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.
Utter Autism 