hippotherapy

[walkitout]

I felt so energized by the whole Westford club phone conversation I decided I'd actually start the get-T.-on-a-pony process, aka, hippotherapy. I wanted to do this before we had an official dx; R. was leery. He thought T. was a bit young, and there is the whole high energy/escape artist/limited language issue. We knew we'd need someone who was prepared to deal with someone like T. The nice thing about hippotherapy is, these people are so prepared for our issues that we're basically the easy people. The down side about hippotherapy are the cost and the length of the waitlist.

B. had taken lessons from someone in Temple, NH as a kid and wanted to take T. there. Turns out B., in her brilliance, had actually found a program with a NARHA certification. If B. can make that work, yay. Otherwise (or possibly in addition to), we'll be more interested in something a little closer (which is to say, less than an hour each way). I started with a list of 4 places, plus one addition, from the Acton Preschool folk. Two of the five programs appear to no longer exist. One of the programs has a 1-5 year waitlist. I left messages (email, voicemail) at the rest, and used NARHA's website to track down some other ones in the area to leave messages at.

You can really tell you are in Massachusetts when you realize there's one place offering equine assisted psychotherapy, and a second place is working on adding that service.

ETA: I'll be touring the can-start-immediately place a week from Monday.

Comments

a little update on the hippotherapy research

[walkitout]

One of the non-NARHA certification places (it's in Andover, but I will refrain from naming it here) supposedly takes some insurance, but it looks like that's only if you put your kid in their therapy program, which may or may not include hippotherapy and is extremely medically oriented (that's actually an understatement). Since I only want the horses as an a la carte item (figuring the local public preschool will be supplying the rest of whatever he might need, until demonstrated otherwise), my only other option there is a group class with caregiver (that would be me, R. or child care) assisting by leading the horse. No one else involved.

That would explain the why-they-aren't-NARHA-certified aspect. It is a program aimed at a wide variety of kids, which is cool and might be good if we already had a sense of how T. would do on a horse. But starting out with that? No.

They seemed disappointed that I didn't have any other questions. I'm betting they don't have much of a waiting list. Especially since their rate on the group classes works out to be approximately competitive with NARHA cert places that _do_ supply a posse to surround the horse and keep the kid safe.