT. I actually made two copies of the social story, she has one in her backpack and she keeps one at home so she can read it whenever she wants to, whenever she's feeling anxious about the trip.
Some of the other things we've been doing is keeping her involved in the process of packing and getting ready to go. She picked out the toys and extras she wants to take. She is also very concerned about what was going to happen to her stuff, like her toys, books, clothes, and bedroom while we were gone. Once we had confirmation our family friends were going to stay in our house, that gave her a sense of relief knowing someone else would be there to take care her stuff. I was actually really worried about this part of the process because she really doesn't like sharing her stuff. It turns out, in this case, she was more worried about no one taking care of her stuff. She has had some extra anxieties like worrying her room would be taken over by house flies, which is part of the reason why she definitely did not know about the mealworm infestation in the pantry that happened before we left. I think having a social story for this was really helpful for her.
Those are the things we've been doing. Hopefully that helps and you can get some idea of what might be helpful for you if this is something you're doing in the future. Stay tuned for more about or Argentina adventure!
