We survived!

I know I say this quite often, but this was probably one of the busiest weeks of all times for us. We had a wedding shower, birthday party, music recital, one doctor appt for Dom, two doctor appts for Mom, and all of Jojo's therapy sessions...........all of this on top of having water seeping into our basement. Talk about a nightmare! Now it is Saturday and we have our usual weekend chaos! Dave has school and work and we are trying to catch up from the week's events! I also have one little sickie, (Dom) who seems to have a sore throat! I have looked at the calendar for next week and have already begun stressing over it!!!

Jojo is doing WONDERFUL!! His speech is become more clear and he is attempting to say so much now. It seems hard to believe a year ago at almost 2 years old, he was using all sign language and couldn't even say simple sounds such as, ba or pa. He is proof of how far apraxic kids can come with proper and EARLY intervention. He wouldn't even be close to where he is right now if we had waited for him to catch up. That being said he still has lots of work to do, he still struggles with certain sounds, words, and motor speech patterns. He is having some problems with assimilation he will say "my map" when he means "my nap" and multi syllabic words can be very hard for him to say. The melody of his speech is a little off and he still is leaving off beginning sounds of words quite often. If you haven't seen this little boy in a while, you will be amazed at the difference!!! I'm so proud of him. I will try get some video up soon.

Neurologist

This morning we went straight from Kaufman Center to Jojo's appointment with his neurologist. She asked about how he has been doing with everything and then observed him walking, running and did some range of motion with his arms and legs. She picked him up moved his little body around and then talked some more with me. She again told us how he has pretty low muscle tone. She said he is very low not only in his extremities but his hips, shoulders and trunk. It is a little bit noticeable by his gait when he walks. I notice all the time how much more difficult things are for him physically than they should be. She said his hypotonia will probably make things harder for him than for other kids. He has trouble with muscles stayed flexed, they tire easily and his balance is harder to control. He also has to be careful because his joints and ligaments are so bendable he could get injured more easily. (dislocations etc) No gymnastics for this guy! Hopefully in time this will be less challenging for him. As I said before, this has been a benign finding with him (cause unknown) and probably present since birth. He has had many blood tests done, and also an MRI of his brain, all of which have been completely normal. So basically we just have to work with it. Last thing is he really needs to be in physical therapy. This is very upsetting to me because of our insurance issues with this. Basically he is only covered 60 consecutive days during each year and that won't begin until June because that is when he began PT last year. I'm going to fight insurance on this also. We cannot pay for PT on top of all of his speech.