Art, School and some not so good news......

Since Spencer has been going to Spectrum he has to come to work with me a few days a week before school so I can get some things done before I drop him off.  Generally we get there at 7 and leave about 8:45 to be at school by 9:00.  He is always so well behaved, he just sits at his desk and watches his movies.  Last week one day, he reached over and grabbed my purple marker and started drawing on a pad of paper....here's what he drew....

Everything on the top of the picture he drew himself.  Once I noticed the "art" he was drawing, I made some little dotted lines with the letters of his name.  He then traced the dots to make his name.  Now, this in and of itself is not that remarkable because he has been "writing" his name like this for a long time.  What IS remarkable about this picture....if you look at the top you can see 2 "e"'s that he drew independently without dotted lines.  If you look further at the picture, you can sort of tell he was trying to write his name independently!!!  A HUGE task for a kid with SEVERE Apraxia, very "weak" hands and fine motor challenges.  YAY little buddy!! 

I am soo proud of him!  We had a review of his most recent VB-MAPP a few weeks ago.  (This is his assessment tool that shows his progress.)  He is currently being evalutead on about 170 points, when he was evaluated in August he scored something like 57 out of 170, when he was re-evaluated in October he scored in the 70's!!  That is VERY impressive in just 2 months to have mastered close to 20 skills!!  He will likely be re-evaluted every 3 months or so....he is making amazing progress!!  The Supervising Therapist said he moves through their programs so quickly that she is having to write new ones every week!!  Her words were "he sure does keep me on my toes and makes me work!!!

On the not so good news front.....if you look back at my previous post I was soo jazzed about the results of his most recent Challenge test....well, I was totally wrong in my assumptions.  The EDTA wasn't any more remarkable than the DMSA, so we won't be chelating any more.  The blood draw did show low Vit D, chromium and Molybdenum.  So we are adding 3 more supplements.  Joyous!!  :)  Next steps with Thoughtful House, I'm not real sure.  I've decided to keep all the Biomed stuff in a holding pattern for right now.  He's doing well, progressing at school, and is generally happy and compliant.  I'll probably touch base with Lucas sometime in March to evalutate how Spencer's doing and see if there's anything we need to tweak or add/change.  I'm kind of tired of all the biomed right now, it's a little bit of work, fairly costly and I'm just not seeing as much as I would like.  That doesn't mean I'm abandoning it, I'm just burned out and need to take a break from it.

Until next time....grace, peace, hope, love and prayers

T