Editor's Note: The Nipper family is five weeks into the Fit Families Challenge from Special Olympics Arkansas! The family of four -- Luke, Christy, Miles (3 years) and Molly (9 months) -- is participating in the six-week program designed for individuals with special needs and their families. The Fit Families Challenge encourages physical activity and healthy eating for the whole family. Read more about the free program here, and check out more posts about the Nipper family's journey here.

“Hey, did you hear that?” I yell to Luke, who is changing Molly’s diaper while I work with Miles on speech sounds. “He just repeated each of the sounds on level 4 of his speech app …and almost perfectly.”

This is just one of the exciting improvements we have seen during therapy time over the past few weeks. It took a change in our schedules for me to pinpoint the reason for the improvement.

Trying to fit in therapy and exercise with a limited amount of time can be overwhelming. Prior to the Fit Family Challenge, I would always attempt therapy first and follow that with exercise (for the portions of therapy that do not overlap). That is my personality; I like to get work done first and play second. However, over the past 5 weeks, I have learned I’m doing it all wrong. Miles does much better if we exercise first and work second.

With cross country season over, I now have my afternoons free to spend with Miles and Molly. On Monday, we started coming home, having a snack, and diving into our therapy program. To me, this made perfect sense…get the therapy done so that when Luke gets home from work we can have fun exercising and hanging out as a family. I was expecting therapy sessions to go better since we would have more time. In reality, it was a time when very little was accomplished. After four trying afternoons, I decided to flip the schedule. We took a walk around the block, did an obstacle course and then started on the therapy program…Miles did amazing. He was identifying sight words, naming objects, following two- and even some three-step directions, and accurately replicating many speech sounds.

Although I felt strongly the change was influenced by exercise, I decided to experiment. The following day, I let Miles come home and play independently for the same amount of time we had spent exercising the previous day. Therapy that day was again more difficult with less visible output from Miles. He cooperated, but did not perform even close to the level of the previous day. Since that experiment, we have been doing 10-15 minutes of exercise before each therapy session and the results are consistently good!

When we started the Fit Family challenge I was expecting it to help us with exercise, healthy-eating, and teaching Miles and Molly about the importance of these things. Helping with cognition, focus and speech has been a welcomed bonus!