5/13/09 Update

Wow..there's a lot going on in the news right now. Many articles are being posted about the a study which shows that about one out of every 10 children can recover from autism by age 9. My philosophy on that.. I had one in 10 chance of having twins so..... :) Cross your fingers that our boy will be one of those 10 percent of kids..we are trying so hard.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30645770/from/ET/

On another note, school is having trouble getting Tyler to go outside on the playground..once he gets out and plays he's fine but for some reason he's struggling to get out the door which of course makes me think back to when I had trouble getting him out of hte car to go to the park playground. Everyone is started to question whether or not he's sensitive to the wind so they are looking at that closely adn will address it if it continues. Tyler had a rough day at school yesterday, they said he ahd trouble transitioning from one activity to another or one toy to another which usually he does not have very much trouble with any of these things. Steve said he did fine at home. We've noticed some resistant on Tyler's part getting into the bathtub for the last month or so and Steve said he got into the bathtub just find last night so hopefully he was just not intersted much in school yesterday and it was just a fluke.

Now that we've had a few weeks of health at our house again, we are finally gonna move forward with the next steps of Tyler's biomedical therapy. We've had the medicine we needed forever but was never able to give it to him due to all the illnesses this winter so steve's gonna make sure we have what we need and it's still good and move forward. We do know to expect some regression during this time and to expect to see more "autistic" like behaviors, we'll see. We wanna keep moving forward that's for sure.

There is also soem news on the bc/bs insurance front. In my opinion it is their way of avoiding lawsuits for discrimination and avoiding having to support the autism bills but putting together their own policy which has significantly less coverage than the autism bills but hey.. i guess life is all about baby steps so we'll take what we can get. Nothing is for sure yet so if anything ever were to become official I'd pass it along.

We are working to get Tyler's summer programming done. We have an appt at the Judson Center (remember the races I do in the fall for them and Justin and Sam's mom's both work at Judson) for an intake appt to get him enrolled in splash camp. See below for a description of the camp.

SPLASH CAMP for AGES 3-6 August 3-21 M-F, ½ day a.m. Location: EMU Children’s Institute $250 per week x 3 weeks = $750 Therapeutic small group work with the ACC-EMU SLPs, OTs and Music Therapists promoting engagement and social growth with similar peers. Low camper-to-staff ratios and creative weekly themes developmentally appropriate for preschool. . Preschool servicse are offered for a few weeks in July and I plan to work a flexible schedule in June once school is out to build on Tyler's skills. Really want to get him eating independently which includes drinking from a regular cup, to improve his skills on taking on/off shoes, pants, etc. Also want to do more gross motor imitations and work with him on sound and word approximations.

Someone sent a message out on the boards yesterday about someone who is an EMU Special Education major who is looking for work this summer as a nanny/sitter and has an interest in children on the Autism Spectrum and also experience with swim instruction. She will be working at the SPLASH preschool summer camp program at EMU in August as an aide...but has the following availability now-July and then daily after 2pm in August. So Steve and I talked very briefly about contacting her to possibly have her work with Tyler this summer on days we do not have much planned for him. We have acccess to a pool and she is a swim instructor as well so to get him swim lessons woudl be great due to his attraction to water and the risks that that poses. Anwyay, we don't want to lose his spot at daycare so we'd need to figure out a way to pay for both but if we do it occasinoally a few weeks here or there hopefuly it wouldn't be too bad. Again this is just all just some ideas we are throwing around to make sure we get the most of out of the summer months.

That's about it I guess. Hopefully I'll remember the camera tomorrow so I can upload the vidoe of Tyler and I working at teh table where he's immitatding what I do. It's a great little video so I'd like to get that posted.

When I first started worrying about Tyler having autism, there seemed to eb no hope, no one to tell us how to help him, no one i talekd to even mentioned recovery. one o fthe docs I talekd about about ABA said that unless he has behavior issues, he doesn't need it (WHAT!!)))Not only are parents posting recovery stories all over the place, but now for doctors to be posting them... welll I just say please cross your fingers and pray every day that our little guy will be one of the lucky ones..... and if not, we will know that we did everything possible to help him and we will love and adore him all the same.