We're still here!

  Wow, it's been a long time since I've updated our progress!  We've been quite busy lately with so much school and therapy and even squeezed in a vacation over Spring Break.  Andrew has been doing very well at therapy but it is slow going.  His behaviors haven't improved much as we had hoped but we have been told by many people who don't see him often that he is more verbal.  I guess we hadn't noticed much because we know he's had these words all this time but he's becoming more comfortable with using them around everyone.  He says words every day now whereas in the past it seemed we'd hear words a couple days then nothing but sounds the next few.  Also, when he says things he looks right into your eyes and shouts them at you lol!
  We are also excited that he's been sleeping great.  I'm almost afraid as I say this that I might jinx ourselves.  It was very common when we put Andrew to bed that he would whine a little and head butt the wall.  In fact he eventually head butted a hole right in the wall next to his bed.  We created a padded headboard and nailed it to the wall after that but he would still bang his head into it nearly every night before falling asleep and sometimes during the night.  Well, I'm happy to say that he hasn't been doing that at ALL lately.  He's getting a good 9 hours of sleep every night without disruptions.  It's really life changing when we can all get quality sleep!
   We have added speech therapy at another clinic once a week and he is enjoying that as well.  She has introduced a bit of the feeding therapy we are also going to be doing there.  In the summer we will be adding an extra session specifically for the feeding therapy so we can get him to eat more foods.
    Unfortunately our Brain Balance funds will be running out at the end of May so we have about 6 weeks left there for now.  But because Jason's insurance now covers speech therapy and occupational/physical therapy we also plan to add a session of occupational therapy this summer.  We plan to continue doing the Brain Balance exercises and listening therapy with Andrew here at home while we take a break from them.  We will stay busy with that and the other insurance covered therapies and maybe we will be able to afford to go back to Brain Balance at a later time. 
  There are still 6 weeks to go there though so we're going to utilize every minute and get any bit of knowledge we can out of the place that might help Andrew keep moving forward.  We have definitely seen changes; I was just hoping they would be bigger and faster but as Andrew has taught us...progress is progress and we'll take whatever it is :) Hope everyone has a Happy Easter! 

Stay tuned....

This week was a great week at therapy as well as Andrew's 8th birthday!!  He has been more cooperative during his therapy sessions so this week we have moved to hour sessions instead of only 30 minute sessions.  Thursday he stayed engaged with her almost the entire session.  During some of the exercises he is trying them on his own rather than having to be manipulated into the poses; and at home he is even wearing his headphones to do the therapeutic listening.  Previously we just would play it over a stereo in the room with him which is not as affective.  Praying we have no more sickness or snow days so we can keep on schedule and get these two hours in each week.

We also celebrated Andrew turning 8 years old this Wednesday.  For the first time we decided to have a few neighbor friends over for a short party to celebrate with him.  He did surprisingly well!  He is very antisocial of course and usually when kids are here he runs to his room and hides the whole time.  He did this at the beginning when kids started arriving but we were able to lure him out with a cupcake and he stayed to play a game and open gifts without crying or getting upset!  There were even quite a few smiles!  While we don't expect him to start playing with the other kids, it's just nice to be able to be in the same house as other children without him whining or pinching people. 
Stay tuned to our updates, we hope to start having some exciting things happening with his progress!!

Happy New Year!

It's been awhile since our last post.  We had quite a break from our normal routine and therapy over the holidays.  Andrew came down with the flu before the holiday break then after the break we ended up having a few snow days!  It's been nice getting back on track and attending therapy twice a week again.  Andrew was just getting back into his routine and getting more comfortable with therapy and then this week he caught a cold!  Will this Winter NEVER end!!??  Good news is, in the next few weeks as long as he works hard and gets through his sessions without meltdowns we will be moving to hour sessions twice a week.  Although he's been attending the Brain Balance Center for 2 months now, he's really only had about 5 hours total of therapy.  I get asked by friends and family often about how he's doing and if we're seeing changes but we can't expect things to change so quickly.

Another wonderful thing has happened this year...our insurance plan has changed and will now pay for autism therapies for him!  Unfortunately it does not apply to the Brain Balance program but we are so excited to finally get him some speech therapy and occupational therapy outside of his school day.  We are working on finding the time to get him started, he's going to be one busy little boy!  We can't wait to see what amazing things 2014 holds for Andrew and us!

Winter

Therapy has been going well.  We missed a day this week due to Andrew having the stomach flu but he has been pretty happy and isn't fighting too much to do what is asked of him during his sessions.  If he comes into therapy crabby they usually start with a letter or number activity to calm him down before getting to the hard work.  Andrew LOVES letters and numbers.  It's not anything new, but he loves to spell words and often we find him spelling things with his blocks or magnet letters.  It's almost as if he just sees the word a couple times and memorizes it, then becomes obsessed with spelling it everywhere.  After getting him on the school bus the other day, I walked into our basement to turn off the lights he had left on down there only to find he had dumped a bunch of our board games out all over the floor.  Then I saw this spelled out with the game letters.  Winter was one of his spelling words at school this week!  Instead I decided to leave the mess on the floor for awhile :)

Therapy update #2

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday!  After having a short week for the holiday we got back on schedule with therapy appointments.  Andrew didn't have a great day Tuesday and when we pulled into the parking lot he started getting crabby.  He wasn't very happy during the half hour session and didn't do as much which got me a bit discouraged.  I was so worried that he didn't like it anymore and wouldn't want to go.  Luckily, I was wrong.  When we got there Thursday he went in smiling again.  He worked hard with his therapist and when it came time to do this computer activity where he is supposed to listen to a sound in the headphones and then click a clicker when he hears something; he actually let her put them on his head!  In the past he refused to put them on because when he hears sounds in the headphones it freaked him out.  Granted he only kept them on about 30 seconds but after taking them off, a couple minutes later he voluntarily picked them back up and put them on again so it's at least SOMETHING!  Look at that smile on his face!  I'd love to tell you all we are seeing improvements but he's only had about 2 hours of therapy total so far so there's a long way to go.  I'm just glad he is happily participating for now :)

Our first week...

Andrew has had his first two therapy sessions this week.  He did pretty great.  He willingly ran to the back room when we arrived because he remembered all the fun things that were there when we previously went for the evaluation.  During the second session there was a pretty minor meltdown when he didn't want to do a certain activity.  He tried to head butt the therapist and then the floor.  She reacted amazingly by telling him she understood he needed a break.  She calmly sat across from him on the mat and gave him his favorite therapy putty for him to play with. Then she immediately joined in with the putty and within a couple minutes he was smiling and laughing with her!  She just seems to have a way with him. 

I LOVED watching through the little one sided window to see how Andrew is when I'm not around.  I've never been to a place that had that before.  I snapped a few photos through the window so hopefully they don't mind.  We also got some at home exercises that we'll be trying this weekend as well as a CD to listen to daily that is supposed to have certain sounds that stimulate certain parts of his brain.  We'll see how he tolerates that!  Keep checking in for updates with us.  We only have one session next week due to Thanksgiving but are excited to keep on going!

 

Here we go!!

    Well, tomorrow is the big day!  Andrew will have his first therapy session with the Brain Balance program tomorrow after school.  We are overjoyed with the generosity of all our friends and families.  We have officially raised $5420 as of this morning to pay for the initial start up costs with the program.  This will cover 36 hours of therapy for Andrew.  We can't wait to see how it goes.

   For "typical", verbal children the program suggests one hour sessions 3 times a week but with non-verbal children on the autism spectrum they like to start off a bit slower to see how things go.  They want to make sure that Andrew stays engaged the entire session and since he has a short attention span we will be going twice a week at 30 minutes per session, but will most likely increase as time goes on.  The good news is that no matter how fast or slow you go with the program, the results should be the same.  Kids don't "lose" the progress they make.  We will update at the end of the week to let you all know how it goes in his first couple of sessions.  He has not been a very good boy lately so pray for us that he is cooperative for the therapist!