Helloooooooooooooooo!

Ok, wow. So, I see Susan sent this link to a lot of people--which is cool. She had my permission. But, now I am typing with the consideration that I have an audience that is more than one person. LOL! Not that I am going to change how I write or type. This is a pretty straightforward blog about the things Jake is doing that I can't catch on tape and that are related to our objectives. I have other places that I write about my feelings regarding autism, RDI, our family, etc.

Just a little background for ya'all. We are the Griders. Craig, Carla, Jake and Lydia. Jake is 5 1/2. and Lydia is 2 1/2. Mommy and Daddy are 6 and 7 years old respectively ;-) (That's Jake's story and I'm sticking to it!) Jake has a diagnosis of autism from July 2004. Lydia is neurotypical. She is also not genetically related to us but was born in China. We adopted her 1 1/2 years ago when she was 8 mos old. What an awesome experience! She and Jake are typical siblings who love one minute, fight the next. Both are huge blessings from God and are the lights of our lives.

We have done a few different therapies with Jake. At 16 mos he started speech therapy and that is when I realized he had autism. We did OT for a short time. He started ABA at 2y4m and did that for 2 years until he "graduated." We stopped speech therapy at about 3 and let ABA handle his language. ABA was great for him. We had a wonderful consultant/implementer and straight implementer. However, he still had "holes" that I knew were the root of the problem. I felt we had slapped about 10,000 bandaids all over him but that he was still just as affected by the core of autism as when we started. I had purchased the RDI book and way old VHS tape right after his diagnosis but was overwhelmed at that time and didn't pursue it beyond an interested "humph." A month or so after we stopped ABA I was talking to a friend whose child has autism in San Jose and she asked me if I had heard of RDI. I went and dusted those books and VHS tape off and sat down to look at them. Well, I was up all night reading, watching, and crying tears of joy that there WAS hope! We started RDI with Susan in Sept of 2006. Right now Jake's only therapies are RDI and some pragmatic language therapy that we started in March 2007. He attends a private Christian school and is in pre-K. He could have started K by age this year but we felt he wasn't ready and that we needed a less demanding school schedule to work on RDI. So, we repeated pre-K and he goes 3 am's a week. He is also a big napper and naps almost every day, so K would have been very hard from that standpoint too. We are thrilled with our decision. His teacher is wonderful and he is doing very well in his class. We plan to keep him at that school for the rest of his education but will take it year by year and month by month and week by week. The school is very supportive and loves Jake for who he is--just like we do. He does not get any special assistance in the classroom. He had previously done typical preschool from 3 on with an aide who was his ABA implementer and incorporated RDI principles as we learned about them and taught them to her. She is amazing and has been with Jake since his diagnosis. She is now a dear family friend of ours and comes to Jake's functions at school and such as his "second mommy." We were able to fade her out of the classroom last March around his 5th birthday.

RDI has been AMAZING for our family. Jake is somewhere around stage 3/4. We are looking forward to another visit from Susan soon so we'll know more then.

Enjoy and feel free to leave me comments. :-)

Carla