Middle school!!

Completely unrelated photo for cuteness factor  :)

Dominic started Middle school almost 2 weeks ago and its going much better than we anticipated. It took a few days for his teacher to figure him out, and of course he is doing is best to sandbag.  I'm getting postivie updates almost daily.

Funny story - one of the first days, his teacher emailed me that he was upset about his shoe being untied and much happier when she tied it for him.  I told her he's been tying his own shoes for over a year... she responded with "that little stinker"

Tales from Home Based Therapy - Writing!

Interestingly enough, what we've observed in Dominic lately is that he will absolutely focus beautifully for writing words out.  He has a VERY hard time focusing for reading.  I believe this is a vision issue still, and am hopeful we can resolve it with the OT vision exercises we are doing, as the vision therapy piece took insurance months to reimburse. 

So here he is today, writing words, sounding them out,a nd then reading back what he (legibly!!) wrote.

Hermetic Homeopathy, Week 3

this week was week 3 of our homeopathy protocol.... the first week of the gold remedy which is the one on which most people see aggravations / stalling of progress.

We have seen some small nuances, but nothing huge.

There was the riding of the camel, alone, at the Renassiance festival on Saturday

And on Monday night, after his finished OT, I told him to go downstairs and take a shower.  Usually this means I have about 2 minutes before he is screaming for me to come down and supervise.  He didn't.  I wandered down about 5 minutes later and he was naked and putting himself in the shower, with both large dogs already crated.

Hmmmmm.

Renaissance festival 2016

We made our traditional trek to the Renaissance festival on Saturday and I'm just now getting to uploading pictures.

It was the perfect day - cool and rainy.   This is Dominic's friend the crane.

Rain bedraggled family pic...

This is huge.  Every year we've gone since Dominic regressed he LOVED riding the animals.  Specifically the Elephant and the camel.  So we pay to ride.  By the time we got to the camel, I only had enough cash left for one person to ride.  It was a tremendous debate, because there is no seatbelt and i've always been afraid he'd not pay attention to holding on - so I always ride with him.

We decided to try.

And he ROCKED riding the camel by himself.  Best $5 i've spent in ages.

then came the petting zoo, where he fed every animal he could.   They are quite tame.

We were sitting in the shade (rain had stopped) and I snapped this.  I love it. FANTASTIC picture. 

More playing with the camera.  I think he looks absolutely mischevious here.

And, as always, a dip in the wishing well pond on the way out.

Tales from home based Therapy - rocking out speech Aug 2

I got all three of these videos today during Dominic's speech therapy session.  he is doing SO well, its awesome.

I caught the very beginning of the session - where he picks what he's going to do for the day. Miss Sarah has a visual chart for both the schedule and for sad faces if he doesn't comply.  (10 sad faces, which he's NEVER gotten, mean he doesn't get his reward at the end).

The rest of this first video is some of his rhyming work:

The second video is working on sight words. He got REALLY bored with flash cards, so now she is using a simple book to help him learn his sight words.  He's really making astonishing progress.  Look at the FOCUS

And the final is him putting together sentences with an iPad app - the program reads him a sentence and he has to then unscramble the words and put them in order.

Normally we get 6 different things in a 45 minute speech session.  So this is about half of the things he would do on a normal session.

Whats awesome to me is that he's sitting, entirely willingly at the table, he's focused, he fully engaged. Its fantastic.  He is making wonderful progress.