Matthew Sumida: Pumkin Patch

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Pumkin Patch

A fun weekend! Friday we went to the Boo Blast, a carnival fundraiser for the school. We went with Matthew's little friends, Kiran and Brenna.

Matthew of course.......always doing things his way.

What a smile!

Special friends!
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Sunday we went to the Irvine Railroad Park with friends for the Pumpkin Patch and to try out Matthew's new fishing pole! He was so excited!

The kids had fun on the train.

Probably the things Matthew would have enjoyed most was the tractor ride.

Unfortunately he thought it was funny to crash into the hay walls so we decided to end his driving experience. There were a few tears but he understood why. He is at the point where we can reason with him and even though often we struggle with his focus and attention, his compliance and desire to please has made things much easier. He really is such a good boy and as sweet as can be. Love you little guy!

1 comment:

Roxy said...: He is such a brave little boy! Got to love those smiles. You are so lucky you can experience all these things with Matthew. We can't, as soon as we make her world a little bit bigger the ugly monster starts showing it's two heads and we have to go back to baby steps, routine, limited exposure, keeping sensory overload to a minimum. :-(; October 27, 2009 at 12:35 AM

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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.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Pumkin Patch

1 comment:

Matthew Dean

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