Life can be hard at times but I’ve learned the importance of finding rainbows. One of the major positives of being in lockdown has to be the improvement in Quinns’ use of the eye gaze.

Quinns has had his eye gaze computer for communication for over a year now.  I had been transporting it between nursery and home for a few months before lockdown started. Now the eye gaze is set up on our dining table at all times, as opposed to being left in a bag after carrying it home from nursery, and the four of us have been sitting down for meals together three times a day. With no demands on any of us to be anywhere else Quinns has had lots of time to practice selecting the words/pictures and we’ve had the time to listen to him.

Like any child Quinns started out babbling only he used the eye gaze. He would choose words and then repeat them over and over. Every new page or board is a whole new set of vocabulary for him to explore. It was tedious but also very necessary.

Now he’s reached a point where he picks out relevant words from our conversations. When we talk to Big Sister about the tiger in her school work he pipes up with ‘tiger’. His level of understanding is such that when Dad and I were having a fairly in depth discussion about going to hospital with Covid 19, Quinns chipped in with ‘hospital’ and  ‘ambulance’.

He’s showing us that he’s following everything we say. Of course that also means he’s got good at demanding. When he’s finished his main course he always asks for ‘pudding’ and constantly says ‘drink’.

We know him so well we know what he means with just one word but we must encourage him to build his words into sentences. He has shown us he can do it especially when he wants something; ‘Quinns be wanting train’ and ‘Train now Dad’ are a couple of ways he’s expressed his desire to go to the train station. Now he can’t go out and see the trains, train has been replaced with PlayStation, YouTube or tablet.

He has the option of some ready made phrases including a range of jokes. The first part of the joke is one button and the punch line another. The jokes themselves aren’t necessarily funny but him saying ‘that’s so funny!’ after every joke always makes us laugh.

During lockdown we’ve stayed connected with family and friends via Zoom. Dad is a bit of a tech whizz and early on worked out how to share Quinns’ eye gaze screen and sound while on calls. This means Quinns has been able to talk directly to people using the eye gaze. It’s lovely to see both his screen and his face at the same time as usually we are sitting beside or behind him.

The absolute best bit of the eye gaze though has been getting a programme called Look to Read. When Quinns scans the words with his eyes it reads them out. He reads entire books this way. The freedom it allows, both him and me, is incredible.

Recently during a chat with his friends the only thing Quinns wanted to do was read. Of course I made it happen for him by sharing his Look to read screen. It was amazing to watch his friends faces as they listened intently to Quinns reading them all a story.

With a little bit of camera trickery by Dad we took this video – tiny.cc/BuzzBug – of Quinns reading to share more widely with friends. You can see the screen he’s reading from on the left and Quinns face on the right as he reads.

Massive thanks go to the amazing person who organised Look to read for us (and for everything else she does for us!) and also to Smartbox for making all this possible.

For Susan, the girl in the rainbow dress (https://www.facebook.com/teamhamish/)