Matthew Sumida: March 2011

Monday, March 14, 2011

Catching up............

It seems so long since I posted last....the times goes so fast. The weeks have been busy with school, therapy, trips to Disneyland, basket ball..... I am just posting a few things though because I have a short window of time before Matthew will want the computer again :)
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We recently spent the morning at Kidspace, the coolest kid's museum ever.

There is so much to do, see, climb there.

Special friends....

We met up with Alex and Aidan there.
Aidan is such a cutie, I think they look like they could be cousins.

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We just finished up basket ball. Matthew had fun but was excited to it to be over so he could start soccer again.

How handsome is he?

My little sweet pea getting his trophy. Good job Matthew!
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Matthew with two of his favorite people! Zachary and Andrew.
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Soccer at last!

Matthew started 2 weeks ago and WOW! What a difference from last season. He can stay on the field and go for the ball. He has done such a great job! I could not be more proud!

Score for Sumida!!!!
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Matthew is growing so fast...it makes me a little sad. The past few weeks have been a little rough with Matthew. I think it is largely due to a need for tweaking his medication but still very hard to manage sometimes. It is hardest on Matthew :(
Keep him in your thoughts, he is such a precious boy.

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.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Catching up............

Matthew Dean

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