8/4/08

So everyone is finally healthy, yeah! We had another sleepless night with Ben on Friday night so we decided to take him to the doc on Saturday and by Saturday evening he seemed to be doing much much better. Dad also started to get better on Saturday.

As for Tyler, he was absolutely amazing. He did so many wonderful things, I'm afraid I may forget to list them all. Let's see... when I picked the kids up from daycare, Tyler seemed very interested in the other kids. I picked up Tyler to give him a hug and he was watching the other kids run around and was laughing. Then since he knows it's time to leave when mom comes, he started waving goodbye to everyone! He usually takes quite a bit of prompting to get him to wave goodbye and even then it only happens maybe 1/3 of the time. Daycare again had said how he was saying "yes" at appropriate times througout the day.

When we got home I first took Ben in the house and came back for Tyler. I undid his belts and then said "out (pause), out (pause) and then he said OUT! Yeah. When we got inside we were all playing with Ben's Thomas tent and we had brought in some miniature plastic farm animals. Tyler wanted to throw the horse back and forth and I would have him say "horse" as I was throwing it back and forth. I use a lot of techniques to help keep Tyler calm at the dinner table and one of htem is to softly tickle his arms. He's so cute because he'll hold his arm up so he can get as much tickle as possible. Anyway, when I stopped.. he then started to tickle my arm. We went through this cycle 3 times. This is a fantastic social exchange that he's never done before. Then when it was time for to get out of his dinner seat, I asked Tyler if he wanted down. I asked twice and modeled "yes" and he said yes! Anyway, all of that happend in about a 2 hour period on Friday. Everyone is agreeing that the language erally seems to be coming in. Daycare commented that it seems like he's in the babbling stage.

We had a videotaping session on Saturday mornign (to make up for the one we missed on Tuesday). Steve took Ben to the doctor during this time. Tyler did very well. Even though he didn't talk as much as he had the night before, he showed some new skills/interests. One of the things that Florida State wanted us to start working on was immatation play. we moved the farm/tractors (took out batteries for sound) to an area on the front room hoping it would promote better play. The kids were ignoring it in its current location. Anyway, Tyler actually wanted to play with the farm and at one point moved the sheep to a grassy area on the farm to play. I gave him lots of reinforcement by making animal sounds. This is the first time he's been interseted in pretent play like that, woo hoo!

Saturday marked the official end to the first 9 months/parent intervention part of the study. It didn't hit me until Sunday, but I no longer had the pressure to get in my 25 hours with Tyler. Not that I don't plan on working with him and using the skills I've learned, I plan to use those every day. It's hard to explain unless you live it, but there is an incredible amount of pressure to turn everything into "therapy" for Tyler, in fact, we almost had to in order to meet the 25 hours. Every family walk was turned into ways to foster communication with Tyler, i.e. stopping and going with teh stroller, signing, etc. It was never just a relax and walk with the family kind of event. Sunday was the first time that we didn't have that pressure. Lunch time was great because Dad fed Tyler. Normally mom would need to feed Tyler all meals on weekends as it was part of our routines for the study adn in order for time to count, mom needed to be the one to work at meal time. Sunday I was able to each my own lunch, at my own pace, with both hands! It was very excited. Now, I'm going to work with Dad and Grandma on mealtime techniques. They've both seen me work with Tyler but until you do it yourself, it's hard to take it all in. So many little things to remember.

Anyway, that's the latest with us. Another big week this week as we transition into the new study. I have a huge parent interview at U of M this week, takes about 3 hours and is heart wrenching (did it for the previous study) and then Tyler has an official evaluation this week as a conclusion to see how he progressed the first 9 months of the study compared to baseline. Then next week we start the new study. There is a parent education class as well as Toddler Play Groups. The caregiver has reading assignments from the More Than Words book. It's quite a bit of reading!