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Tyler did fantastic sitting at dinner last night. The only times he got up from his seat was when we had a surprise visitor and mom had to step away. It was a good test though cause now I know he knows that if I'm not there, he can get sneaky! Breakfast this morning, however, was not quite as successful but he's not always supermotivated to eat breakfast anyway so that could be part of it. Tyler s really doing a great job of usung vocals to get something he wants. It's amazing to me how far we've come. Remember at the beginning we were just trying to get him to look at us. Now he automatically makes sounds w/o being prompted.

As for words/signs. He said uh-oh again this morning. In fact i wish I could remmeber all he said when I got him out of bed because he said uh oh and then I said another word and he used that same sounds even though he couldnt get a world out. He was really doing a good job of immitating me. Also today when we were reading a book (while being videotaped) we came accross a tiger and unfortunately my sounds for a tiger are the same as lion. So I said Tiger and made a "roar" sound and he spontaneously signed for lion, yeah! So I said yes, lion says roar, this is a tiger. That gets me back to me needing to learn more of the jungle animal signs, I mostly only know farm animals. But I was ssooooooooooooooooooo excited that he did that on his own!

Tonight I have a parent education class (we have these monthly) and I'm excited because I think two more families are joining playgroup/parent education and I know one of the families so it should be a good night to get more of a group environment.

On a side note, I can't wait for Tyler to get to know Ben better. Ben is so funny. He makes me laugh all the time. Last night he was killing me on our walk. He was singing Old MacDonald to me and was using a rhinoceros as his animal, so funny. oh, and we ran an errand last nighta nd on the way back I was at a stop light and although I was kind of talking to Ben, I was doing it for Tyler's benefit as I was saying the light was red, we have to wait until it turns green to go. Ben said, "I know that Mom!" Oh my... he's already a teenager. So cute.

Oh, I left one thing out of the blog when referencing Jenny's book. The only "father" warrior in the book was talking about how you kind of lose friends and family when you are in a battle with autism. Not only is all of your spare time and thensome used up by autism but, everything else in life that seems so important to other poeplejust begins to feel pretty insignificant in comparison. So this dad joked about a friend telling him about re-doing his kitchen and this dad was like, "I don't give a shit about your kitchen". I laughed outloud because just recently I had went out for a drink with some coworkers. They were all older than me and talking about hte economy and how it's effecting their retirement and changes they should make, etc. After about 20 minutse of this discussion, I finally said, I am trying to find a way to pay for Tyler's biomedical treatments and diet and not lose my mind with all this scheduling, I could give a shit about my retirement fund. So don't take this literally, I honestly welcome conversations that having nothign to with autism or anything else going on in my life, it's refreshing to give my mind a break once in a while. It, autism that is, definetly brings all the selfless people to the forefront in our lives. We can't afford to give much back to family and friends, emotionally or physically at this time in our lives and we appreciate all of you that continue to give your love and support to us unconditionally. One day, I promise, we'll be able to be there for you again too!