A Year Later….

It’s been a whole year since I last posted here.  It’s been a very difficult year.  With puberty in full swing we’ve had issues with increased aggression and changes in medications.  At 5′7″ and 180 lbs. he now towers over me and can easily out muscle me.  There have been more broken windows, broken appliances, broken doors, broken beds… 

And yet the news isn’t all bad.  He continues to type words on the computer and in his Dynavox.  He’s discovered Google and YouTube and regularly types in long lists of keywords to find things to watch and see.   He’s picked up a few more chores (aka living skills) including filling the dishwasher, putting away his own clothing and even becoming independent in toileting. 

The latest report from his speech therapist:

I also wanted to fill you in on the reading and writing program that I started him this year.  Both myself and his reading teacher have been working with him on it and it’s been a huge success.  I put together a literacy binder that has pictures of functional every day objects and corresponding words.  Some of the categories include; food, leisure activities, numbers, shapes, household objects, appliances, etc.  We have been gradually increasing pages since the beginning of the school year.
He began by using his keyboard to type in a word, listen and match it to the corresponding picture.  We then moved to showing him the word and having him match to the picture.  He is now able to type many of the words when shown only  the picture.  In many cases, he is able to type in just the beginning part of the word.  This has given me a great opportunity to work with him on using the word predictor feature on his device.  He’s really starting to catch on! 

All good news.  After a rough time at camp this summer we were thrilled to find that his return to school went spectacularly.  The staff seems to be a perfect match, clearly ‘getting him’ from the first day.  It’s awesome to see the looks on their faces when we drop him off at school.  You can tell that they’re genuinely happy to see him and his eyes twinkle with reciprocal affection.

I’m grateful to have made it through what I hope will be the worst of this transition period into manhood.  And I’m looking forward to the coming year and all the progress he’ll make.

He’s the Typing Type

The keyboard screen has become a favorite on Adrian’s Dynavox V.  More and more often we see him go to this screen to type out things he wants. 

Sometimes he needs to check his spelling by going to other pages on the device where the word appears but amazingly, he chooses to type the word out instead of just using the pre-programmed button for that item.

Every few days he’s typing in things – without checking the spelling – that we didn’t know he knew.  I couldn’t even venture a guess now about how many words he can read or type.  It’s all happened so suddenly that our heads are still spinning.

He continues to use the keyboard screen to answer the all important question, “What does that say?”  I considered putting a button on his device for him to ask this question…. but then I realized, he’s already got a perfect strategy for answering the question for himself!  Several times now, we’ve seen him copy words he clearly doesn’t know from items or websites – just to find out what they say.

Amazing stuff

What’s That Say?

I have  a five year old who’s learning to read.  He’s constantly pointing to words and wondering, “What does that say?”  It seems Adrian has similar curiosity but without the ability to ask us to read it for him, he’s left in the dark. 

In the past I’ve set Adrian up with his Dynavox and given him items with words on it, like a cereal box or books or a magazine, so he can type the words in.  But this has always been an activity I’ve initiated. 

Just the other day, for the first time, Adrian decided to try this technique himself.  He had a screen cleaning cloth he’d been looking at and I guess his curiosity about what the tag said finally got the better of him.  He typed the words in and listened as the machine told him it said ‘Scotch Brite’.  

He smiled, satisfied that he now knew what those words said.

Christmas Time Again

I may have been quiet here… but Adrian sure hasn’t been.  He continues to surprise us on a regular basis by typing out words on his Dynavox V that we didn’t know he knew. 

We expect he’ll have a whole new group of words to type now that the Christmas season is here.  Adrian loves Christmas time.  He loves the trees, the decorations, the lights, the music…

He’s already using his pre-programmed buttons to tell us he saw that Christmas tree out in the garage and he can’t wait to decorate it

Signing His Life Away

Adrian’s picked up a new habit.  If he finds a pen laying about, he’ll pick it up and sign his name to the nearest piece of paper.   We find mail on the counter with his signature.  He’s branded notebook after notebook.  And there isn’t a to-do list in the house that hasn’t been blessed with his autograph. 

While I’m happy to see him getting so much handwriting practice in, I can’t help but worry that someday he’ll be making his mark on the wrong dotted line!

Where the Dynvox Can’t Go

Even at 11 years old,  Adrian still requires some assistance in the bathroom.  For obvious reasons, we don’t want him to bring the Dynavox V into the bathroom with him.  And clearly we can’t see his ‘help’ sign through the closed door. Communicating his need for help while in the bathroom is one of those areas we hadn’t figured out a good solution for…until now.

We’ve installed a wireless doorbell in our main bathroom.  The button just sticks on the wall with double sided tape.  The receiver that makes the sound is powered by batteries and even comes with a handy belt clip.  We can take it or put it where ever we need to so we can hear it.

I thought we’d have to teach Adrian to use it.  It only took one explaination and he quickly understood.  Now he no longer needs to wander the house half naked to show us the help sign or engage in other less desirable behavior (like flushing the toilet non-stop or slamming the bathroom door repeatedly) in order to communicate his message.  One push of a button and help arrives

More Surprises

After another brief episode of malfunction, Adrian’s back to surprising us with his Dynavox V.

The other day he made creative use of some programmed vocabulary.  Adrian was ready for dinner (when isn’t he?) but we were waiting on Dad to bring the pizza home.  I explained over and over that the food was coming and he needed to wait.  He wasn’t satisfied with my answer and went into the page with phrases intended for the use of the microwave.  He asked, “How much time?”  He asked over and over.  I finally set the timer so he could see the time counting down.  He seemed happy with that and waited patiently for the pizza to arrive.

Then tonight he was trying to get my attention.  He surprised me by going into his keyboard screen and typing the word ‘mom’.  He’s never called me using my name before.  It was pretty cool!

Thus Ends the Summer

The rest of the summer passed rather quietly.  Camp ended and Adrian spent about two weeks home.  He hates being cooped up here and regularly asked to go for a ride in the car, sometimes with his device and occasionally with sign.

Dad was gone for one of those weeks.  We drove him to the airport.  Adrian was very excited.  I took him to the keyboard screen to see if we could get some insight into what he was thinking.  He typed ‘gr’.  I made a guess and took him to the family page where he pushed the buttons for Grandma and Grandpa.

He’s been very willing lately to make an attempt to type his requests, even if the vocabulary exists elsewhere on his device.  Many times he’s even gone into other pages to verify how to spell the word then gone back to the keyboard screen to finish typing it.  It’s such an encouraging step.

We’ve also seen him attempt typing in his own messages when the word he wants isn’t somewhere else.  The most memorable of these was the word ‘Teletubbies’.   In the end, he got his message across despite having misspelled the word.  Based on what we’ve seen so far, I wonder if he doesn’t understand at least some of the phonics involved in making words.  We’ll continue to take him to that keyboard screen as often as possible.

Today is his first day back to school.  I don’t know if it was the excitement or what but he was up from 2 am on this morning.   He was very glad to get back to school and very excited about riding the bus home for the first time today as well.

House of Shock

Adrian was looking for attention tonight.  Standing on the furniture, trying to steal Grandma’s glasses, taking my pens and doing what ever else he could think of to get me to pay attention to him.  Dad’s been gone for a few days for work and without my tag team partner, I was feeling kinda tired and ready for a break.

I turned to our Dynavox V to try to distract him from getting attention in negative ways.  With our surprise success the other day, I went into the keyboard screen to see if he’d type something for me.  I wasn’t prepared for what he did.

He typed

H

and then thought – hard.  It was as though you could see the wheels in his head turning.  He stared off into space, looking for that word in his mind’s eye.  He continued…

HAU 

By this time he started to close his eyes and squint.  He was just thinking so hard!  He tentatively finished…

HAUO

and hesitated before he slowly asked the machine to say it.  He knew it was wrong but couldn’t figure it out.  I had no idea what he was attempting to say and told him so.  He went to his computer and I watched to look for clues.  He went to the Clubhouse Mickey webpage. Suddenly, it dawned on me…. HOUSE!

I asked him to come back and I showed him how to spell house.  I was so pleased at that point I couldn’t have fathomed that it wasn’t over yet.  He continued…

HOUSE OF MOUSE

He finished the rest of the title without hesitation or help.  And I sat there in shock for a minute.  Then I ran and got the House of Mouse – Villians DVD and put it on for him

What an amazing thing words are…. and what an amazing son I’ve got

Exciting Development

My husband came upstairs the other day and said,

“Adrian just typed out Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin without looking at anything with those words on it.”

These are two of his favorite movies and he accesses them on his computer by sight reading them.  So I wasn’t shocked to hear he’d used them.  But then I thought about it. 

He typed them without looking at anything else and spelled them correctly. 

First, this means that not only can he learn to sight read words – he can learn to reproduce them.  And if he can reproduce them, he can learn to use them.  There’s a whole lot of hope in that statement and if you’re not the parent of a non-verbal child you may have missed it. 

While being able to use programmed vocabulary is great, it still limits what he can say.  The ultimate goal is to teach him to read and write so he can type his own spontaneous, unique messages – to be able to say what ever he wants to say, whenever he wants to say it. 

So what did we do next?  I opened Adrian’s keyboard page on his Dynavox V.  And he began typing…

LUNE

Lune?  I couldn’t figure out what he meant.  He thought for a second, went into his ‘time for’ page and looked there, then when back to the keyboard screen and typed…

LUNCH

He could have just hit the lunch button but he didn’t.  He typed it.  Could it be that he really recognizes the power of all those letters?  This is one exciting development