Is it the honey, the trampoline, Dr. Gill, Pediatric Minds, Music Therapy or just time? ;-)

I began to give Ian Manuka honey on July 9th. A friend of mine who's son has Angelman's Syndrome said it "lifted a cloud" from over her son's head so I thought I'd try it. It's also becoming quite popular within the SN (special needs) community. I swear the next couple days he was showing such a difference in his cognition. Now our sweet boy is amazing us every day multiple times! As usual, not sure what it is that's making the difference, because we've also been doing so many other things, but I'm not stopping it! I also have been more consistent with adding coconut oil to his supplements as well.

Let's see... he now will walk mostly on his own and is actually pretty fast on his feet. He plays the "stop and go" game walking anywhere. His "words" and sounds are definitely coming along. Momma is now used for me and for "more". He has his versions of "again", "in", "on" and says letters "i" (which he also uses when referring to himself), "o", "a", "e", "m", "n". Last night he continuously said his version of "x" (along with "o"), was kind of obsessed with them. A couple weeks ago he "smelled" a flower for the first time and now pushes all flowers to my nose to smell. His pretend play skills are developing rather nicely. He will "eat" fake food and wants me to "eat" it all with him and continues to put phones up to his ear as well as handing them to me to "talk".

As shown by the many videos I've been uploading, everything is just taking off. The other night in the tub he handed me an F and a toy fish together. When I asked what letter boat started with as well as dolphin, he proceeded to put a B on the boat and handed me a D with the dolphin. By the time I realize I should be recording this fun game he's always a bit over it ;-)

Through all of this excitement in his development, I'm still quite anxious this week. His sleep study is scheduled for Saturday. I always get really nervous about him getting sick before hand and of course he has a bit of a stuffy nose the last couple days! I must jinx him. But I will be flooding that adorable little nose with nasal spray every day as well as feeding him Olive Leaf, Silvercillan and the Cold and Flu tincture daily.

Of course there's the hope that the study will show he doesn't need night time oxygen. Again, don't want to go too far into this hope for worry of jinxing it ;-) But if he's unable to do the study due to a stuffy nose, we need to reschedule. Which takes months. And puts him smack in the middle of cold/flu season. Sleep studies and the c/f season are never a good combo.

On the school front, we finally settled on him attending Step-by-Step in Santa Monica and are very excited to get him started there. The teacher came by for a home visit and is quite lovely, really in-tune to Ian. We had also sat in a class at SbyS and had her on the phone for our transition meeting from PM.

Now it's just a matter of working out when we will fit in the extra 5 hours of therapy at our home-school since we were unable to work out getting push-in services as an alternative. We will still have OT and Speech push-in at least 1 hour a week but will have to cover via insurance or out-of-pocket. Seeing his progress at PM with the 1-on-1 therapist within the school-like setting shows me this is a must for him to succeed.

But we will also need to coordinate his home-school services. This is on top of the 6 hours a week of speech/OT/PT he is already attending. We are so happy with the  providers he's already seeing we most likely won't be changing those out. It's been such a long process to get a set schedule with them all. Going to be an interesting calendar ;-) Lila will def have to attend after-school program (if she can get in) as she's getting really frustrated with being totted along to all of his sessions.