Matthew Sumida: Fun at the Zoo

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Fun at the Zoo

It was finally a warm and sunny day so I took Matthew to the Santa Ana Zoo with our friends. He had fun seeing the monkeys, snakes and birds but his favorite was the play area and train. Matthew loves being outdoors and enjoyed spending some time in the sun.

Matthew's buddy Brenna

Cute little Kirin

The smile that makes my heart flutter!

Regardless of what challenges we may be struggling with at the moment, I look at Matthew's precious face and am reminded what a gift Mark and I have been given. One of Matthew's hugs or kisses and the world becomes a perfect place.

I love you little guy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Great pics. Matthew looks great, what a cutie.
Miss u both.; February 19, 2009 at 6:21 PM
The Hoffman Family Blog said...: Very, very cute.; March 2, 2009 at 8:03 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.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Fun at the Zoo

2 comments:

Matthew Dean

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