Animal Assisted Happiness

For more info about the fundraiser and sponsoring the goats, please see this link: https://AAH.GiveSmart.com

Thank you so much for supporting our family in this way.

Much love,

Sarah, Pierre, Alina, and Iris

Alina and the Goats

Private tours at AAH offer opportunities to connect with animals, but that much is in the name: animal assisted happiness. It’s *how* the guides at AAH achieve that connection that makes Smile Farm visits such a special experience for our family and especially our amazing daughter, Alina. Alina is autistic and faces lifelong developmental challenges. But at the farm? That kind of thing doesn’t matter. At the farm, Alina gets to be the leader in ways she rarely is given the opportunity in any other environment. Her instincts about everything from which path to take to what animal to visit are honored at every turn for the entirety of the visit. Perhaps for this reason, Alina’s self-knowledge and self-expression have blossomed with each visit and beyond our wildest expectations. These days, Alina knows where she wants to start when she is feeling most excited (“my friend Lollipop!”) and also where to go when she’s feeling out of sorts: the small goats who she knows will help ground her. It’s an incredible thing to realize just how much Alina has learned to connect with herself by connecting with animals and just how loud and confident her voice has become over time. The deliberate focus on and support of her behavior, choices, and language by the AAH guides during these tours has made such a tremendous difference in her confidence and growing sense of self.

Our family used to think of Smile Farm as a safe haven, but these days we recognize it just as much as a place of empowerment for Alina. At AAH, agency and self-advocacy are prized and to watch Alina gain such critical life skills given her circumstance gives me as her parent such hope. The Farm offers such essential training ground to practice them. It also steels my own determination as Alina’s mom to support her in carrying those skills into other environments.

I’ll never get over how unexpected the wins at the farm can be when Alina is gifted those opportunities to such a consistent and emphatic degree. These days it’s like Alina is able to access not just her words but her own ideas so much more easily at Smile Farm now too. For example, when we were at the farm the last time, Alina returned to the small goats as usual but this time she had news for them that I didn’t anticipate her bringing up to them ever at all. As the group of goats gathered around her, Alina informed them proudly of a fact I never could have guessed was perhaps her plan all along: “Great job guys! Simone won!” Alina’s voice carried the same reverence she had shown the gymnast herself as she watched her win gold at the Olympics this year. I had pointed out Biles’ goat necklace to Alina when we watched Biles compete and Alina had seemed impressed at the time, but I never imagined her thinking to tell her friends at Smile Farm of their influence. Alas the goats didn’t seem to register they had been goated in the moment, but Alina? Her smile was golden.

On that note and last but not least, a throwback photo of Alina with the goats and Smile Farm's very own Simone -- a prescient photo if ever there was one.... :)