Look who was in the local paper called The Patch for coverage on the Etnies Skate Day. Thank you to Etnies and Askate for giving our beautiful kiddos a day of new experiences, fun and above all acceptance.
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 centralnervous system. It is considered to be a neurodevelopmentaldisorder. 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, areunable 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 whatautism was and that there was no cure for autism. Well...... that is not the case. You canrecover 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.
1 comment:
That is great. So cool there are companies out there to support the cause.
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