My Love of "Copy/Paste"

I do not have an artistic bone in my body. My great works of art could, at best, consist of a lot of stick figures. I never allowed my mom to ask my opinion of whether the thread she had picked match the color of fabric she was going to use - I was not the color judge. So, when it comes to creating Social Stories for my son, I use copy/paste.

Social Stories are a visual timeline for Darin to follow to determine his schedule. We've made a fair few that have worked in the past. When we tried potty training for the first time, I made a pretty good one that is still hanging on the wall of two of our bathrooms, even though we've delayed potty training for quite a bit of time now. When the family was out in California for an extended time, Aunt Julie made a great one with photographs for Darin to get ready for bed.

After struggling with Darin the first few days of school to get him on the bus, I created a really short one to let him know he needed to get dressed, eat his breakfast, and get on the bus. Wouldn't you know it - right after I made it, he became compliant with getting on the bus? Well, it wasn't all a waste. After a handful of days being compliant, he went right back to pitching a fit about getting on the bus. Out came the new Social Story. Darin was pretty excited - and what a difference it has made in the last two days.

So, last night, I spent quite a bit of time to print out a new copy on cardstock paper, a new copy of his short bedtime Social Story, and a few little cards I created to let Darin choose what he wanted to do when he got home from school. I cut them all to a good size and then laminated them with contact paper (I'm going to have to do the same for the potty training schedule when we start training again because they are in pretty bad shape.

I am very lucky to be living in an age where I can get a picture of almost anything off the internet or a reasonable clip art picture to represent things like sleepings (the word in our house that means pajamas). Otherwise, my husband would be doing a lot of drawing of pictures 'cause I would be totally lost without copy/paste. Darin wouldn't understand what Mommy's scribbles were supposed to be.