Updates

We got the results of the boys' bloodwork finally. Joshua's Insulin-like Growth Factor is a bit high, and Jacob's is low. I have no idea what this means exactly, but the ped is sending us to an endocronologist for the two of them. We are still waiting for the results on the bone age x-ray. Supposedly the Children's Hospital has no record of our having been there. Yeah, I am so sure that will be the case when the bill gets sent. Needless to say, I will not be paying for something that I will never see the results for, and I may let the insurance company know as well that they supposedly lost the x-ray. We'll see what happens. I for one am very interested to see what the results were and how it relates to the low IGF.

School is going fine. We didn't do anything today. Jacob had to go to the ped's office today because for the past 5 days he has been blinking in an odd way...like really long and hard blinks. If we ask him if they hurt, are itchy, are dry, etc he always says no. So today, since it seems to be never-ending, we went to get him checked. The ped had him go through a vision exam (he has 20/25) and then she examined his eyes and asked him several questions. In the end, she thinks it is allergy related and she gave us a prescription for some drops.

So I got to thinking about what in the world could have suddenly set him off. When Silas came home one day early last week, he brought me my early Valentine's gift - some beautiful yellow tulips. That is the only difference that I have thoguht about, so we are thinking that may be the key. We are going to find a new location for the flowers and see if that helps with the drops.

So that is all to report for now. :)

First dental visit

I posted a little over a month ago about having concerns about Elena's top front teeth. She has had some yellowish colored spots on them and I had the pediatrician look at them to see what she thought it was. Her thought was that it was either the start of decay or damage to the enamel. So, I made an appointment with my old pediatric dentist, Dr. K. While I was at it, I went ahead and asked to schedule an appointment for Joshua, explaining my concerns and wondering if they were willing to see an autistic child and an infant. Usually they do not see kids until they are 3 years old, but after explaining that Dr. K. was my old dentist and the bad experiences I had prior to going to see him, the woman I was talking to agreed to talk to him and he agreed to try seeing them both. I figured, if they can handle an autistic child and a one-year old, they'd be able to handle Jacob with no problems, and we'd make an appointment for him later. ;)

Well, I prepared Joshua as best I possibly could this weekend. I made little picture cards that went through each step of the appointment that I knew they would be doing today (counting teeth, sitting and laying in the chair, open mouth and say "AH!", etc) and a couple they thought they may try (like x-rays and "polishing" the teeth. Then last night I got out a little dental mirror I bought and some other things and had him lay on my bed with his head on a pillow on my lap. I had our bright top light directly over him and shining on his face, so he would know to expect it. He did great, so I was feeling a little better about how things may go.

So, we get to the dentist office today and Joshua tells me he doesn't want to go and see the duster. LOL I corrected him, and said he would probably like it. We walked in and he found the playroom and made himself at home. Elena also enjoyed this part of the experience. LOL After a while we were called back to the examination room. The hygenist talked to us for a bit and Joshua got into the chair. He was fine until she decided to try and lay it back, and it totally freaked him out. He told her he wanted it to sit up and so she fixed it and he immediately thanked her. That's one thing Joshua definitely has going for him - wonderful manners!

Anyway, eventually Dr. K. came in. Dr. K. is not a tiny man...he is a big guy, but a big teddy bear as my mother likes to say. He has always been relatively quiet when he speaks too, so he took Josh by surprise when he suddenly saw him in the doorway. He started fussing a bit and becoming difficult. Dr. K. had me pick Josh up while he layed the chair back, and then I put Josh back on it. Then he lifted the chair, which Josh again disliked. They also turned on the bright lights and when they did, Dr. K. covered Josh's eyes, which was a tremendous help!

They got Josh's teeth checked and there is NO DECAY!!! Woohoo! I was soooo relieved! He did have a spot on one tooth that looked to me like a little hole, so I mentioned it. He has an enamel defect on that tooth, and there is nothing to do right now. He said he won't attempt a cleaning right now on Josh and that he would likely have to be pout under ansthesia to do so, which he does not recommend, so we will try that again next year I suppose.

Next was Elena. He had Silas hold her on his lap facing him, then lay her back so that her head was on Dr. K's lap. He still had to have someone hold her head still for him because she was fighting him so badly. He saw no decay or enamel defects. I showed him where I was seeing the problems and he told me that it was discoloration of the enamel and that was all. Whew! So no decay! Am I ever happy and relieved!

Elena does, however, have a flap of skin that goes from the lip to the palate and will likely need to be surgically removed at some point or her teeth will not properly grow together as they should. My mother was told something similar about my outh by my quack dentist, but mine was not severe, and I have had no trouble whatsoever...I barely have a gap at all between my teeth now. SO I guess time will tell...maybe it is something that will change in time? Anyone have experience with this?

He recommended that we only give water in the sippy cup and that anything else only be given during meals. This is typically all we do anyway, but I didn't tell him that. Mainly, my kids drink water, and maybe one day a week they will get a can of Sprite each. And at night they have been having milk while Jacob drinks his shake supplement. So, it seems like we are pretty much doing everything right. :)

Dr. K. did tell me that he is not an expert on autistic kids, but he knows it can be difficult to deal with them. He said to not worry about the toothpaste if he won't accept it (another of my concerns) and just worry about cleaning it with water if that is all he will take. He also said Josh has been blessed with nice spacing between his teeth, so that helps tremendously because the food is not getting trapped in between.

So, all in all, I couldn't have been happier with the way things went today. :)

Knights and Castles

Our lessons right now are on knights and castles. Jacob is currently reading The Knight At Dawn from the Magic Treehouse series. He is really enjoying the series and it has been a lot of fun hearing him reading them.

My mother listened to him read yesterday while I was with Josh in therapy, and she asked him some questions. One of the things the book mentioned was that they ate peacocks, and mom got the feeling he didn't quite get what a peacock was exactly. So today, I asked him if he knew and to describe it. He started out telling me it was a bird, had a beak, a long neck, and he was really convincing that he knew what it was...at least until he told me they were pink. LOL So, I jumped on the internet to find some pics of peacocks and then he remembered seeing them at the zoo. Silly boy.

I found a really neat site to help with visuals of a castle and its different parts. Here is the link: Kids' Castle It allowed Jacob the chance to dress a knight, learn about squires, pages, tournaments, the moat, etc. all with visuals that appeal to him. Here is a screenshot from the Knight in Armor activity that he did:

Before Jacob dressed him:


After Jacob dressed him:


Right now he is building a castle out of Lego blocks. I'll take pics and post them when he is finished. :)

He is such a little boy. Today when he was reading, there was a section where Jack was describing what the people he was seeing were wearing. The boys serving food were "wearing dresses". You can tell he really was paying attention to what he was reading, because he stopped and looked at me with this adorable puzzled look and said "The boys were wearing dresses?" and he burst out with laughter that I thought would never end. It was so funny. He'd get further down the page and then he'd start laughing again and would say "haha The boys were wearing dresses". LOL Luckily once he turned the page there was an illustration that showed what Jack was talking about, and it settled the laughter down a little bit so we could finish the lesson.

The Autism Spectrum Quotient

Yep, I'm a chatterbox today. :P

I saw this on a blog I recently discovered, Matchbox Kid. It is a 50 question quiz found on the Newsweek site. I thought it would be interesting to take it and see what it said about me. Here's the link for anyone interested: The Autism Spectrum Quotient

Here is the scoring scale:
0-10: low
11-22: average (most women score about 15, and most men score around 17)
22-31: above average
32-50: very high (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism score about 35
50: maximum


I scored a 16. Interesting.

Cassidy's funny of the day

I thought you guys would get a kick out of Cassie's latest. She loves wearing dresses, so when I was getting her ready to go today, I let her pick out what she wanted to wear. She grabbed a pink dress that has flowers painted on the edge of it. So, she puts it on and starts holding the sides of it out, and she runs over to Elena and says "I look soooo beautiful!" She cracks me up. Well, a little later she comes up to me and holds out her bare foot and says "And where are my beautiful shoes?" I told her she was funny and she did look very nice today and she could bring me her shoes and we'd put them on. While I'm putting them on, she said something, and I replied "Yes, Princess Cassidy" and she got real upset and told me she is NOT Princess Cassidy, she is Princess Cin-der-ell-a. LOL Yes ma'am! To top it off though, she stands up and tells me very seriously "I need to find a prince." I lost it! Two years old and already looking for her Prince Charming. ROFL

Second half of the speech re-eval

We went in for the second half of Josh's speech re-eval. Let me tell you, everything that should have thrown him into a total tizzy happened. The therapist was running 20 minutes behind to begin with. When we went back to the room, someone else was using our usual room so we had to change to a differnet one. I looked at our therapist and said "You mean we have to switch to THIS room on an eval day?" She wasn't too happy about it either. It was much larger, the blinds were open and causing a bad glare, there was a mirror, a microwave, a fridge, a fan - all HUGE distractions for him. And then to top it off there was this annoying little humming in the background the entire time. I'm not autistic and it was bothering me, so you can imaginewhat it did to Josh. Believe it or not, he did awesome!

The last time he was tested (in July) he only made it to question 43. We had to stop for the day at question 56 because we ran out of time, so already that is showing he has made wonderful progress. She actually has to continue the eval until he gets 5 consecutive questions wrong, and so far it hasn't happened. She thinks, looking ahead, that it won't be too much further before he does have to stop completely this time. I'm so proud of him!

He is having trouble with past tense words still, mainly those that actually change the word completely. For instance he does fine with past tense words such as smiling being changed to smiled but changing "the child is drawing a picture" to "The child drew a picture" is still not clicking for him. He does say "drawed" instead though. I asked about that part and the therapist said around 5 years is when they start to chage it and they give points on the test if they use any form of past tense, correct or not.

So, in the end, we are still not through. :lol She said that she feels he has age appropriate language skills now and that a lot of his problem stems from being easily distracted now. So, I'm not sure what this means for speech therapy at this point. We may get released after she scores the test next week, or it may be that she will have to keep him in a little longer because of the auditory skills being a little below the average still. She said the clinic's goal is to get each child to score an 80 or above on their raw score and within 6 months of their actual age before releasing them. I just don't know whether that means total, each section, or what, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

I have to say though, he cracks me up. They have had a major lack of boyish stickers lately, so he kept picking the biggest sticker he could and it was always a giant pink and blue sticker that said "Tuff Girl" on it. LOL Today though, they finally had a ton of choices for him - Tonka trucks, smiley faces, The Incredibles, Pooh...guess what stinker chose? Barbie! :rofl2

What a day!

(except that should be a patch on the eye instead of a toothache. ROFL)

Well, we got up bright and early and left home at the same time Silas left for work. The kids were really good about not complaining about the lack of breakfast, which was a nice surpise. We picked up my mom, who was wonderful and came with us to watch the girls during the labs, and headed to where my insurance company told us to go. By the way, this was NOT a pediatric lab nor a pediatric imaging center, but I went with it seeing as it would be covered by insurance. Given this little tidbit, you can imagine how well this was going to go.

We were getting out of the van at the lab...all of the kids were ready to go inside, I decided to be brave and leave my diaper bag in the car, and I grabbed my purse and put it on my shoulder. I was ready! Not even 5 seconds after closing the van door, my purse strap breaks and flies up full force and the end (which is metal) strikes my eye. I have not felt so much pain! I couldn't get my eye to open and it was watering something fierce. My mother kept telling me to go and lean on the van, which I could not understand how the heck that would help. LOL After a couple of minutes, I was able to open it. I am guessing that my eye actually did close before being struck, however my mother informed me that it was bright red, so I am sure that everyone in the lab thought I came in with a massive case of pink eye. LOL It is pretty much back to normal coloring now and other than a little bit of sweelling, you probably couldn't tell I had such a freak accident this morning. It isn't really too bad as far as pain goes. Every now and then it will sting a little, but I am hoping after a good night's sleep it will be better.

I specifically asked that they take the boys in seperately so as Jacob would not hear Josh scream and go into panic mode. He was already nervous about the needle as it was. I was assured that would not be a problem, and then we proceeded to wait a little longer. Eventually they called me in with Joshua. It was cute...when we got to the door, the guy says "Hi, my name is Thomas". Joshua started crying and said "No! You're not Thomas!" He thought the guy was talking about everyone's favorite tank engine of course. LOL We then went in to the room where I was given instructions on how they wanted me to hold him. I think they were expecting a real struggle because they had three people in there ready to step in at any point, but he did fine. He simply screamed about getting stuck. So not too bad.

While Joshua was getting stuck, one of the three people that were standing guard, for lack of a better description, decided to sneak on out and grab Jacob, telling my mother that I had said I wanted Jacob back with me. I was a little ticked to find out she plain out lied to my mother like that, but at that point it was too late. So, Jacob was at the door while Joshua was screaming bloody murder about the needle. Grrr. Anyway, the tears started flowing with the alcohol swab. Poor kid was so worked up over this and his little heart was pounding in his little chest. But, we made it through and the worst was over.

We then left to get the kids some breakfast, which they were extremely happy about. I dropped my mom and the 3 younger kids off at her house and took off for Jacob's x-ray. Remember, I called the insurance company last Friday to find out where to bring him for this. They told me where to go and it was just down the hall in the same building as the lab, so no biggie.

We get there, wait for someone to finish flirting with the receptionist, and then proceed to hand over the orders. She looks confused and takes it to her supervisor who then asks how old Jacob is, and then explains they don't do x-rays on children under 18 years of age. Great! So we go back to the van and I pull out my cell phone where I proceed to call Humana and find out where I can go now. I talk to a guy that obviously has no clue what he is doing. He named every hospital in town EXCEPT for the children's hospital. I asked him to look that specific one up. He spelled it in 2 totally off ways, even after I spelled it to him. I was frustrated and I told him I could not believe that the only children's hospital in the entire area was not in our network. I finally got off the phone and headed to the hospital across the street, but before I got there I called Silas and asked him to jump on the internet and see if he could find out anything. Lo and behold, the hospital is not listed on the website, but the larger hospital that it is part of is...so I asked him to make a phone call while I looked for a parking place in the overfilled garage. Turns out the children's hospital DOES take the insurance, go figure.

By this point, I had already found a place to park and I decided to just go ahead and stay at the hospital I was at since I was going to have to pay for parking. After a long goose chase we finally found their imaging center. I signed in and after a few minutes I found out it was an hour minimum wait for people with an appointment. I grabbed Jacob and told him we were leaving.

We headed over to the children's hospital and I verified once more that they do in fact take Humana HMO. They said yes and I told them that Humana apparently doesn't seem to realize that. The woman was shocked and said that all of the hospital's empoyees have the same insurance, so Humana is nuts. Again, go figure.

The x-ray went well. He only had to get one and it was a breeze after the bloodwork. LOL We hoepfully will get the results tomorrow, but hopefully we will have a definite idea of what is going on by the end of the week.

Needless to say, Joshua has not done very well with the change in routine today. We have had a lot of meltdowns. I am hoping this is not going to affect his performance tomorrow during his speech re-evaluation.

Whew!

Back to school!

Well, we are back to school. Jacob did his journal entry and we moved on to math. I thought I would just do some review of the addition and subtraction that he had a good grasp on before Christmas. We had major crocodile tears. I can not figure out why he has such a mental block when it comes to math. After struggling to get through it for the day (an hour for 4 short worksheets, I kid you not), we moved on to social studies. We love social studies around here, so that went smoothly. We ended with his reading two chapters of the next Magic Treehouse book and his summing it up for me afterwards.

Joshua's school day mainly revolved around beginning reading. I decided to try the same method I used with Jacob, but I will likely focus on one set of words for a few days as opposed to a new set each day like I did with Jacob. Today we started with the word at. I told him what it was and had him look at it and repeat it. Below that I wrote at again and had him watch as I added the letter b in front of it. I asked him if he remembered what sound the b made. He didn't, so I made the sound myself and had him repeat it. I then explained to him that we could take the "b" sound and add it to the "at" and make a word. We put it together and he got so excited. It was really cute to watch. We then did cat, hat, mat, sat, that (which takes some work since he does not properly say the "th" sound yet), and fat. Yes, I left some off, like pat, but we will get to them eventually. ;)

Tommorow will be a crazy day. We have to get up insanely early and get the boys' bloodwork done. One of the many tests being run requires them to fast, so the earlier the better. Once that is done, we'll go get some breakfast and then wait around for a couple of hours to get Jacob's wrist x-ray done. This will give the doctor an idea of his bone age and maybe give some other insight to why he has stopped growing. I'm not worried about the x-ray, but the bloodwork should be LOADS of fun with my two sons. Wish us luck!

Re-evaluations

Happy New Year everyone!

We started Josh's speech re-evaluation today. :) Today was the first half and it tested his auditory skills. His raw score was a little higher than the first time around, but it somehow managed to make the average the same. I didn't quite understand the whole thing about how the scoring works, but I am guessing that his age factors in there somewhere. Anyway, Joshua was a year behind in July. He is 5 yrs, 2 mths, and is testing at 4 yrs, 7 mths...so he is only about 7-8 months behind. From what the therapist said, they are considered on track so long as they are within 6 months of their age...so not too far from that goal! Woohoo! Next week will be testing expressive language skills, which he was a year and a half behind in back when he was tested in July. So we shall see how that turns out.

We are still waiting for the blood work orders for the boys. Our ped has had some crazy hours lately. Since she will be there tonight and tomorrow night, I will have to call and find out what is going on. It is 4 days shy of a month of waiting for the orders. We also did not have our referral faxed to the therapy office today, so that should be loads of fun to get straightened out.