Go, Brycen, Go!!!

What a wonderful surprise to come home from church to find Daddy & Brycen outside on the sidewalk with Brycen's bike.  As we drove closer, I could see those little legs pedaling away...and Daddy not even helping!  This video was taken by me in front of our house.  Unfortunately, Blogger would not allow me to load the other video of him riding towards me, a little uphill so he does pause or accidentally applies the brake and needs a little nudge from Mike to keep going.  This video has been loaded onto our FB pages instead.  The second video which Blogger did allow me load below is of him riding to the corner which is slightly downhill...and you can see he gets some momentum and Daddy ends up having to run next to him.  We are so, so, so thankful for the hard work of the physical therapist in the last few weeks to help him get to this point!  She knew that he had the ability to do it, but just needed the extra encouragement to realize it and knew it wouldn't take long.  I don't think any of us thought he would have come this far in only a few weeks!  Once again, just when certain things can bring us down, he pulls through with something amazing that keeps our momentum going in this fight.  We will NEVER take for granted these things!

NEXT UP, RAGBRAI 2012!!!!

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!

Brycen is catching a ball!

Brycen has always been pretty good at sports, hence he IS his father's son:)
Mike has been working with Brycen on catching again as he used to have this skill almost mastered over a year ago, but lost some of his fine motor skills & hand/eye coordination during the regression that are required to be able to catch a ball.

Here is a video of his progress and the result of this hard work!



Note in the video you will see Brycen looking at himself in the TV screen often. This is something he does a lot lately. Now that he is starting to do some dance moves again to various songs on cartoons, he tends to sit down on the floor in front of the glass door to the TV stand and watch himself as he does the moves. He will also turn around in his chair at the table so he can see himself eating in the microwave door that is directly behind him on the counter. I'm not quite sure what to make of all this, but I think that his awareness of himself and interest in watching himself is a good thing.

Oh, and almost forgot to mention that Brycen did a great job imitating "bubbles" today! I distinctly remember him saying this word quite clearly before he regressed. Shortly after Aubree was born and while my Mom was here visiting, I remember sitting in the living room at the old house feeding Aubree and could hear Brycen outside on the porch with my Mom clearly saying "bubbles" while she would blow them and he would chase them. His fascination with bubbles has not ended, though that word did disappear. He is now saying "bu-bu" with prompts from us...and would even put together the sign "more", "bu-bu", and the sign "please" with prompts today. While the words we do get from him are prompted, at least we are getting a few more word approximations out of him...and not just once, but multiple times! The key to working with Brycen (and many children on the Autism spectrum) is repetition, and while it does get boring to say the same phrase over and over for 1/2 hr of "work", and then have to take "breaks" to let Brycen finish his flapping so that he can concentrate once again on the "work", the rewards can be amazing! Good job, Brycen!!!