A good day

Zach began speaking fluently today. We woke him up and he said "good morning, Momma."
He went on to articulate exactly what he wanted for breakfast (sausage, eggs, and juice) and then read the newspaper headlines. We were shocked.

OK - April Fools.

However, yesterday Zach did have a good day. We left for work before he awoke, which I am wondering helped the situation. He is doing a lot of mimicking with therapist H. and our therapist L. has been working on getting him to eat with a spoon and fork (he has it down for the most part). This will make going out to dinner with the kids a nice thing one day.

H. has him mimicking putting a block in a cup, clapping his hands, sitting in his chair, and raising his arms above his head. These all sound like trite things to most of you - but the concept of imitating is so important in learning - don't ever take for granted when your child can do it! He also said "tickle" to H. on Monday, and yesterday told our sitter "Bye" for the first time ever when she left. I was totally elated.

We met with a new doctor of integrative medicine yesterday out in the Rochester suburb of Pittsford. Dr. W. went to Case Western for undergrad, and University of Rochester for medical school. She also did a fellowship with Dr. Weil which I found particularly impressive (for those of you PBS watchers, you likely know who he is. If not check out the wikipedia page.) She reviewed Zach's records with us and discussed what alternative/supplemental approaches we had tried. She told us she feels he likely does not have Lyme disease. She recommended one additional supplement to the one's we are already giving Zach, and increased dosage on two of the others. She also recommended some tests which we will have run. I could tell that Steve really liked her, better than probably any other doctor we have come across thus far. She is very level headed, but open-minded to things that weren't taught to her in medical school (which is quite a bit, especially nutrition). Her year's fellowship with Dr. Weil has made her very well rounded.

Doctors know a lot about medications because they are constantly "educated" on them by your good ol' pharmaceutical representatives. There are no supplement/herbal representatives out there knocking on doctor's doors that I know of. Sometimes I wonder if the FDA would regulate this stuff and get it into the business model of prescription drugs, would doctors be recommending these things more?

I will discuss Zach's regimen in a later post. Nothing that awe inspiring - but may be of interest to some of you who might be interesting in trying some of these approaches yourself.

So today is a Wedesday, and April is Autism awareness month. Look for me in future posts to involve you in my advocacy project for the month: Getting our New York State representatives to pass a bill on insurance coverage of autism treatments.