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MARCH . 2009>

March 9
So it's been a very exciting week. Luke is really starting to talk. He has quite a few more words, and is copying a lot of what we say. Biggest deal is that he finally said the name of our longest-employed BI. She was very stoked, as were we. Yay. Today alone he said "cow", "moo", "blueberry", "cantaloupe" (apparently at preschool snack time), "muffin", "chicken", "bible".

He's also flying through his programs, and is wanting to play more and more. His thought processing time has sped up to the point where he responds automatically (used to have to wait for him to understand what we said, then wait until he figured out the correct response).

At lunch today he actually fed himself. My jaw dropped. Usually I feed him (on a fork) one bite of muffin (or whatever) and then one bite of fruit. Today he had his blueberries, muffin with fork, some bits of chicken and a cup of juice, and he just chose what he wanted, and when, and fed himself (with his fork and/or fingers). This is so unbelievable... in fact, I'm a little skeptical if this habit will continue as it's too good to be true...

I'm also excited to say he had his very first Sunday School class. We've asked his long-time babysitter to sit-in with him and help him along; apparently he smiled mischievously as he attempted to write on the table, not the paper. The teachers were trying hard not to smile as he tested his/their boundaries in this new environment.

March 16
It's for real this time. He's really starting to talk and to keep his words. He is adding so many every day, and copying us whenever we ask. He is AMAZING!!!! Here are some new words: blue, open, door, tree, cake, turtle, meat, hockey, golf, roberto (luongo), bobby, happy, bird, pee, joel, luke, brush teeth, light, car, yes, thank you, water, paper, blue, celery, snowpants, grandma, grandpa, all my and dave's siblings names, go, in, mouse, bath, amen, balloon, bye, hi, lego, weiner.

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The other very fun thing is we went to McDonald's tonight for a birthday party and Luke and Joel were having a BLAST in the fun-room. Luke actually climbed up inside the big vertical tunnels all by himself (tested first to see if he could get back down by himself). He was 20+ feet above us in a tunnel, crawling along inside the horizontal tunnels. Luke's dad and I were floored and couldn't stop smiling. I was so proud of him. Luke's dad went in at one point and showed Luke that it was okay, and after that Luke had no problem maneouvering through them at his own cautious pace. He did not go down the slide, but climbed back down on his own. He would run around and play with Joel and watched the other kids. What a hoot. I could cry from the normal-ness of it all. It was such a huge moment for me to be able to bring my sons to a typical place and watch them play and have so much fun. They even shared the apples you can buy (no caramel sauce allowed), and they split an apple juice. It was a very wonderful evening for us.

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Miss M. (Luke's preschool assistant) wrote this in his back-and-forth book on March 11:
> We are learning a few songs with sign language. As Miss S demonstrated the signs, she asked the children to show her how they do the signs. For the first time, on his own, Luke also did the signs as he saw the children and Miss S do them.
> C, A, and G were all vying for some play time with Luke. M also had a turn with sharing an activity with Luke. While A & Luke were working with lego, Miss S rang the bell for everyone's attention; Luke stopped his activity and looked at Miss S across the room. He held his gaze and stillness until the message was complete. This was the first successful time without me beside Luke.
> I was able to leave Luke for a very long time — for more than 20 minutes without him looking at me or getting "carried away" with the activity or children (in other words — getting too silly).
> Miss R joined Luke & A aksing Luke to come do a lesson and Luke said "No." Miss R encouraged Luke to say "Lego"; Luke said "Gogo" .

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Oh yeah, and the whole "feeding himself" was a total fluke ALTHOUGH he's definitely not as dependent. Baby steps and pick your battles, I guess!

March 20
Wednesday we went to the optometrist to pick out some glasses for Luke. There wasn't a great selection so we decided to look around and found some totally funky ones with sunglass clippies :). They are WAY too cool. OK, I know, he's only 4; but I was pleased to find "the" ones. We pick them up today or tomorrow... I'll post a photo as he TOTALLY looks like the kid from Jerry McGuire now (just have to teach him to say "the human brain weighs nine-and-a-half pounds" - haha). Fortunately, Luke was incredibly cooperative and both places we went seemed to think Luke would take to the glasses (on full-time) easily.

Anyways... had a team meeting yesterday and our BC was very excited about Luke's verbal skills. It was very obvious that all Luke's programs now need to be verbal-based (no more signs). She put two photos in front of him (a bed and a cup) and asked Luke "Where do you sleep?" and he pointed to and SAID "bed". Her mouth dropped. She showed him a picture of a spoon and asked Luke "What is this?" He pointed to it and SAID "spoon". This is amazing because she didn't say the word, so we call this a "spontaneous" word (not repeating what we said, but "knowing" it and saying it without prompting). She also put up and "A" and a "B" and asked Luke "What is this letter?" He pointed and SAID "A". So it was a very exciting day. That and he blew into a New Year's Eve noisemaker! He sucked in air and then blew out with force. I also saw him pick up another horn that he got from a birthday party loot bag, and he blew into it and made noise easily. This is a great step in his "oral motor skills" which go hand-in-hand with strengthening all the mouth muscles necessary for speech. Yay Luke. Oh, and I must mention that he said the BC's name which was the icing on the cake!!!

Today he was walking around the house saying "MMM, A" again and again. These are the first couple lyrics to his favourite song "MMMM-A went the little green frog one day".

Today, Friday, we got the highly complicated test results from the Phillipe August Laboratoire in France. I can't decipher them (science was not my forte), so I've forwarded them to Dr. Bratt. From the little I can glean he has too high and too low levels of a LOT of things - haha, how's that for an interpretation. Anything too high does not mean he has too much, it actually means he's not using it properly in his body because it's all coming out in his urine. We'll see what Dr. B. says. We meet with her May 4 at 10:00am. That gives her more than a month to figure out all the stats.

We have also scheduled an EEG for Tuesday May 5 at 10:30 at Children's Hospital. Hopefully it's a nice normal EEG and we can discuss weaning Luke off the two anti-convulsant drugs he's still on (he's on quite a small dose).

One of our BIs has a son with asperger's (she lives down the street). We're getting together next Tuesday night to talk about how to raise funds. We need to come up with some money somehow to pay for the Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber that we want to rent, and to continue raising funds for other families so they can afford these naturopathic / homeopathic treatments that the government does not cover. Anyone interested in joining us or supporting us with a donation... just email me below, and thanks in advance.

March 22
So we can't really keep up with the words because he repeats them after us when we ask him to... all of them... everyone's name... multiple syllable words... Dutch words (haha)... words that he's been pointing to the objects for years and years (like "jets" in the bathtub, and saying "trees" outside). It's been a wild couple of weeks as we finally get to hear our son's voice. He's also saying a lot of words spontaneously: he was playing with his castle and he opened the door and said "door" and then looked at me again and signed "white".

Luke's allergy tests came back and he's still has a high intolerance for all dairy products, but has no reaction to eggs, nor gluten. He has a moderate intolerance to almonds and pineapple that did not exist before, but we've been giving him almond butter and jam on his toast almost every day for quite a while and he had an overdose of pineapple just before the tests... we'll get the full analysis when we see Dr. Bratt in May. It would be SO amazing to bring eggs back into the diet. She also calculated Luke's cholesterol levels and they are very, very low so we can give him 6 Sonic Cholesterol supplements a day. We started with #5 today and will increase to 6 on Wednesday.

Luke has his glasses. He's adorable and being very good about keeping them on. Click here for the photo, as promised!

March 23
Just had to add a "funny" story. One of Luke's first words that he seems most passionate about is "Light" but it sounds like "Die". Anyways, we go into church the other day and all he does is point to the ceiling and yell "Die" "Die". I can only imagine what people must think and I have to laugh to myself. Hahaha. Just another day with Luke :).

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