My Nonprofit Reviews

Our son Max had been on the waiting list for services at Little Bit for just over two years. When I called to see where Max was at on the wait-list I found out from the fabulous Nicola Towers that they were just finalizing the Summer Camp sessions and we could get Max into one of those! I had a vague idea what hippotherapy was about. Watching Max’s first day at Little Bit (in Cowpokes Summer Camp) was a revelation. Max was 3-1/2 when he was diagnosed with autism at the UW CHDD (center for human development and disability). He was seven in the summer of 2009 when we got him enrolled in Cowpokes Camp so by then our family had been through more intake appointments, assessments and evaluations in more clinics than I can remember now. Most of these evaluations and services focus on deficits: “Max lacks sustained eye contact.” “Max has no peer play skills” “Max has extremely limited expressive speech”. What a depressing and limited picture! No mention of Max’s flexibility, his sense of humor, his kindness. No sense of him as an individual child at all. His first morning at Cowpokes Camp Max was a little overwhelmed: a group of unfamiliar, noisy kids, an unfamiliar place, unfamiliar routines and expectations. He sat at the table where everyone was gathering, just like he was supposed to but looked a little lost and disengaged. Ryanna Steele introduced us to the group. The young boy she’d introduced as Alexander came over to me on his crutches and said “What’s Max’s disease?” Wow. Not ‘how old is Max?’ or ‘Where does Max go to school?’ Or ‘Does Max have brothers or sisters?’ What is a kid’s world like when “What’s your disease?” is the important personal information to share. While I’m still trying to process this, Ryanna Steele comes back and says “I have a volunteer I’d like to pair up with Max: she’s a Special Ed. Teacher in Seattle and has several years experience working with autistic kids. She’ll be great at getting Max involved and helping him out when he needs direction.” Ryanna saw Max was struggling, saw a way to enable him to succeed and took action – all in less than five minutes! That… is Little Bit; finding what each kid needs to succeed and making that next thing happen. When we picked Max up at the end of his first full day we got a glowing report: Max is so comfortable on the horse! Max was very cuddly with Brooke! Max didn’t want to rope a bale of hay he went after the cat instead! It felt like everyone there was looking at Max with a mother’s eyes; they saw his charm, his willingness to please, his resilience. They also saw his stubbornness and his often short attention span – but they see those traits without judgment and didn’t use them as an excuse to lower their expectations. Max has been in regular one-on-one hippotherapy with Sara Niwah since October last year. In those nine months Max has spoken two words together (horse please). He’s learned to zip up his coat by himself, he can follow some two-step directions, he wrote his name for the first time in a birthday card for a classmate and he made his first friend. To have Max someplace like Little Bit where his strengths and gifts are recognized and where he is valued for what he has to offer when so much of the world wants to diminish him with a label, “autistic” “high functioning” “delayed”, means more to me than I can express in words. We are so grateful for each and every achievement but grateful most of all for the environment, the world Little Bit has created, a place where these achievements are possible, expected, aspired to. Our family is fortunate to be part of Little Bit’s world. And thanks to continued fundraising efforts and expansion into the new facility I hope it will be possible to share this beautiful world with other families.

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