Update and a couple weird new words

I’ve really been slacking lately. I keep meaning to update but….. The autism walk was really fun. There were a lot of people there. I was able to let Thomas run around for a little bit without having to worry about losing him. I think Thomas had a good time. When it was time for the actual walk, we mostly walked with Thomas on our shoulders because he was tired from running around beforehand. All in all, it was a good time.

We are finally gearing up to start Thomas in the autism preschool. Our final meeting with everyone is Monday, so we’ll get details then. I’m really nervous. He’s going to have a great time and I’ve heard nothing but good things about the program. But still, he’s only two and he’ll be riding the school bus and will be at the Elementary school and it’s just a little scary for me. I still have not looked at the school myself. Sam really liked it, but I think I need to get over there one of these days to actually see how everything works. I wonder if they would let me go with him on his first day. I might be more of a distraction than a help.

We’re hearing a lot more words from Thomas although very often we aren’t sure of what the words are. He sometimes even talks in short sentences, where he is obviously saying something specific, but we can’t figure out what those words might be. It has become a lot more obvious that he has motor planning problems in his speech. My layman’s diagnosis is apraxia. A lot of kids with autism have apraxia, but I’m not sure it would be considered a secondary diagnosis. I don’t really know how that works. You can see that he’s working really hard sometimes to figure out how to make his mouth say a word we are working on. He’ll often just be able to say a small part of the word. Or, he’ll be moving his mouth just right, but doesn’t put the sound with it. It takes a lot of concentration sometimes. We also saw in one of the videos of our Play Project session that if he was very still, the word (“down” in that case) would be very clear. The more motion in the rest of the body, the harder it was for him to say the word. Kind of weird. I think we are only up to 10 or so words in current use (because he often loses or stops using words and/or skills as he learns new ones), but I think he is having a bit of a language explosion. I think he understands so much more and I really do think he is saying a lot that we just don’t understand yet. I think as we work more on how the different sounds are made it will help tremendously. In last night’s session, we had three new words. Very weird collection of words: Glasses, Delicious and X-ray. Delicious is a hard word to be starting with, but it was getting pretty clear by the end of the night! The cutest thing ever. We have a set of flashcards with the letters of the alphabet and X-ray was the picture for “X”, and he just started saying it over and over. If you think about it, X-ray really a fun word to say. Just ask Thomas!