(Image above is Liam chewing down on Mt Mikes Pizza)
Liam's first full week of school went great. There's been a lot of progress and discovery.
His physical therapist said he's doing worse than she remembered. That was upsetting. I work with Liam every day and I didn't think he was getting worse. I didn't see him get a whole lot better either. Two days ago the special education teacher called me. She had spent two hours with him in the class and said that his teacher was a perfect fit for him.
She also said that she thinks that Liam's low muscle tone is affecting his ability to use the
bathroom. The theory is that Liam can't control his urine flow and that he doesn't know when he's peeing. It makes perfect sense considering I've been working on potty training him for 2 years now. Now we're doing a timed training method where we have him sit on the potty every hour on the hour. It helps but it isn't accident free. I'm worried how Kindergarten is going to go if he's not potty trained. It's in his IEP that he's not potty trained but still.
Liam has always had texture issues. It's been a large problem his entire life. Finger painting
has been something he hated. Yesterday and today he finger painted and loved it! His teacher Mrs H taped off one of the carpet squares just for Liam so every day he knows exactly where he's supposed to sit and he gets really excited.
Every morning the class eats breakfast together. The teachers are working hard to get Liam
to drink milk. That helps me out because he needs the calories. He's been doing very good eating breakfast with his "friends". He still doesn't eat a lot but it's a start. We're also working on keeping his hands out of his mouth. We tried bracelet he could chew on but he just took it off, had it on the ground wrapped around his shoe so his teacher took it away. So no more bracelet for Liam. He just has to learn to control the stimulation without using his mouth.
Liam's speech has improved drastically. It's almost like he's a new kid. The speech
therapist hasn't even seen him yet but because speech is so ingrained into this school he's improving daily. He's using more complete sentences and talking clearly. Finally he's able to tell me what he wants, how he feels or even just about his day and I understand his without having to decode him. He still has times or days where his speech isn't very clear and that happens more when he's tired.
(Liam loves to get on stage and dance and sing along at church on Wednesday nights)
We were having problem with him tolerating his night feed, then he got better and worse again. This whole week Liam has handled his feed so much better. He's up to 105 mls per hour for as close to 12 hours as I can get him. Unfortunately he got into a coughing fit early this morning and I had to turn off his feed an hour earlier so he wouldn't vomit.
Every morning I wake up Liam at 6:45. He then sits on his potty in front of the tv and watched cartoons for 45 minutes to an hour like that in an attempt to empty his bladder. This helps. After he uses the potty he gets to pick something from the prize box that's full of little toys and stickers. This reinforces potty time for Liam and gets him excited to use it.
Liam and our kitten Ozzy have continued to bond. Liam and Ozzy continue to play chase everyday and Ozzy has taken to sleeping with Liam. Ozzy likes to sleep on Liams pillow and Liam likes to sleep with his feet on his pillow and his head at the foot of the bed. Its funny to see this.
All in all everything is going good. Liam is learning how to thrive finally. We still have a long road ahead of us in life but the story has to start somewhere.
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