Week 10 Update

The stuff I did this week was pretty similar to what I've been talking about for a while now (analyzing Quince's speech sample at ASU and going to Quince's therapy sessions). So instead of repeating myself, I'm going to give you guys an update on how Quince is doing and what sort of progress he has been making in the last month or so.

My parents have been coodinating a lot of medical stuff for Quince, which I'm not really going to talk about. Essentially, Quince's speech is significantly affected by how healthy he is at that time, so every time he gets sick, his speech deteriorates. It's not just that his throat hurts so he talks less, but his pronunciation becomes way more garbled. Anyways, the medical stuff I was talking about seems to be working pretty well, because his speech is very clear and more spontaneous than usual.

But the most exciting thing that's been happening with him recently is that he seems to be more aware and less scattered. When he was one and a half, Quince used to grab my calculator, hold it up to his ear, and babble like he was talking on the phone. But after his regression, we haven't seen any pretend play at all (for nearly four years). Not engaging in pretend play is very common among children with autism. However, in the past couple of weeks, Quince has carried around an orange bucket that he puts on his head and says 'hat'. We also saw him trying to make his stuffed bear ride his bicycle. This may seem kind of insignificant, but it's actually very exciting for us to see because it shows he's making progress.

Something else that indicates a lot of progress for Quince is his improved attention span. My mom, a pediatrician, has described him as having the most severe case of ADHD she has ever seen. He usually doesn't stay at one task voluntarily for more than a few seconds, and he spends most of his free time (when he's not in therapy or working with someone) running around the house from one object to another. This is why watching him is so much more exhausting than a regular child. Ok, I'm getting sidetracked but this might be kind of interesting, so I'm going to describe a typical five minutes when I'm babysitting him. We'll probably start in his playroom. He'll grab a toy, throw it, run across the room, run back, and then bolt out into the living room. He'll dive onto one of the couches (on the other side of the house), then climb onto a windowsill. After I haul him down, he runs into the kitchen, grabs a lemon from the counter, and if I can't catch him, bites a chunk out of the rind. While I'm getting that out of his mouth, he'll reach over, grab the dropped lemon, and throw it down the sink. Then he would probably run back to the playroom, run back to the kitchen, pull a box of cereal out of the pantry, dump it on the floor, run into the bathroom, spread shampoo all over the bathroom and himself, turn on the bath, run out to the kitchen and grab the lemon again... That's probably only about two minutes actually but you guys can see where this is going. So anyways, you can see there's very little coherence or planning in that. Anyways, the cool part is that lately Quince has been doing things that are still kind of difficult to manage, but that involve multiple steps and a sort of planning. For example, yesterday, he climbed up the pantry shelves somehow, and my mom found him perched on the top shelf, pouring quineoa onto the floor about eight feet down. Usually, he wouldn't do this because it would require him to take at least a couple minutes focused on climbing, not to mention pretty good motor control to climb those shelves, and a sort of intent that he hasn't displayed very often. Basically, Quince had to think something like "I want to pour quinoua off the top shelf of the pantry" (he loves pouring things and the feeling of grains and stuff) and then proceed to work towards this goal for far longer than he would have ever stayed focused before.

So that was pretty cool for me, but it might have been one of those you had to be there things so sorry if I bored you. Anyways, thats's what's been going on.