Yes, I know Maeve still has her fingers in her mouth but we are working on it. I decided on this picture for today because it is showing Maeve while in the process of one of her stims, shorthand for self-stimulation. Both Maeve and Josie have stims, as any autistic child would and they seem to change as they get older. Maeve's include: repetitive jumping in place, ripping paper, grouping and sifting objects through her fingers, running laps (usually right before bed), and tapping things with her fingers (palms up and tapping with finger nails). Josie doesn't have as many stims and some have gone away since she was a baby, hers include: banging the back of her head against solid surfaces (seen only rarely now), shaking her head, spinning, and quite a bit of visual stimming ie looking out the corners of her eyes, pulling her hair down in front of her eyes to look through out of the top of her eyes, wiggling her fingers in front of her eyes etc. Once these kiddos get started on a particular stim it is very hard to brake the habit! Redirection and substitution are two good ways of deterring stims but only seem to work temporarily as of now. Hopefully they will grow out of most if not all of them!!
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