Fox turned 3 and really enjoyed his chocolate cake!
We attempted potty training but it did not go well. We went cold turkey from the diapers, and tried to take him to the potty frequently throughout the day. He just loved sitting on the potty, he played with toys and read books, but wouldn't pee. In fact he would always pee about 5 minutes after he got off the toilet. We tried various things for about 2 weeks, but it just seemed like he wasn't getting it and it was starting to stress him out (and me!) so we stopped. We're thinking of giving it another go in another month or so, he's showing more signs of readiness now so maybe, hopefully it'll go better this time.
Fox didn't have pre-school in the summer and we took it easier on all of our other appointments, so we spent a lot of time at the park. Fox just loves being outside, he really comes out of his shell. It's really amazing how much he changed from the beginning of the summer to the end. At first he was afraid of the slides and he would only go down if I went down with him or if I held his hand down. Now he's completely independent on them and just seems to enjoy them more. He still as always loves loves loves sand, especially loves mixing water with sand and most of all loves mixing sudsy water with sand. We had a lot of fun on the deck with just these simple ingredients. He got a lot of exercise running back and forth between the kiddy pool and the sandbox with handfuls of sand to throw in the pool. We also played with oobleck a lot, it's a combination of corn starch and water and food colouring if you want, it's messy so he of course loved it!
Fox has really gotten into art over the last few months. He use to do a lot of colouring, but now he mostly loves finger painting. Just as proof of how far he has come, he use to freak out whenever he got his hands a little dirty, now he just dives into the finger paint! I tried a couple different recipes for homemade finger paint and then tried using corn syrup with food colouring, but I have to say the store bought non-toxic washable finger paint is by far the easiest to clean up! Plus, it doesn't give the mistaken impression that paint is delicious. I walked into his room once and caught him licking one of his old paintings, that's when the corn syrup painting had to stop :)
As for his different therapies, we have started one-on-one speech therapy at kidsability. It's going well so far, she noticed that when he makes sounds he is having trouble shaping his mouth, his mouth always falls to the side, so 'no' sounds like 'neh'. So we're practicing vowel sounds and he's being very good about letting us poke and prod his face while we do it. His ABA therapy is also going well, we recently had our 1 year assessment (can't believe it's been a year already!), and he has made a lot of gains since the last assessment. The one difficult thing is that every child with ASD is so different so there's no base of comparison to say that he's moving at a quick enough pace, but any progress is good and keeps us motivated to push forward. We also dove back into RDI. We're continuing to work on developing our guided participation relationship with Fox. We do this by working him into our daily activities and giving him a role in them. For example, he'll help us make juice, put dishes away, put laundry in the wash, etc. When we first started doing this he was so not interested in helping and it was difficult to keep his attention, but now it's getting so much easier! He's becoming so great at listening to instructions it's really making things around the house a lot more pleasant. We also did some occupational therapy over the summer, she focussed mostly on play skills, and we talked a bit about his sensory needs. The OT thought that he was really seeking out proprioceptive/deep pressure input, so told us to try to incorporate more of this throughout the day and it should help to keep him more calm and focussed. So we've been trying this, but to be honest it's hard to stay consistent and also difficult to know if it's making a difference for him. The good thing is that he enjoys these activities so at least he's having fun jumping on his trampoline, rolling up in his blanket like a hot dog, being lifted and flipped by Dad.
Other then that there's not much to report. Little Miss Ruby will be a year next month. She is crawling around and getting into everything! She just adores Fox and is all up in his face all the time. This has really helped Fox I think, he's really started to pay attention to her and other kids now. So it will be interesting to see how they interact going forward. She's just a little chatterbox, so maybe some of that will rub off on him :)
