One Little Step

John's progress in life seems to be more in one little step and then another little step and maybe a step back here and there but always, always another little step forward. We continue to see this as this week we again had new earmolds made for his hearing aids. Even though on the official growth charts he is making no new progress in height, and even though on those same charts he's going backwards in weight - due to recent illnesses, his little ears are growing one little bit at a time, enough so that he is ever in need of new ear molds.

John is also progressing onto a new formula for his g-tube feeds, here we are going a little step forward, two back, three forward, another back and so forth, but all in all he seems to be going forward in his own way. The new formula has a lot more calories to it so that is a jolt to his system but he's doing okay with this change that a year ago he could have not even attempted.

School on Friday, well let's just say that the steps forward were little and the attention span was little too! John's grasp of sign language is amazing to everyone that works with him, but it seems that even in his sign his dyspraxia is showing it's head now and again. John can readily show us the sign for dog, when ours bark, or just whenever he wants to, but if he is presented with a dog and asked "what is that?" he has a hard time coming up with the answer until he hears us say 'dog' and then he has no problems. This seems to be the case with many things, well except for shoes, which he never has a problem signing at any time. I notice that he has more of a problem with his hearing aids in and me asking him what something is than he has with his hearing aids out and my just holding the object up or pointing to it. Does this have anything to do with anything? Who knows, but I'll be asking his speech therapist on Monday. All in all our little guy makes leaps and bounds in knowledge but the baby steps in expression keep it kinda bottled up, which is frustrating to a little guy, but he keeps trying and working and one of these days he will conquer this too.

His new favorite is to flip through the sign language dictionary to one of the large displays for a letter and then get us to make the sign for that letter and sing the little phonics song for it. He also loves to find every cat in every book, picture or anything and let us know that it is there, and lately all the apples too. We are constantly amazed at just how wonderful he is and axiously await the day that he can readily tell us!