4/27/09 Update

I had a meeting with Tyler's teacher and speech pathologist last week. They had given me a print out of where Tyler stood with all of his goals in advance. We used most of the hour to catch the speech path up on Tyler's history. It's the first time I had met her as she's relatively new to his classroom so it was my first opportunity to kind of catch her up on how far we've come with Tyler. For someone just coming in to meet Tyler they can see wow.. he's happy, he makes ok eye contact, knwos quite a few signs and has relatively little behavior issues but he doesn't talk, so let's get that boy talking. I always feel it important for people just coming into his life to know how hard we worked to get him being that boy, yep we want him talking but all those other pieces were taught to him as well and those were our first steps. but yep, I agree.. let's get some more sounds out of him. She says she wants to hear his voice more so I got some tips from her on how to do this. Oh, I digress a little. My point of hte meeting was that I received a HUGE compliment. At some point during my conversation with them I was explaining something and she (speech) interrupted and said, what is your background? Then she goes, I'm sorry Was that inappropriate? I said, no, it's not, I have a degree in political science in psychology. She goes, you really get it, teh whole behavior thing. I said, that's all thanks to carrie and the study. She goes, no, Carrie is great, but we've had other parents in here that have been thruogh that prgoram as well and don't have nearly the understanding you do. I said, wow, thanks. This is great too because then they know they can just tell me something and that I'll be able to do it without a lot of explanation, i.e. they wanted me to start working on gross motor imitation, which we started this weekend (I'll explain later). ok so the poitn of the story is that Tyler is doing great, great great and not only is school great and he's working with greaty people but he has a mom at home that really "gets it" and he couldn't be in better hands :)

Another really cool thing.. I added up the signs that Tyler can physically do on his own and it's 50!!!! So if you think back to when Tyler started school and he knew only a handful of signs, this is amazing, he really has taken off with signing. He understands quite a bit more than that but he can do 50 all on his own :)

In other big news, school discovered the other day that they think Tyler can read! Well not by sounding out letters obviously but that he memorizes words and therefoer their label. Too long of a story to explain how it came about but basically he saw the back of a flash card at school and the front had a picture of a dog on it but speech hid that picture from him and on the back of the card (part he could see) is the label and some questions about the picture. Tyler saw the back of the card and signed dog without ever seeing the picture. Pretty amazing! Speech told Steve about it when he picked him up from school on Friday and mentioned how very very smart TYler is:) yahoo little guy.. we are so proud of you.

so this weekend we worked a lot of gross motor imitation. Tyler has leapfrog tag books that he loves. Grandma got him a dora one for his birthday and then the easter bunny got him an ABC chicka boom book for Easter and those two are his favorites. INitially he wasn't interested and then once he realized how fun it was and holding the ben on his own wasn't such a bad thing, he wanted to play with those books all the time. Anyway, we realized that these books are great reinforcers so we need to restrict his access to them so that we can uset hem as a reward which is what I did this weekend. Tyler and I sat at the table and I'd let him play with the book for a bit and then I'd take it away and ask him to "do this" and I would clap my hands, then I'd say "do this" and I'd pat my head. I'd go through a sequence of about 4 things depending on his regulation level and then give him the book back to play for a bit. We also got a bit of an oral response out of him cause sometimes I would say do this and i'd say "ahhh" and he'd say ah. I also at times used a flash card to get him to sign what was on the card. The signing is easy for him but the imitation of the gross motor skills and sounds isn't as easy so I wanted to make sure that he was being successful and give him some easy tasks with hard tasks. He's doing really well. Steve also was able to watch me do this with Tyler so that he can learn to do it. You can use this technique for anything we try to teach him really. The key is knowing what to do if Tyler makes a mistake and I also made sure to tell Steve when I made a mistake. It all happens so quick that it's sometimes hard not to make a mistake but with more and more practice, it gets easier and we all get better :)

On a social note we were really excited this weekend about something TYler wanted to go do. We went to our neighbors house on Saturday evening to play with the kids next door for a bit. It was kind of late (past bed time) and after about 20 mins, another little boy accidentally ran into Tyler and knocked him down. Well TYler was tired and therefore beside himself so I took him home to get him ready for bed and to calm him down. The next day after lunch we went outside and got the water table and sand box all set up for the boys to have some fun in the sun. We had beautiful weather. Anyway, Tyler kept trying to walk around to the gate in the fence to go back to the neighbors. Although this created such an issue that we eventually had to scrap our outdoor fun and go back inside, we were really happy that he watned to go back and play with the other kids, especially since we didnt' leave on such a good note. There were about 5 kids that night plus Tyler and Ben and then a good 5 adults so it was great that he wanted to be around all those people.

Oh, and we went to the park and Tyler did much better this time. I think we only walked around teh circle maybe twice. Other than that he was playing on all teh equipment with all the other kids. yahoo! He is really good at climbing up the slide.

We are working through our summer plan for him. School has about a 3 week summer program, EMU also has a program we are considering to supplement some of the other time, I think it is also about 3 weeks long and then the other weeks in there we are thinking about having me do the same schedule I did during the studty where I'm with him 2 mornings out of the week to get some extra time in there. He learns so quickly from me when it's just me and him without distractinos. We are just working through the financial aspects, transportation, and work schedules to get something in place.

Ok I think that's all I wanted to mention. We did get a video clip of Tyler working on imitations at the table so I'll hopefully get that posted soon. We are soon gonna get a clip of tyler eating dinner. It's been a while since we posted him eating and we talked about this in th emeeting with the teacher, i.e. just making sure we are all on the same page of how we get Tyler to eat. We used to haev to use all kind of toys to get him to stay regulated. Then we worked with just getting him to sit on his own and want to eat and once we got that we moved him back to teh table and worked on reinforcing his requests to get down but getting down usually meant he'd bring back a book so now we are working on making sure that he isn't having the book all the time and to make sure he's still eating on his own or attempting too.. it's give and take right? Anyway, we talked strategies to make sure we were doing the same thing so I want to make sure that everyone sees it in case they are feeding him to know how to handle/read his mood. We plan to start using real cups with both boys soon. The easter bunny brought them some fun mugs for easter so it's time to start practicing.