Thread: The simple things

I posted this picture of my model railway in a topic on the Defender2 site. It brought back memories.
I used it to help my youngest daughter, who has special needs, to develop her hand to eye coordination.
If she raised a cup to her mouth it sometimes went elsewhere.
She used to come up to my trains. I showed her how to use the transformer to move the locomotive. I used to ask her to move the locomotive to the buffer stop. She found this hard to do and usually crashed the loco into the buffer stop. The problem was because she had to keep looking from the loco to the controller in order to use it. To cut a long story short one day she managed it. She could watch the loco WITHOUT having to watch what she was doing with her hand on the controller. It sounds innocuous enough but it was a big breakthrough.
This was one step in working to develop things that other parents take for granted. Simple things like walking in a straight line, her balance, even her eye muscles. All these were tackled in the same way with just time and patience.
The one she did not like was getting the fluid in her inner ear to swish one way for a minute then settle, then swish the other way for a minute. This was done to aid her balance by getting the fluid to move over the tiny hairs in the inner ear. When she was born she was premature and very small. I had to put a tube down her throat to feed her. Would n't fancy doing it now but at the time it seemed natural enough.
Anyway she is 23 now, still comes up to the trains and still remembers "her" locomotive!