Alpine Aug Parents meeting / and Preschool update

We had our August parent meeting over at Alpine this afternoon and things are going really well.

Dominic continues to show good compliance, which indicates his receptive listening has improved greatly from the beginning of the summer. He’s following an instruction more immediately instead of gazing off into nowhere. He’s doing great with his new body part program and has generalized very well the things that he’s doing for us at home.

Some of the good signs we’ve seen at home that we mentioned today in our meeting (and were reassured that they were in fact excellent signs)

– Dominic is now labeling pictures of himself as “me” instead of “Dominic” when asked who they are.

– Once, last week, Dominic actually answered a yes/no question with a very quiet “yes”. (we about fell out of our chairs. This is a HUGE goal. It hasn’t happened since, but once is where it has to start)

– Yesterday, I was working on my never ending weeding project outside, and I asked Dominic to go inside and bring me my water. He went inside, went upstairs, got my water off the counter, and brought it to me. This is HUGE, because look at all the opportunities for distraction along the way.

– When Rod told Amber that Dominic was methodically digging in the sandbox at pickup from preschool this morning, and gently letting the sand go, she was very pleased – apparently they’ve been working on good digging at Alpine (instead of wildly flinging the sand around) – because it means he’s generalizing the skills he’s learning at Alpine over to preschool.

Dominic had another great day at pre-school this morning as well. Today was his first meeting with the new school Speech therapist, who he will work with twice a week. They’re getting to know each other, and apparently he did well. So far, the D11 staff seems surprised and impressed with how well Dominic is doing – yesterday the teachers words were that he had an incredible first day, he’s doing great with compliance, he’s participating… amazing what 2 ½ months of ABA therapy will do for you…

We talked Long Term plan at Alpine today, as well, and right now we’re committed half days through May, and then full days for next summer. Then depending on how he’s doing, and if kindergarten is half or full day, would depend on if he went back to half days in the fall. Right now, we’re operating under the assumption that insurance isn’t going to pay (they might, we’ll know by Mid Sept what the decision is for the June invoice), and are continuing to work on creative fundraising ideas. (anyone with suggestions can feel free to leave a comment… we’re seriously open to anything)

The biggest hurdle for him is language. He can fake it really well but he simply doesn’t have the ability to communicate verbally or nonvebally and that’s what we’ve got to build. Its coming, and we expect that being in a classroom of neurotypical, verbal children will only help matters.

Oh, and we’ve decided looking at the last couple of weeks of data (on my spreadsheet) that we’re going to add the Enhansa back into his routine. He’s been much less focus’d and had higher behaviors off of it. So we’ll see what that does this second time around. He’s been off it entirely for 2 weeks, and we’d reduced the dosage over a weeks time.