Coping with Autism

I apologize for being far more inconsistent than I thought! The last post here was in February(!) and so much has happened since. Nathan improves daily and we have seen an explosion in speech, pretend play and social skills. We suspect that he will always have some autistic characteristics but he is doing very well. Peter is improving too! While his speech abilities are still on the level of a maybe a 2-year old, he is using pronouns correctly about 75 percent of the time and he is beginning to use adjectives in describing things such as, "I want water, cold water. I want cold water." (This was a request just from this week.) We also went to Disney World again this year and I will post more on this later today or tomorrow. Nathan's birthday is Monday and I want to write more about how excited he is about this as well as his requests for toys and such for his birthday presents.

Peter has picked up on his use of words again. He's requesting things more and using words more frequently to describe things. I think his speech regression was tied to how much time he spent on the computer. Now that we've curbed his obsession with the machine, he seems to be returning to "normal." Nathan has started mimicking more and that bothers me some. It could be that he's just playing with speech and is repeating what is said to him. OR it could be that he's beginning to do what Peter does. I believe he's just playing around with speech and sounds but it's hard not to worry. Potty-training is taking off. Of course, I have to harp at the boys about it. They don't usually remember on their own. We may actually have both boys trained by the time kindergarten starts. I hope. At least I think so. . .