Matthew Sumida: Our little Buccaneer

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Our little Buccaneer

Tonight we took Matthew to a halloween party at Sensory City. He was a pirate and the cutest little buccaneer you have ever seen. He had a great time and we enjoyed watching him play with the other kids and have a chance to visit with other families.

A visit with our Anna who Matthew loves dearly.

Playing in the ball pit, a new favorite.

A great time was had by all. I wish we had taken more photos but were having a good time running after our little fellow. We are enjoying being able to experience so many different things with Matthew that were not possible before. He is able to handle various stimulation so much better and loves seeing his friends and playing. We look forward to even more special and memorable times with our precious boy.

Mommy loves you Sweet Pea!

2 comments:

Trojan Fan said...: We love seeing the wonderful changes in this very special boy. He is such a cute pirate and looks like he had a fun night. Much love to you all.; October 26, 2008 at 9:23 AM
Suzanne said...: That's too funny! Devin is the exact same thing this year. Same costume. Cute cousins think alike. Ha!; October 26, 2008 at 4:32 PM

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Matthew Dean

We started this blog because we wanted to be able to keep our loved ones up to date on Matthew and the wonderful progress he is making. It has been a crazy time since receiving Matthew's diagnosis of moderate to severe Autism in February 2007.
Autism is classified by the World Health Organization and American Psychological Association as a developmental disability resulting from a disorder of the human central nervous system. It is considered to be a neurodevelopmental disorder. It typically begins before 3 and is lifelong. It is characterized by varying degrees of impairment in verbal & non verbal communication skills, social interactions, and restricted, repetitive & stereotyped patterns of behavior. Children w/autism often fail to respond to their name, are unable to speak or have delayed speech and often avoid eye contact. They tend to engage in repetitive movements like rocking, spinning, hand flapping and in self-abusive behavior such as biting or head-banging. All behaviors that Matthew was exhibiting regularly. At the time we sent letters to our loved ones, we described what autism was and that there was no cure for autism. Well...... that is not the case. You can recover from autism and to that end we are pursuing a combination of therapies. Matthew is in an intense intervention program consisting of ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis), Speech Therapy and Occupational Therapy. He is in this program for between 6-8 hours daily. He is also on a gluten-free and casein-free diet which he has been on since February 2007. We began biomedical intervention in June 2007 as well and homeopathy in April 2008. We read stories all of the time about these parents who start the diet, biomed or other modalities and see a miracle before their eyes. We have not had that experience but with each added intervention we see improvement..... 10% here, 8% there. We know that we will reach that 100% mark and that day will be the second best day of our lives, the first being when our little angel was born! We will update this as often as possible to that you can celebrate Matthew's success with us.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Our little Buccaneer

2 comments:

Matthew Dean

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