Matthew Sumida: January 2011

Sunday, January 30, 2011

My little Kobe!

Matthew is enjoying basket ball though he misses soccer. How cute is his team!!! The coaches and "buddies" are wonderful and make it fun!

The All Stars and their coaches and "buddies"!

And he did it!!!

Score!

He may be the littlest guy on the team but he tries hard!

Great job Matthew! We are so proud of you!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Until soccer season starts up again we thought we'd try basket ball with Matthew. I mean (I have zero sports knowledge) it is basically the same theory as soccer right? Get the ball to the opposite side right? Anyway, he enjoyed it though not as much as soccer. Could he be any cuter? So his uniform is a little large too!!! :)

Overall he understood the game and had fun.

That smile.......

Yay! Matthew made a basket! He was so cute, he started jumping up and down yelling "I won, I won!"

Great job handsome boy! We love you!

Saturday, January 8, 2011

New Years Eve Fun!

We decided to take a trip to Wrightwood for a few hours of fun in the snow. Matthew was so excited to go. We got to the bottom of the mountain in great timing, then it took 1 1/2 hours to drive 2 miles to the tubing area! Yikes. We had a few mishaps but Matthew had a blast! He is begging to go back and have a "sleep over" at the snow.

Matthew and Kiran....little adrenaline junkies!

Such fun!
*****
I haven't posted pics in awhile and didn't take many either. December was a difficult month. Christmas was hard, Matthew was really having a terrible time and has been since early December. The past few days however have been great and I think Matthew is finally getting back to himself. He is such a sweetie and it is hard to see him so off and struggling, it just doesn't seem fair. He works hard and is the best boy ever. We love you sweet pea and are proud of you.

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.