A brief revisit of where we are at...

I posted this to a mommy's board I belong to, and thought it might be good to post it here. Some information is new, a lot of it is stuff I have mentioned before - but a good summary of where we are at right now.

For those of you who follow our autism fight...
Zach is now able to repeat just about all words we ask him to say. His pronunciation is sometimes good, but quite often he leaves off the final consonant. His pointing is pretty good - although we sometimes have to prompt him to point at the object of his desire.

Although he has a vocabulary, his language is far from functional. The two things he says independently to request are milk and up - in which he also give the sign for. Everything else is still murky.

He sort of counts to 20 - I will say one, he will say 2, I will say 3, he will say 4, sometimes he manages to go to 10 this way but quite frequently he jumps to 13 and just repeats that over and over.

Today he surprised me while in therapy by identifying a handful of letters for the therapist when she asked him what they were (she held up a cube with a letter on it and asked him "what's this?"

He still is awful when attempting to get him to follow directions. His receptive language is so low! He doesn't understand necessarily how to play with others, and avoids other children besides his sister. We will be looking into organized playgroups with other children to see if that helps.

His eye contact is sometimes good, and sometimes not. He more often appears shy than anything else.

He gives kisses and says hi and bye on command which is awesome.

25 hours of services a week (and likely maybe even 10 more to be added) is a little intense - but he has really come a far ways.

We are doing special diets and supplements which I think are adding to his progress. So that's it for now. Will attempt potty training next month. This will be interesting, no?