"Can I give you a different perspective? A Brain Fit perspective?" I asked the mother of my 7 year old client.

When I was a teacher, I would always feel best about a lesson after I had taught it at least three times. In fact, when you're a new teacher, they say that by your third year of teaching is when you actually start to know what you're doing.

Sometimes my clients think I'm a little weird because I name some of my equipment- like "Big Green Ball", and "Heavy Pink Ball". They give me that rolling eyes look as if to say- "Really, Amy?!?"

In honor of this new site for my blog, I am writing about gratitude. There are so many things to be grateful for when I think about my life since Brain Fit came into it. In the post titled "Thankful", that I wrote last Thanksgiving, I listed many things that I was thankful for. Today, I continue in that spirit with more gratitude.

"I'm soooo tired!". We hear this all the time at Brain Fit. Clients come for a session and they are just so darn tired. It happened with my own son (I remember) when he was also going through the program.

One of the guiding principles at Brain Fit Academy is to "notice without worry or judgment". In the post titled "Notice" I talked about why noticing is an integral part of what we do and different ways that we help kids to "notice".

My new, seven year old client looked at me and exclaimed "That was work?" I smiled and replied "Yeah- it's not the same kind of work you have to do when you're in school or something like that, is it?"

In the post titled "Behaviors are Communication", I talked about how important behaviors are. I talked about how I didn't listen to my client's words, I listened to his behavior. All behaviors tell us something, even if we don't know what it is.

Some of you may have wondered (somewhere along the way) why I named my blog "Being Me- Amy B.". You see, when I started this blog in May of last year, there were two Amys working at Brain Fit- hence the "Amy B.". 

Humans are designed to have rhythm. Nature (in all its glory) is full of rhythm and patterns and beautiful chaos. So are our human bodies and brains.

Typically, we're talking about "Back to School" in August or September, and not March/April. But- there again, what (if anything) has been typical about the last year? 

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post that was difficult for me to write, but also very real and honest to where I am right now. I wrote about how I still don't fully accept my son and his diagnosis. 

Acceptance is hard. The hardest.

I love that at Brain Fit Academy, we use simplified vocabulary when we teach our clients concepts. Be they kids, teens, or adults, we have language that helps us to explain things in a way they can understand.

Whack-a-mole. Remember that game? You know the one- people play it at carnivals and amusement parks. You hold that big soft hammer looking thing and try and "whack" as many moles as you can in a certain amount of time. 

We have clients come to Brain Fit Academy with a variety of "labels". As I wrote about in my post titled "There's Someplace Else", we often have families come to us after they have tried other methods, therapies, and modalities. We are the "someplace else" that often seems to come further along on a family's journey to help their child.

We talk a lot about babies at Brain Fit Academy. We talk about the Baby Brain. We talk about babies in our reflex class. We talk about babies when explaining our methods to parents.

I think most of us most likely take for granted that (generally) we feel safe. Right? I mean it was probably pretty obvious when the pandemic hit and suddenly we had reasons to not feel safe. 

I remember when I was a classroom teacher and it was the beginning of a school year. I taught elementary school and had either 2nd, 4th, or 5th grades in front of me. No matter which of those grades I was teaching, building routines was a huge part of the first few weeks of school.

I was sitting on the sidelines of my Brain Gym® 104 class. We were on Zoom and the participants were working together to practice a few of the movements I had taught them.