"No Pizza"

Before I had enough margin back in my life to put this blog together, I posted a couple of little progress stories on ZL on the Sonlight Special Needs - Learning Challenges board with the thought that that would preserve them until I could put them up on a blog.

I need to search back through and find more of them (there are at least two others, I think), but here is one from June 26 of this year.

An interesting window into the mind of my 3.5yods (PDD-NOS/ASD):

We've been doing a GFCF diet with him for 3 weeks or so now. Since right after getting his diagnosis.

ZL is low-verbal. He uses primarily one-word phrases (his only two-word phrases have "please" at the end, since we insist, but it's really only one word), mostly nouns. He does not initiate conversation (or at least did not until recently; he's starting to point things out in his environment). So, basically, we don't have a whole lot of insight into what's going on inside his head. We know he's intelligent (he's beginning to read), but we don't know what he's thinking.

Yesterday, when I was getting the kids ready to take to a friend's house for a while so that dh and I could concentrate on packing our house, I called to one of the kids to get the yogurts out of the fridge and put them in a sack to take with them (ZL had a GFCF snack already packed, instead).

ZL piped up with, "Yogurt!" (I obviously should have been more respectful and not mentioned it in front of him. We're working hard on this, but I forgot in my rush to get out the door.) So, I had to tell him, "I'm sorry. You can't have any yogurt."*

His response? "No pizza."

You see, he made the connection, the first time he heard anything about not being able to have yogurt, with the fact that he's been left out when we've had pizza since we started him on GFCF** (please, understand that we've been packing up in the US, packing our house here, and I'm 3 weeks from having a baby; there's no way we would have had pizza in front of him right at the beginning of him going GFCF, otherwise).

It floored me. It really gave me a window into how many connections are actually happening in his little mind that we have no idea about, because he can't verbalize them. It excited me (and, admittedly, made me a little sad for all we're missing). And it inspired me. We will find a way to get in there and let him out. Period.

Oh, and this morning, I asked him if he was a lil' punkin (dh's nickname for him, since he was born on 10/31), and he said, "Yeah." He answered a yes/no question! (Those of you with ASD kids will truly appreciate the magnitude of this.)

I think I have renewed vision and strength for the road ahead.

*I have since learned how to make coconut milk yogurt, and he is *so* happy to have his yogurt again. :-)

**We also now keep GFCF pizza in the freezer for him to have when we have pizza.

One More

One more recent phrase. I knew there was another one, but I couldn't remember it when I posted earlier.

- "It's broken. It won't work." ZL has a recently-developed fascination with super-heroes. (This is partly due to the plethora of hand-me-down super hero pajamas he has from when we were living in the US when MS was this age. Oh, the money we save by Mommy not being able to wander through Wal Mart and Target on a regular basis.)

We're still in the process of unpacking boxes and a cheap Spider-man surfaced that ZL latched on to and began playing with. It, being cheap, broke quickly. My general policy in these situation is to say, "Oh no, it broke. Guess we have to throw it away," all the while secretly glad that it's another piece of stuff we can get rid of.

While I didn't say this out loud to ZL, when he came to me and said, "It broke," because I wasn't sure he would grasp the whole meaning, I didn't have any intention of fixing it. Not worth it. However, when "It broke," developed into, "It's broken. It won't work,"* I caved. I fixed it (Spider-man's leg pin [apparently, Spider-man was injured in 'Nam] had come out). What mom of a kid on the spectrum can turn down two sentences in a row? Not this one.

*These sentences are thanks to the recent episode of Blue's Clues, "The One in Which Blue Gets Frustrated," that Mommy chose for his viewing pleasure. Okay, so that's not the title, but we've been on a Monk-viewing streak lately, so indulge me.

Progress Report

A few new phrases and their significance:

- "Mommy, you soccer ball!" A friend is out of the country on a trip, leaving her husband to care for their four children. Two were down with a stomach virus, so we took the other two to a park for a picnic and some flag football. The flag football game consisted of ML & MS vs. the two friends. And the added challenge was that you had to avoid knocking down ZL, who was running along the field with the pack the entire time, thinking he was part of the game. He came to me at one point (texting a friend after a failed attempt to get him to kick the soccer ball around with me on the sidelines), said the above phrase, and ran off. Very clearly, he was demanding that I watch him play football (all balls are "soccer balls" at this point). He wanted to make sure that I was paying attention. This is a very definite milestone in both social skills (sharing experiences with others) and language (communicating that desire).

- "I kick the ball." Earlier, before the flag football game was underway, ZL was kicking the soccer ball around the field. I asked him, "Are you kicking the ball?" and he responded with the above. Six months ago, he might have responded "ball." A few months ago, it would have been "kicking the ball." That he inserted the correct personal pronoun (that he used a personal pronoun at all, for that matter) and that he changed the tense of the verb is note-worthy.

- "He crying." Listening to baby brother fussing about having to burp in the middle of a feeding, this was ZL's comment today. Commenting on things and people around him was something that was notably missing from his overall set of communication skills when he was tested this summer. We're getting there.

I like meat!

I'm trying to balance between catching readers up on where we've come from and reporting on where we are/the progress we're making now. This post is about progress we're making now.

One of Z's new phrases is "I like/love...!" One of the first examples of his use of this phrase was a couple of weeks ago when ML offered him ice cream if he would go poo-poo in the potty at Burger King (a long shot, since we haven't had any success at all on the "big potty" yet, but a noble effort). Z's response was "I *love* ice cream!"

If you're just joining us on this journey, um, Z hasn't spoke in sentences up to this point. Six months ago, he had nothing but one-word phrases. When properly motivated, though...

More examples:
- When given some lunch meat last night for dinner, "I love meat!"
- In reference to Sonic video games (which he watches older siblings play; occasionally, but always joyfully), "I like Sonic!"

I don't know where he learned this phrase. It is possible that it came from the dreaded (by adults and siblings) "Y Ga Babba" (Yo Gabba Gabba) of which we own two episodes (bought before we really examined the droning nature of the show). Those have been a recent obsession, and I would love to think that something good has come out of that.

I am being realistic in assuming that the phrase was memorized from somewhere. We're not quite to spontaneous sentences yet. But he's taking a memorized phrase and adapting it to fit the situation, and that is *huge* progress, so we'll take that.


one thing Z likes: his GFCF brownies! (Bob's Red Mill mix)