Moves in Curves

C came up to me yesterday evening and said, “Mario and Luigi have a message for us. Where did all the cave people go? The Princess sent a letter and it says at dot com Mario and Luigi you can play a game with Valley of Bowser and lava dinosaurs. I want to play it all by myself on your computer, without you watching, okay? You know at Mario and Luigi dot com you can do it on some games on your computer right now. Right now, okay? That what you’re supposed to type. Right there *points to browser URL* Go all the way up there at the tippy top.”

I started laughing at him, and he gave me a look and said, “What’s so funny?”

I wrote an article for Hippymom about CAS. Read it here.

Want to listen to my boys’ speech to hear what CAS sounds like? Our YouTube channel.

Our Apraxia Kids STARS page.

I uploaded that dinosaur video yesterday, and YouTube popped up a video in the “more like this” column that I had put up last year from their 4th birthday. And it was so odd to watch it and think it was only a year ago, because our paradigm has shifted so much since then. They were silent. The only word either of them spoke in the video was a garbled “Mama”. C signed a few times in the video, and otherwise they were silent. It jolted my heart to watch it. I listen to them now and worry about their pronunciation, they’re still so distorted, leaving out final consonants, and certain sounds are very hard for them to make, but they talk. They have a huge vocabulary. They talk in paragraphs. They lecture me. It’s wonderful. It’s such a huge change in just a year. It lets a little of the tension out of my personal cloud of motherly worry to see that change, and it gives me hope that they will get there one day. I want to try to remember this huge explosion of communication they’ve had in the last year whenever I feel panicky about their future, wrap it up in my heart and keep it close, something to give me hope.

Yes, I’ve now got my old Blogger posts imported to here. Well, most of them. I deleted a few, but the stuff about my kids’ speech progress was mainly what I wanted. It was fun to go back through them (adding categories and tags) and see how much progress my boys have made in the last two years, especially in the last year. A year ago, Weapon X could only say 9 words, and that was being generous counting approximations and “uh-oh”, which is only sort of a word. He’s talking in paragraphs now. His speech is still very distorted, but it’s a huge improvement in his expressive language, and he’s still making lots of progress. This morning he said “Dat’s so funny” with an F sound instead of the usual “punny”. Project Alpha’s made huge progress too, though is also very distorted. But it’s really encouraging, and sometimes I forget how far and how fast they’ve really come, so it was a good reminder. I still worry a ton about them, because they are still very delayed in their expressive language, but it’s getting there. It’s a huge relief to have them communicating. I used to cry almost every night about them not talking. And now, last week, I had to tell Alpha to stop talking and do what I told him to do.

So yeah, I’m glad the importing finally worked.

Project Alpha likes to sit on me when I lay on the floor.  I tell him not to sit on my back cause it hurts me, and now he’s been sitting (and wiggling) on various parts of my back, butt, and legs, and asking me “Does that peel good, Mama?” Usually I’m like “No, it doesn’t feel good, get off me” and he moves to another spot and repeats the procedure. Tonight he scratched me with a graham cracker (those suckers are sharp)  and was like “Does that peel good, Mama?” Sigh.

Weapon X likes to tell me he’s going to keep me “porever”. He told me after the graham cracker incident above, “Mama I won’t hurt you, I just hug you and kiss you.” Before you aww too much, he also likes to take flying leaps at me unexpectedly, usually landing knees-first. This is a kid who’s going to jump out of planes someday with a Navy SEAL team, I just know it. When I was pregnant, X hid from the ultrasounds for a long time so we couldn’t see if he was a boy or a girl, so my brother nicknamed him Weapon X. Upon reflection, this was oddly prophetic.

They’re done with speech therapy for the summer now, though I still do the constant pronunciation and grammar reinforcements of course. We’re leaving on Tuesday for three weeks in San Diego with the Hubby, then we’ll be back home  for like a week before school starts. They’re doing speech therapy at school, it’s supposed to be twice a week for half an hour each time. School speech therapists don’t get as good results as private therapists in our experience – they don’t always work with the kids according to their specific diagnosis, even when they’re told to in an IEP. So we’re in the pool for the local university clinic, which is the only private therapy we can afford. We did therapy there during July and saw some improvement since they used apraxic specific techniques. I’ll be pushing the school more, as usual, to do what’s best for the boys rather than what’s expedient for them.

It’s hard sometimes, but they are making improvements, and the neurologist was positive about their future, which apparently he’s not normally very positive. I quite liked him, but the school STs told me they usually get parents complaining. I get along with doctors, even though I don’t trust them. The boys’ dentist told me he was glad I wasn’t one of those moms who freak out, that I kept it together and was calm, when Weapon X whacked his mouth and impacted a tooth (he was doing a flying leap at a friend’s house and landed on her coffee table. He makes me tired).

So that’s where we’re at. Hopefully we’ll continue to see leaps of improvement through their kindergarten year.