Happy October

Pardon my French, but Tyler is kickin' ass and taking names in Kindergarten! The boy is "wooing" his teachers and therapists this year, and frankly his parents too. His speech therapist is programming new words/pages onto his dynavox every 3 days and he learns them very quickly. He now loves his dynavox as much as he loves his ipad :) Grandma was trying to play with it one day and he pushed her hand away and pressed "DON'T" lol. He uses it to make requests like more pancakes, juice, etc. He also uses it to label objects. Ye's starting to tell us dates and what the weather is like. At school, he's now routinely using it to answer questions at circle time. He is writing (using his dyanavox so I guess I'd say putting together) 4 word sentences. He's understanding math concepts and syllables. He's enjoying interacting with the typical kids (he's in gen ed 1 hour a day) and showing them his dynavox skills. His fine motor is coming along as well, yesterday he wrote the number 13 all by himself. Teachers and therapists can't believe how smart he is and comment on how sweet and happy he is and he's a joy to work with.

The day that we found out he wrote a sentence we were just astonished, proud, humbled and appreciative. I think it first got a big "WOW'..... then just a relfection of where we all once were and where we are now. WOW, huge difference and so many people to thank. Our pediatrician in Tecumseh listened to our concerns when Ty was just an infant and sent us to a behavioral pediatrician as well as getting us in touch with early on services. The behavioral pediatrician then got us in touch with the UMACC where Tyler started the First Words Project and then the Early Social Interaction Study. By the way, UMACC Closes this month :( Dr. Lord has moved on to another organization. That's when we got our official diagnosis and started working with BCBA Carrie Miller, awesome! Not only did Carrie teach us how to better support Tyler in every day life, but also how ot get him to want to communicate with us, and how to play with him, get him to learn, etc. But she introduced me to the wonderful Amy Sanderson who pathed the way to a better education for Tyler. He started school at 30 months old, 5 days a week, 5 hours a day. Amy lead me to Kelly who got us into see Carol Fast, Ty's amazing private speech therapist. Carol, via her IPAD, showed us that Tyler knew how to read and told us to get moving on an assistive technology meeting. Some of Tyler's guradian angels:) got him an IPAD and we were able to use video to show the school leaders how capable Tyler was using electronics and how it speaks to him and how it could benefit his education. Kelly helped prep me for that meeting.... and voila.. introduction to Tyler's dynavox. The speech therpaist couldn't keep up at first with programming. We are firm believers that the dynavox and the ipad are the reasons that Tyler was able to move up to a higher functioning classroom setting.. which brings us to where we are today. Not sure where we'd be without all those people leading us down the right path but I'm more than thankful. Ty's doing awesome.

And Mr. Ben has a girlfriend :) Her name is Rachel, very cute little girl who is the daughter of one of my friends. A fellow runner, who has 3 children, the oldest boy has autism, a typical child and then cutie Rachel who is in Ben's class. We have his parent teacher conference next week so we'll here more about how he's doing at that time. We get a daily notebook sent home with Tyler so we are just kept more up to date as the classroom size is significantly smaller and it's easier to communicate with each parent than in Ben's class.

We are becoming good friends with people in our neighborhood and overall just creating a really great circle of support in our new home. We are very happy that we moved and hope our landlord will let us extend our lease. Other than that we are just gearing up for Halloween. Ben picked the theme, long ago, Batman. Ben is batman, Tyler is Robin, Steve is the joker, grandma is the cat woman, the babysitter is going to be batgirl and I'm Poison ivy. We are hoping to decorate the front porch like a batcave and are hoping to find a way to turn our radio flyer into the bat mobile with Robin at the steering wheel. Tyler doesn't trick or treat, in fact he's never even had candy, he doesn't like it. So he just rides in the wagon and plans on the ipad while Ben trick or treats. Will be interesting to see if we are judged at all, in past years, we get a few snide comments about Tyler having an IPAD and being so young. We live in a new neighborhood now and being that Ann Arbor is very open and understanding, I'm hoping that it's just accepted as it helps us all have fun on Halloween as a family.

Love to all,
xoxo