How To Relieve Stress During Christmas Break
You might have noticed that our waiting room isn’t overly decorated for Christmas. We’d love to decorate it with things for the holidays, but we don’t because we realize that with smaller children in here, and children with special needs who have sensory issues, attention and focus issues and behavioral issues, it would be a huge distraction. You’d have to keep holding your child in your lap to make sure they didn’t touch the tree, or ornaments, or lights, or menorahs. We keep it pretty simple in here, but we don’t want you all to think we’re not celebrating the holidays! We are celebrating, and we have many different holidays that we celebrate with our families here.
As we get into this holiday season I wanted to remind you of a few things:
1. Book Your Intensives
We are working into the holiday season, so remember to think about booking your intensives. We’re getting to the end of the calendar year and that means for many of our families, your out of pocket maximum has been reached and therapy is free or at a nominal cost for you for the rest of the year. So over the holiday period while your kids are out of school is a really great time to schedule some intensives. We have lots of flexibility with the way we schedule. We can do them a couple of days a week for a couple of hours, or we can do them multiple days. We can do segments.
This year our holiday season is running a little late getting out of school, but they’re going to be out a little longer. We are able to accommodate that but please sign up quickly because we already have families taking spots! Also, remember to check our power point in the clinic because we’re always posting new things on that every week, things out in the community, things here—all kinds of good stuff.
2. Keep Your Normal Schedule
The other thing I want to remind you about, and I keep saying this over and over: We’re coming to a holiday, which is exciting. It’s exciting for our kids because of presents, and ourselves because of family. But for our kids, it’s a change in schedule. It’s a transition. We know that those are weak topics for our clients, so we want to be mindful that we’re preparing for these things. Remember to practice things in advance. I love being spontaneous, but it’s not good to be spontaneous with our clients. Remember food sensitivities and prepare for them. Let your child know what’s happening ahead of time so that they’re not overwhelmed by something they didn’t expect. Even a good thing can be very overwhelming for our kids.
Think about those same things we’ve been talking about: Try to stick with some routine, plan some activities, remember that they’re going to be out of school, so plan for what you’re going to do over the holidays for the next few weeks, so that next year you can remember these holidays as a happy time, not as a difficult time.
Happy Holidays!
