Parent Teacher Meeting today...

First... apologies for not blogging this week. Work has shifted for me and I am suddenly much busier. I do not see that easing up.   So blogging will likely be a once a week kind of thing  for a while.

We had our first parent teacher meeting of third grade today and it went really well ~ 

We're still working off of the IEP goals written last January and here's how he's doing on those:

 - Dominic has mastered his IEP goal of sitting for 15 minutes without reinforce
- He's mastered his goal of writing his first and last name independently.
- On his goal of "given a written number symbol from 1-10, Dominic will provide the corresponding        number of an item/manipulative with 80% accuracy over 3 consecutive trials", He's mastered doing this with numbers 1-5, and they've just started folding in the rest.
- On his goal of "During 15 minutes of interactive play with peers, Dominic will participate in at least 3 conversational turns of more than three exchanges over three consecutive chartings" - he's doing better. Last spring he was at 1 conversational turn.  He's up to 2 regularly with an adult.  With peers its harder because they're not as patient in waiting for his response.  Apparently, this week he stated "you are in a tree" during pretend play, AND spontaneously gave his SLP a hug. She was blown away.

The only goal that they're really struggling to see progress on is "Given a simple 4-5 word written directive, written with instructional level words, Dominic will demonstrate comprehension of directive by completing the task noted with 80% accuracy over 3 consecutive trials".   ITs a doozy goal, tho, so i'm frankly not suprised.

Whats really exciting, tho, is that he's doing really well on a keyboard.  Both the SPED coordinator and SLP believe that his academic learning will come from technology.  He can find the right keys and now types his name, the words mother, father, and school from a copy.   The other day, while he was typing, his teacher asked him to type CAT.   He looked at her, SOUNDED IT OUT, and typed CAT.  She is blown away.  So with that she wants to start doing more CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) decoding on the keyboard.  We're fine with that.   

She said that they're no longer shadowing him in the hallway for tasks like going to get his backpack or going to the bathroom and he's doing fantastic with following those instructions without getting distracted. 

They are going to move him towards doing his school work on a netbook probably within the year.  
They were quite excited to hear that we are on the C-HCBS waiver waitlist and have been told we should be off of it in 4-6 months and will then have home based ST and OT maybe twice a week each.

At the end of our meeting, Dominic told us he wanted  puppies.  He took us (independently, after being told by his SPED to show us the puppies) to the other part of the school, to the sensory room. Went to the back shelves and got out 3 little stuffed puppies from a basket.  He took them over to a lego set and played with them for a few minutes.  It was really cute.

The growth he's made in the last 6 months is AMAZING.   I really credit the combination of the various therapies (CD and GCMAF and Cranial work)  we've been doing in opening up the pathways he needed to make this growth and am really anxious to do hard chamber HBOT.

 ~~~~~

because not everyone who reads this blog does facebook... here're some tidbits from this week that i had time to pop on facebook, but not enough time to craft a blog post around...

My status from last night:
Dominic was HILARIOUS at safeway. It was our second stop which was brave of me... and he loves those silly little $3 animals that you put in water and they grow that safeway hangs up randomly in the aisles. So we walk in and he says to me "FISH". I told him we had to shop first. and he's too big to fit in their carts so he had to walk along with me instead. so we got bananas and cilantro, and then headed down the distilled water aisle. At that point, he moved to the front of the cart (rule is he has to keep one hand on the cart at all times) and starting pulling the cart purposefully down every single aisle looking at all the hanging impulse buy stuff. The damned fish he wanted for about 2/3 of the store away. we were there longer than anticipated but it was so hilarious and cute that i went ahead and bought them for him.


A post I put on one of my Autism Mom groups on Tuesday: 
So guys... this morning I was delayed in getting dominic's breakfast ready. He came and got me, and said "MUSH, SAUSAGES, BREAKfAST", led me to the kitchen. I got the oatmeal (aka mush) down and started in the microwave, gave him his pre breakfast pills and DE/RP, got out his avocado and sausage, and pulled the mush out. HE then goit a napkin to cover his sausage, put it in the microwave and started it himself! Then handed me his avocado and said "CUT IT". And then he told me "RAISINS". For his mush. So dialed in, and wanting to help, and trying so hard to get the words out. Its really cool.

This is more than an inchstone.

Maybe not a milestone, but its more than an inchstone.

Dominic has never gotten the hang of washing his hair independently - even with verbal cues, he just wasn't getting it.  He's 8.  We've done it for him for years.  no big deal.

Thursday night, I said to Dominic while he was in the tub "Hey, lets wash your hair".  He said to me "Soap".

Um okay. (we keep the soap on the sink because its amazing homemade allergy free soap from here and I don't want him melting it away in the tub playing with it).

I handed him the soap.

He dumped a cup of water over his head, soaped his hair up and handed me back the bar of soap.

I figured it was a fluke until he did it again on Friday night.   Then last night, I wasn't even in the bathroom to have this conversation and he got out of the tub, got the soap, washed his hair, and then put the soap back. 

This is huge.

So... what do I think contributed to this sudden improvement in self help skills?

After my last post a friend on facebook made the obvious suggestion that Dominic was maybe craving oil since i was finding teethmarks in the butter (and he was snitching things like olives and  cooked bacon from the fridge).  It was kind of a duh moment.  We're doing all this work to help his brain make connections (ultrasound, gcmaf, etc),  and brains need fat to grow.  So i immediately went to Costco and bought 2 giant bags of avocados (which had to ripen, of course) and pulled down the bottle of MCT oil (medium chain triglycerides made from Coconut oil) that we've had floating around in our cabinet since our DAN days.   I started megadosing the MCT - an ounce 2x a day, while the avocados ripened.  Thursday morning, the avocados were ripe, so we added a whole avocado to his breakfast and kept the ounce of MCT at night.

Also... we're a week into the transcranial ultrasound every day...

And, on Tuesday we added a brain support energy patch that our Chiropractor can get (unfortunately i cannot link them because they're for sale to doc's only).  We've used patches from this company before but this is the first time we've used this particular one. 

So I'm guessing all three of those had a hand in it.  Its going to be interesting to see what else shifts over the next couple of weeks.

Steady sailing…

So yes, again, I haven’t put an update out on the blog in a week or so.  We are sailing pretty smoothly along right now.  Of note, and just to keep track…

Dominic’s seriously eating again.  His cravings seem to go in phases, but we are definitely to a phase where he wants to eat things he shouldn’t. I found tooth marks in the butter the other day, for example.  We have now moved all non-acceptable food out to the garage fridge that he cannot get to for the duration of this phase...   He also picked the bacon off a dish in the fridge, ate all the raisins in the open bag in the cubbard (found that one this morning), and the remainder of a can of black olives that was in the fridge.  I swear, we feed him regularly.

We are playing around with adding in Mebendazole at the New moon this cycle – and he had the easiest weekend he’s had in weeks.   I think we’ll do it again next month.    We also have added in Cloves and Ginger (encapsulated) as they are potent antiparasitics.  We will pulse them a day or two a week just to mix things up.

We’ve been keeping an eye on cutting edge research on GCMAF (the immune system repairing formula out of Europe that Dominic has been on since March), and one of the things that came out of a recent conference in Puerto Rico with Dr Ruggerio is that he is seeing great synergies with transcranial ultrasound in combination with GCMAF.  Our Chiropractor is a cranialist and watched his instructional videos about this last week.  The basic idea is the ultrasound will open pathways in the brain that the GCMAF can then work through… As of yesterday, we’ve added transcranial ultrasound, daily, 60 seconds per side of the head,  to Dominic’s protocol.    The first time we did it, 20 seconds into the treatment, he spontaneously said “Wow”, so something is definitely happening there.   Our Chiropractor believes that transcranial ultrasound is going to be a missing piece for all ASD kids, with or without the GCMAF and she is tremendously excited.

Dominic has also this week started sitting still in my lap and letting me do Reiki on him which is an exciting development, as he hasn’t for YEARS allowed this. We’re doing about 20 minute a day, focused on his brain, liver, and intestines.  The  downside is that now he and the dog RACE to see who can get in my lap first as soon as I sit down in the living room.