He will occasionally say "Mama" but it applies to many situations (for instance "look at this, what is this) not just me and is usually said in extreme frustration.
So other than the occasional random word out of nowhere that never appears again that's been it for 3 years.
Until the Nacho Cheese Dorito.
As you probably know Aaron has Celiac disease so he can't have any gluten and during his endoscopy to diagnose his celiac they also scoped the "other end" (if you get my drift) to do some biopsies just to make sure his 2 years of diarrhea wasn't a result of multiple things. What they found was that Aaron produces almost no Lactase, the enzyme necessary to digest Lactose. So basically he's lactose intolerant on an Everest level scale. When we did his diet change for the Celiac, we took him off all gluten and all dairy, not just lactose free stuff but all dairy. Sometimes the casein protein in dairy has a negative affect on autistic kids so we thought maybe if we eliminated it since we sort of had to do it anyway, Aaron might have some symptom improvement...no dice but no big deal...I didn't have high expectations for that anyway. Aaron drinks almond milk now which he loves (it's actually not bad) and breaks the bank on, he eats almond yogurt which I think is gross but he likes it.
I know I'm going on and on about this but there is a point...
Doritos are gluten free but they have milk in them because of the "cheese" (I'm sorry I have to use quotes around cheese)...anyway...so Aaron couldn't have them anymore when we changed his diet...this was over a year ago. He didn't have them a lot so it wasn't a big deal. Every once in a while he'll get pissed because we are eating something that he can't have anymore so we either get him a gluten free dairy free substitute (we found an Oreo sub, a chocolate chip cookie sub, pasta sub, etc.) or we just don't have it in front of him...except Doritos. My husband likes them and eats them a lot but Aaron didn't seem to care until recently and I couldn't find a Dorito sub no matter how hard I tried. He got super mad and didn't understand why he couldn't have any and it's impossible to explain it to him. He just doesn't get it. I figured the lactose content in them couldn't be that high that it would cause that much digestive upset so we gave him a few...gluten is the real damaging thing after all. Gluten will shorten his life...lactose will just cause him to be bloated for a while. The Doritos didn't really do very much (diaper wise) so we decided since the elimination of casein didn't do anything for him symptom wise this whole time that it would be okay for him to have Doritos again. Now for anyone reading this that works at Aaron's school or babysits Aaron, we are not going hog wild with the casein, I still don't want him to have a crap load of casein, we are making an exception for this one thing because the content is so small. Other than this his diet is unchanged.
Okay here's where it gets awesome....
The day that he started having Doritos again was June 25th. On June 26th Aaron was trying to move a bunch of his hotwheels cars from one room to another. Because he's like me he wants to take them all in one trip instead of making multiple trips and there were just too many cars to do it. He was getting mad and grunting and making all kinds of frustrating sounds, cars were dropping all over the place. I walked up to him and asked him if he needed help and made the ASL sign for help. That's actually what I was trying to show him. He then made the cutest little face and said "help!" Although it sounded like "hoooooh." to try to describe it he's making a round shape with his mouth and sticking his tongue out while he makes that sound. I literally wanted to jump up and down and scream and yell but I had to maintain so I just said "good job saying help buddy...I'll help you." and I helped him. The amazing part about this, is that since this happened, he has consistently used the word "help" over and over again with me, his dad, his big sister, and his therapists when I wasn't there (that part is awesome) without prompting. That is a huge accomplishment for him.
Something has opened up or clicked in his brain. Since that day when he said "help" (keep in mind none of these words are clear but they are definitely what he is trying to say) he has said....hi, bye bye, daddy, Wubbzy, (which he uses daily to ask for Wubbzy the cartoon) egg, two, open...and the most amazing one which I wasn't in the room for unfortunately but "she" was and Daddy was...he tried to say "Kenzie." Kenzie is the name of one of his older sisters. That was amazing.
This same exact day (June 26th) he also started saying "Mama" in a normal tone of voice...before he would scream it at me like he was super pissed and it was a 3 ma sound "mamama." Now he just says it clear as day and it's the one word where it sounds like it's supposed to...also amazing.
He still says all of his little Aaron words...he's a very vocal child..."talking" all day long. His word for blue is "peh." It used to be "pop-pee." Now there is this added bonus that I hope he keeps adding to. Fingers crossed. A good friend of mine who is the speech pathologist at the big school here (our town is small, only one K-12 school and Aaron's preschool) just recently told me she resigned from the big kids school and is going to be at the preschool now (I hope that wasn't a secret.) That means she will be Aaron's speech therapist when school starts again! I am so excited about that!
We are also still working with the autism specialist from Denver who is amazing. We have about 5 more weeks with him. He is teaching us so much about how to help get Aaron talking and coincidentally Aaron started all this chatter about 5 days before our phone sessions with this doctor started. It's almost like divine intervention that all this is happening at the same time because we are getting some great tools that will help encourage him to continue to try and speak.
Three years of nothing! Now if you ask him if he can say something (that's the way we word it..."can you say?") he will try to say it probably 75% of the time. When he doesn't it's usually because he's distracted. When he's irritated I won't even go there and I'm not bombarding him with it because I don't want him to get pissed. We are taking it slow and I didn't even blog about it until now because I was afraid I was going to jinx it, but something is definitely going on in that adorable head of his...Doritos...coincidence?
Doritos are pretty awesome...
No comments:
Post a Comment