First, I apologize for not posting yesterday – my work laptop has been dying, and it was time for it to be replaced. I didn’t, unfortunately, get everything transferred over, so I’ll deal with the ends of that process tomorrow.
So, it’s finally happened – a decently huge leap forward. Continue reading
I remember when I was a veritable bottomless pit at some point in my teenaged years through my mid-twenties, when I used to be sucking down food day and night. I think most teenaged boys do that at some point, frankly.
All of a sudden, well before his teenaged years, the Monster’s turned into that bottomless pit. Continue reading
I think I’ve spoken on more than one occasion about how one of our biggest problems with the Monster and Autism is his verbal ability. Specifically – he’s very good at communicating his needs at times, and then he’s atrocious at others. Continue reading
Another thing we’re working on with the Monster is expressive verbal skills.
The Monster is very good with descriptions of his environment – he’ll tell you, happily, what any of a number of objects are, answer simple qualitative and quantitative questions about the items, etc. Narrative language, he’s not so good at – he’s not very good at coming up with a description (even prompted) of what happened before, and what will happen in a short while. Ongoing actions, he’s not so bad at telling you about. (IE, we’re in the car on the way to the wife’s parents’, and he’ll happily tell you that we’re “going to gramma and grampa’s house”, present-tense continuing to near-future.) Continue reading
When we went in for the IEP in April, we asked the city to provide ESY services for speech therapy, at the very least. Because their speech therapist hadn’t sent a new report that proved her concern that there’d be some regression (she only sent a letter stating in three paragraphs that she was concerned at the possibility, without evidence), the city denied the request.
Now, it’s not like he’s not had speech therapy over the summer. My insurance is covering a session a week at the Hearing and Speech Agency (HASA), and he’s attending a special day-camp three mornings a week that provides more speech therapy. Continue reading
We all know that we’re supposed to watch what we say in front of young children. As a child, I’ll admit that I did have a tendency (and yes, I still do at times) to repeat phrases and dialogue that I found particularly amusing, and not always at the most appropriate circumstances. Now that I have kids of my own, I really do try to watch how much ‘inspiration’ I give them for such behavior. Continue reading
So, somewhere in the last few days, both the Monster and I came down with something. (Which is why this one’s a bit shorter than my norm – I’m still quite under the weather myself.)
I’m only assuming he must have caught it at one of his camps because no one around me in the office has seemed ill. Of course, the biggest problem is since he’s not the most verbal, we can’t ask him if he’s been feeling unwell. Continue reading
Part of the Monster’s autism is a persistant developmental delay when it comes to his use of language. He’s delayed both expressively and receptively to a large extent, which has the effective result of having him communicate as if he were a little more than a year younger than he really is.
The majority of the time, his expressive language tends to be riffs on canned phrases. Lately, it’s taken up his repeating artifacts – commercials he’s heard on the television or radio, things he’s heard people in his environment say, or weird linguistic artifacts he’s come up with himself. Continue reading
We’re usually fairly careful about paying attention when it comes to the Monster.
We’ve gotten better about keeping track of when the front door is open at the house – he’s only gotten out once in the last week or so without us being directly with him, and that one time my wife caught him before he got far. Continue reading
Last night was the first time that we’ve tried to use Skype while I’ve been traveling.
He really loves technology – he can use an iPad or iPod without too much trouble, and he loves to play with our Nooks. It’s not too difficult for him to get into the books or games he wants to play at any given time. But to date, we’ve kept him off of our computers. Continue reading