31 for 21: Laughter

*I've joined a blogging challenge for the month of October: Blog every day in October in honor of National Down Syndrome Awareness Month (Down syndrome is medically defined as Trisomy 21, and there are 31 days in October, hence the name 31 for 21).  My posts will not necessarily be about Down syndrome, but I am writing as a person who 1) loves many people w/Down syndrome and other disabilities and 2) desires for others to be able to see what I see: remarkably unique people with much to offer to the world*

Today I want to share a few unconnected instances of pure joy and lightheartedness.  I love when these happen at work, because for a few moments, I am practically forced to leave my responsibilities and time constraints behind for just a few moments and join in the joyful abandon of the person in my care.  Today's such instances:

1) One of my clients at work thinks that sneezes are hilarious.  Always.  We might think this individual is asleep or not paying attention, but if anyone in the room sneezes, there is a loud, guttural laugh from her table.  The louder the sneeze, the louder the laugh.  She reacts similarly to someone dropping something.  She happens to be blind, so I'm sure she'd laugh a lot more if all of things we dropped made loud noises.  But it's so fun because these laughs happen sporadically throughout the day, and never fail to make me smile.

2) When I was getting settled in the room this morning, I approached one of my clients.  She has cerebral palsy and is difficult to understand; she is also hearing-impaired, so our conversations are always a bit labored.  Our conversations also happen to frequently consist of her bringing complaints or problems my way and hoping that I can wave a magic wand to instantly solve them.  Today, I came up to her to explain that she would have a doctor appt around lunchtime and needed to consider eating a snack before she left since her lunch would be late.  She ignored what I said and told me instead that her glasses were too loose and needed tightening.  I reminded her that we'd asked her to ask her group home staff to help her because we don't have a toolkit in the room.  I then suggested that she ask the woman taking her to the appointment and said that the "MACS" (our medical appt coordinators) usually are pretty handy and might have a tool to help her.  I have no idea why, but she absolutely fell apart in laughter at this comment.  What had started out as a tedious conversation about an already-over-discussed-issue became the two of us laughing and laughing and laughing.  Her laugh is addictive and contagious.  Both the lunch issue and the glasses issue were dropped, and we just laughed.  I still have no idea what the joke was...

3) I was giving an afternoon snack to another woman this afternoon.  This lady has many physical challenges that make "easy" tasks quite difficult. She eats only pureed foods and had some applesauce for snack.  She eats with a very small spoon and has a very tight mouth, and I 've joked with her that waiting for her mouth to open is like waiting for a mini-golf door to open up - you have to take your shot at just the right time and hope the ball gets in before the door shuts.   Today...I missed my shot.  And somehow the angle of the spoon coming towards her face and the timing with which she closed her mouth led to that spoon sort of bouncing back and flinging applesauce up and onto her forehead.  I'm sure my own clumsiness was mostly to blame; the physics of it all just really don't make sense.  But however it happened, it was awesome.  There was a big glob of applesauce on her forehead and none in her mouth.  She almost stopped breathing from laughing so hard (scary moment); and I finally had to try to convince her to stop thinking about it, as every bite I tried to feed her was met with this deep chuckle that I was sure would impede the actual eating of the applesauce.

4) In my music therapy session with a client this afternoon, I closed with a very brief improvisation on piano keyboard; we both played freely and I tried to follow her lead as she presented different rhythms and melodic turns.  She presented with some interesting syncopation that she doesn't typically use, and when we finished, she said, "I bet you don't know what I was playing?!"  I asked her to tell me and she said she was playing our goodbye song.  Sure enough, she'd been playing an approximation of the rhythm of the song we always use at the end of our sessions.  She was so proud she'd done it, even prouder that she'd stumped me, and she was simply glowing as we transitioned into our actual goodbye song.  She fought back laughter through the whole song, sang with this gloriously-joyful-if-uncomfortably-strained voice, and made me SWEAR I wouldn't tell her mom what she'd pulled off.

They say laughter is the best medicine, that it has no foreign accent, and all sorts of other things about it.  Today I benefited from the blissful freedom of it.  No trouble understanding laughter, no real point to get across, just a carefree expression of joy, for reasons big and small.