rubenpants.com - a journey…

When three or more regular blog readers ask how Rubén is doing because there hasn’t been an update in a while, you know you’ve been getting lax. I’m going great guns on the Camtasia Studio book right now, and in order to meet my deadline, I’ve got to pound out approximately 2,000 words per day. It has proven difficult, and even on the days when I meet my word-quota with a little time left at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is sit down and write.

So how’s the kid doing? Aside from a rather nasty chest cold, he’s doing wonderfully. Since we started chelating and attacking his gut bugs much more aggressively, my brilliant son has shown marked improvement in several areas:

1. Productive language is starting to show the same kind of progress that his receptive language has in recent months. He’s repeating words that he’s heard us say and heard in videos, words that we didn’t even know he knew. Completely unprompted. It’s incredible to hear him take his first tentative steps toward real verbal communication
2. Cognitive development has taken a leap forward. He can solve puzzles much more easily, and is matching shapes and colors with ease. Once he gets a little more verbal, I could well see starting him on a memory game soon.
3. He’s just so much happier lately. Like many kids on the spectrum, Rubén was a truly joyous little infant, but once the mercury took hold, he really became a pretty glum little dude. It’s a fantastic feeling to see him with a bit of the old light in his eyes.

Some elements, of couse, haven’t improved at all. He still tends inward from a social perspective, and even after many months of working with him, his pretend play has not evolved beyond kissing or feeding a stuffed animal (and even then only when prompted). He has also been increasingly finicky about food, something that troubles us greatly as it has historically been a non-issue.

These speed bumps aside, he’s made more genuine progress in the last week or two than he has in the past several months. We’re delighted.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2005 at 10:48 am and is filed under Milestone (yea!). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.