Mr. Yellow Pants

Our latest movie obsession is Curious George.
Thus, we've been hearing a lot about
George and "Mr. Yellow Pants" lately.
I didn't realize there were so many great one-liners until the little guy started randomly repeating things like:

"I have a date with a monkey!"

and

"Yellow's the new khaki."

Here's to hoping insisting his name is "George" doesn't last long.

What does your child do well?

When we had concerns about our sweet boy's development, the first step was to talk to his pediatrician who had us fill out an M-CHAT and when it looked like we may have valid concerns, he referred us to the developmental pediatrician and psychologist at the state Department of Health's Children with Special Health Care Needs. 

We came prepared to talk about our concerns but instead the fabulous Dr. Carbone started out by asking us, "What does your boy do well?"  This kind of caused us to take a step back and remember that, concerned about him as we were, we'd been blessed with an amazing little boy that has so much good in him.  An obvious thing that came to mind was his love of music.  For the longest time we didn't understand a lot of what he said but we always knew what he was singing thanks to his almost-perfect pitch.  Since he's continued to progress he loves changing up words to songs without missing a beat, usually totally blowing us away!

Here's some of his latest and greatest:

Old McDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o
and on this farm he had a carrot...
with a crunch, crunch here, and a crunch, crunch there...

And on this farm he had a giraffe, e-i-e-i-o
with a tall, tall here, and a tall, tall there...
(I wasn't sure how or if I could use it, but check out this giraffe picture!  Love it!)

I looked out the window and what did I see?
Chi-cken nuggets on the apricot tree!
(It's "supposed" to be 'popcorn popping on the apricot tree')

He may struggle with answering yes and no questions or even looking you in the eye but I swear he's the next Mozart or at least Jason Mraz (because it's all about the wordplay, get it). 

So do tell: What does your child do well?

Sweet Dreams

The holidays have come and gone and I'm embarrassed to say that I still feel like I'm recovering!  Is that lame?!  Maybe by St. Paddy's Day I'll get my house clean...  So as to keep the ball rolling (or give it a much needed push?) I thought I'd share one of our latest ventures.  We have been blessed to have a good friend just down the street from us going through similar things with their cute little boy and she told me about DAN (Defeat Autism Now), doctors treating autism through biomedical approaches.  So, the little guy is getting supplements for things he's deficient in, including B6 vitamins.  I guess getting B6 after being deficient in it makes you have really vivid dreams and it's been entertaining to hear about it from his perspective.  At first he'd wake up too early in the AM wanting "the fire" (furnace), or his baby sister or some random thing and I'm thinking: Seriously?  Where do these things come from at four in the morning?!  Now he's starting to understand dreams more and it's fun for him to tell us "I dreamed about a spaceship" or "...a huge bug" and once he wakes up he wants to go back to sleep to dream some more!  Funny until he gets way frustrated in the middle of the day screaming "I want to dream about Grandma!"  Well, okay, still funny.