I started a new blog to start fresh: http://victorbiomed.blogspot.com/

Every therapy out there

I don't know if this is good or bad but Victor is now getting different therapies. He gets floortime at school, AVB with his private SEIT that comes here on Friday for an hour, AVB & RDI (how she manages to put the two together is astonishing) every Tuesday for 75 minutes with his private ST and Sun-Rise through the local rabbi's wife - schedule kinda changes weekly.

I'm back

I haven't blogged in a long time. Life is crazy. I thought about just starting a new one since Victor isn't GF at the moment but really I started this to talk about him & his Autism so I'll just keep posting here. Victor is now 3 yrs 3 months. He has many words and some phrases too but sometimes its hard to get him to say something without a lot of prompting. We can 100% attribute his development to the AVB he was getting. I say was because as of January 1st he was kicked out of EI (Early Intervention) where he was getting AVB & moved into the school system which pales by comparison in the AVB department. He is now in a program that believes in floor time. the therapists are all very nice & I can tell they care about Victor a great deal - I'm just not seeing any results yet and he's been stimming like crazy. I know there's a period if transition but I didn't expect it to be this long. we'll see. I am hoping to get some medicaid money to pay for private AVB.
Even though I have been on this journey for along time in some ways I feel like I am just beginning. We have dabbled in the biomed dept trying CF & GF and CLO but thats as far as we got. I'm going to start doing as many great plains tests as I can & go from there.

Update

Holidays drive me crazy. Sorry it's been so long.

Victor has been completely dairy free since Nov 5 (minus 2 incidents at school). We have seen a lot of improvements in his receptive language and it appears he is consistently saying "bo" for ball now (Yeah first word). We are going to be removing gluten again real soon. I am stocking up on gluten free, dairy free foods. We probably won't stay on it to long if we don't see any changes as we were gluten free before with no change. But maybe with no dairy it will be better. eventually we are going to reintroduce dairy to see if that is really the cause or if its just all his therapies, his age, his body maturing...whatever other causes there can be.

I've been tagged

OK. So I am supposed to write 8 random things about myself.

1. I became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. at the age of 9
2. I was a vegetarian for 6 years and a vegan for 1 before my now DH reverted me back to meat eating
3. while I have had non kosher beef & chicken at one point in my life, I have never tasted seafood or pork
   
4. I love girly movies (Romantic Comedies, Dramas...) but I also like Sci-Fi like Star Trek & X-Men
5. My tongue is pierced
6. Last year I finally gave up on watching All My Children which I had watched since I was 5 years old! (with my aunt & sister).
   
7. I briefly dabbled in paganism during my college years
8. I have always wanted to be a wife & mom

I know it's been awhile...

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. Victor has been sick off & on but he is finally on an upswing again - he woke up on his own this morning (we've been having to get him up lately) and was in a good mood all morning. His appetite is back and he is trying new & regular foods again (he was limiting himself to peanut butter & jelly sandwiches or chicken nuggets for days!). He is still dairy free and we see no difference. Maybe the real trick is to be both at the same time (which we plan on doing next) but it doesn't seem to be doing much for my friend's son Austin either. Mayeb teh diet just doesn't work for everyone.

A week and a half ago, Victor had an appointment with his Dev Pedi (this was a follow-up) and he officially diagnosed him with Autism. It was expected but still hard. I feel like Victor has so many strengths that I often wonder if there should be 2 separate Autism disorders - one with "classic" symptoms like lack of eye contact, behavior difficulties, and not wanting to be touched, and then one with great hugging, great eye contact, but really bad communication skills and sensory processing difficulties. Maybe part of me is still in denial.

bye bye casein, hello gluten

After much thought we have reintroduced gluten into Victor's diet. Our original plan was to leave him gluten free & take out casein on top of it so we would be GFCF but we really have not seen any indications that this has been working for us. We reintroduced gluten on Friday and he had a whole weekend of eating whatever he wanted. Today we took out casein. We're going to try this out for at least a month as well and then possibly do GFCF after that. So now this blog is named wrong but oh well!

Halloween was fun. We made it to about 2 dozen houses. Victor was a trooper. He seemed to have a good time (he loves being outside). He didn't quite understand what we were doing and didn't get any candy into his bag by himself but he loved going up to people's doors with mommy & daddy. Many times he chose which candy he wanted & then we put it in his bag for him.

Tomorrow we have a group meeting with EI. My husband, myself, EI coordinator, Special Ed 1, Special Ed 2, OT, & ST are all meeting up to go over Victor's plan. He has not made the improvements we were hoping for when we started this 7 months ago. He just got a new ST recently who is doing AVB with him & we are hoping that will help him more but they all want to increase his services. He currently has OT 2 times a week & she wants to bump it to 3, ST also 2, and she wants to bump it to 4, Special Ed 4 times, and they want to bump it to 5. OT also wanted us to get a PT eval but we really don't think he really needs it. I am not opposed to an eval but my DH really doesn't want to introduce another person - we just want them to focus on getting him to communicate.