It's a New Dawn

It's a new dawn, it's a new day....and we're all shiny and new. They're new swimmies for Ayla to, by the way.

Welcome to our new blog home. There are a few reasons for the change. The first being that the setup on our webpage blog just wasn't working for me. I couldn't attach video directly to the blog and it was really difficult to get the traffic that I was hoping for.....not that I think everyone will be super interested in everything that I have to say :)

The final reason was the shove that I needed to go ahead and just do it. We have just arrived home from our last ABR workshop for Ayla for this year and so many things came out of it for us....including the possibility of a 10% discount on our ABR machine hire for the year. That may not sound like much but it equates to $204 Euro or $327AU each year. All we have to do is update our blogs weekly and have links back to the ABR website. It might sound fishy, but it's really not. You see, the thing is that ABR is not as widely known as we think it should be. ABR (Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation) is a relatively 'new' therapy for kids with brain injury and cerebral palsy and as such it hasn't been recognised by mainstream health professionals. Only those parents and kids who are involved with ABR know the true value of this therapy so it has always relied on word of mouth. This little dangling carrot, aka 10% off, is just a way of raising the profile of ABR across the world.

It gets better though....In this 'blogging campaign' that's being undertaken by the parents there is an opportunity to win our machine hire FREE for 3 months!!! That's the incentive we are all going after I'm sure. It's worth $1086AU, and when you're paying up to $25 000 per year for a therapy (including flights and accommodation), that really is worth blogging about. If you want to help us save some serious $$, you can! All you have to do is create 'traffic' from this blog to the ABR websites. Tell all of your friends about our blog and our campaign to be slightly less broke this year, facebook about it, tweet it, re-tweet it (on twitter), click on the ABR and ABR Asia links in the panel at the right and have a look around. That's it! It will only take a couple of minutes....c'mon.....you know you wanna help....:)

In all seriousness, if you're reading this and you have a child with a genetic or acquired brain injury, please visit the ABR websites. They really are life changing for both you and your child....and I'm not being asked to say this. Over the coming months I will try to post as many before and after pictures and videos of Ayla so you can see it too. END PLUG!:)

So, we're home and we're tired. It's a fast-paced few days during the workshop. We have theory workshops, videotapings, one-on-one prescription exercise sessions and then training sessions....where Ayla is expected to sit still and be practised on for 2.5 hours.....she loves it, not!:) This time around we have spent a lot of extra money to get the ABR machine which will help us to increase our ABR hours. The machine is able to do some of the hours for us...and before you start thinking that it will take the pressure off us and you may actually see us socialising.....No, it won't. The machine can only do a few of the exercises and is used either during the night or whilst we are doing other 'manual' exercises. We still have 1 - 2 hours of our new 'ball' exercises plus around 80 minutes daily of 2 other manual exercises.

You're probably asking yourself why we would bother spending so much money if it's not reducing the amount of work that we will be doing, right? It's kinda hard to explain but basically ABR is not measured in how many months or years you have been doing the therapy but in how many hands-on hours you have done. The more hours you do, the more quickly the child improves. It doesn't mean more hours, more improvement.....and so on, until your child is 'normal'. All of these kids have the potential to be the best they can be. The more ABR hours we do, the more quickly these kids can move toward being the best they can be. Here's an example: If I have the machine working on Ayla's chest for 20 minutes, while I do the manual exercise on her neck for 20 minutes, that's classed as 40 minutes of ABR. That's like 2 for 1!! That's what I'm excited about. I have the opportunity to, at the very least, DOUBLE our ABR hours.

Until next time.....

By the way....if you are just joining us here on our new blog and you want to catch up on Ayla's story so far....in the right hand panel is a section with the links to earlier blogs on our webpage. Just click on that and you'll be all caught up.