The End of the Year

What an amazing, stressful, wonderful year it has been. We have been through a lot in just 365 days. When you say it like that, 365 days, it really doesn’t seem that long. But as I look back and realize just how far we have journeyed I get a real sense of just how far we have come.

I don’t really remember much about last January except that Matthew was not quite three years old yet and he was being transitioned into a Regional Early Childhood Center (RECC) pre-school program a month before he was technically eligible. Larry and I were thrilled that the school system and his teacher realized that he needed more intensive therapies then what could be supplied by his private pre-school. This was a wonderful step in the right direction for Matthew. He was almost a year younger than the other students in the classroom. Most of them had turned three before school had started in the fall. So many of his classmates were turning four as he was turning three.

This difference in age was very apparent when he was invited to a classmates birthday party. It so happened that is was on Matthew’s actual birthday, but as his party was in the afternoon and his friend’s party was in the morning, we felt Matthew should go. What a disaster. Matthew was not a physical child since he suffers from hypotonia (low muscle tone) and things like climbing just didn’t come easily to him. And unfortunately his friend had her party at the local gym’s play area. There was a lot of climbing. And a lot of games that Matthew just didn’t understand and frankly had no real interest in playing. There was food he couldn’t eat, and there was a LOT of stimming. I remember gathering Matthew and Nico together and making my way back to my car. By the time I actually got everyone situated and locked in their carseats I was crying my eyes out. It was so hard to watch my son be so different from other children. The whole experience was terrible.

But as the year went by we started to see real changes in Matthew. He was doing well in his new school. He loved his classmates and he was starting to be able to recall things he had done was in his class. Then over the summer we were lucky enough to hire a college student that seemed to have great success with teaching Matthew to write his name. She was an absolute Godsend and we can’t wait to get her back next summer.

We finally got in to see a DAN! doctor and Matthew’s cognitive abilities skyrocketed. We found out that Larry has a milk and wheat sensitivity, and we decided to put Nico on the GFCF diet too. Interestingly enough, Nico, who had not been speaking before we put him on the diet began to talk more after he was taken off gluten and casein. I had the rare pleasure of attending a DAN! conference and became so excited about what I had learned that I had to start blogging about it. (and aren’t you all lucky I did?) I even started making my own sauerkraut, which we served the first batch at Christmas!

I also became a Rescue Angel and have helped many other families on their biomedical path to hopefully recovering their child. And now as the year is closing and we have started an ABA program for Matthew, I am realizing that the child that walked into that RECC program 365 days ago is not the child I have with me, closing out the year. This new child is more aware, he is more present, he is more affectionate. He understands many jokes. He tells some himself. He asks pertinent questions and supplies many real, complex answers. He is far from recovered, but not that far. We are working, with many other people, to make Matthew just a plain, ol’ normal kid. I look forward to what the new year brings us. I am praying it is just Matthew. I am praying it is the “light at the end of the tunnel”.