Brycen's TWO Little Secrets!

We believe this may be the most exciting post we have ever written on this blog! We have been teasing many of you for the last day with what Brycen recently showed us, but please know we were not doing it to be mean. We wanted to be absolutely sure that these were skills he learned and not a fluke. As many of you know, we have shared things in the past that he has done such as a word he said, to then find out a week later he will no longer say it. That's part of living with Brycen...you just never know! Before you scroll down and click on the videos, we want to give a little background on what Brycen's knowledge has been leading up to this point in these two areas. Brycen has been able to recognize his name for some time. He knows it is his name, he is just unable to verbalize it. We used to have a card with his name on it, then single flashcards with each letter, and he knew to match the flashcard to the right letter on the card with his name. When it comes to ABC's, Brycen has recognized a few letters (besides the ones in his name) for quite some time. He has been able to verbalize a handful of them and is able to point to almost all of them when we ask him to. (Note the video below is only 1/3 of the real video...for some reason Blogger was giving us a hard time with loading a video over 3 minutes so we had to edit it down. It still gives you the progress made! If you are a friend of ours on Facebook, we are attempting to load the video in it's entirety there as that is the only place I can load the entire thing). In addition to those things, Brycen has been working hard at school with the Handwriting Without Tears program and he has a lot of difficulty with tracing (fine motor skills are very far behind in the area of holding a pencil/crayon but this is being worked on in both school and OT each week). Up until this point, we just weren't sure what he was learning from this yet as they have been working on a new letter each week since he started at this school in October of last year. The speech therapists have also been working on single sounds of letters. Since Brycen has difficulty with many of the sounds and positioning his mouth and tongue correctly, this is definitely slow going. It is very important that he knows how to make the various sounds by themselves before we can expect much more out of him verbally. All of these things include so many steps to teaching him and we are so grateful for the help from the therapists and teachers to let us know what the next step is! We don't want to keep you any longer from the videos:) I'm not going to explain anything afterwards because we believe if you have been following along with Brycen and his progress/struggles over these last couple years, we don't have to explain in words how these two things are so very exciting to us. We sure hope you feel the same as we do! As always, feel free to comment or ask any questions if you are unsure of something you see or hear and we will gladly explain. We will especially enjoy the encouragement from all of you to share with Brycen. Let's make sure he knows how many people care for him and cheer him along!