Matthew's Puzzle - Autism Recovery, Gluten Free, Green Living Mom Blog

My friend Erin, over at The Mom Buzz, suggested that I take a look at a product designed to help Autistic kids Think, Communicate and Connect. She even went so far as to provide me with the product itself. So I jumped at the chance to review Playtime with Zeebu.

When Playtime with Zeebu first arrived I decided to open it without Matthew around. I figured I would like to learn about the product before I tried to introduce it to my son. The package contained a Zeebu puppet, a Playtime with Zeebu DVD and a Playtime with Zeebu User’s Guide. I immediately opened up the User’s Guide. I was quite impressed with the level of information provided in the User’s Guide. It gives Puppet Show Ideas such as “Role play exact scenes from the video. This is a great way to reinforce and model.” and “Practice ‘What is your Zeebu puppet thinking about?’ by following his eye gaze. After children find out what Zeebu is looking at and thinking about, they can ask Zeebu questions about it. (For example, if Zeebu is looking at the refrigerator, the child may ask, ‘Are you hungry?’“). It also suggests Activities While Watching such as “Pause on emotions, whatever emotion the puppet on screen is having, pause on that emotion and label it. Make the same emotion on your face so the child can reference how you look when you feel that way.” and “Pause to talk about what may happen next. You can make ‘I wonder’ statements about what you think will happen next. Say; ‘I wonder if Neek and Jumby will look at their friend’s faces?’” The User Guide has a lot of other great ideas and suggestions that run the whole gamut of play and instruction. I found it to be very useful and helpful. For parents like myself that want to help our children but we don’t know exactly what to do, this User’s Guide offers so many suggestions that you have to stumble on one or two that you feel comfortable with trying. And after you try a few you start to realize you can, and want, to do more of the suggested activities. That is how a good resource inspires a parent.

Next I decided to introduce Matthew to Zeebu the puppet. He immediately took to it. He wanted to carry Zeebu around the house and he was very excited when I put Zeebu on my hand and Zeebu started to ask him questions. He really responded to Zeebu, so much so that I was actually taken by surprise. I had not expected such a response from him. I tried a few of the ideas from the User’s Guide such as having Zeebu ask Matthew how he was feeling and engaged him in pretend play.
Finally Matthew was so excited about Zeebu that I decided we would watch the DVD together. I was amazed at how quickly he took to the DVD, the characters, the songs and the overarching ideas. He asks for the DVD almost daily and he has started referencing things from the program in other situations. Just the other day he started taking five slow breaths, just like the characters do to calm down and get their minds in a good frame for thinking. And today while transitioning from one activity to another he told me he was finished with his first choice and was moving on to the next choice on his choice board – Zeebu uses a choice board to help him pick what activities he would like to do daily, and to move to the next activity once he has finished a previous activity. Matthew did all this after only watching the DVD twice.

Overall I find the program to be very well thought out. They are addressing many topics which are difficult for Autistic children to learn, such as the importance of eye contact, emotion recognition, and how to calm down to think and process thought. And they use different, proven methods to engage Autistic children such as music, slowing down the speed of conversation, the choice board mentioned above, and music and song. I also liked the fact that Playtime with Zeebu can be used for children of many different age ranges. When I initially watched the video (I did this by myself, without Matthew) I thought maybe it was to “old” for him. But after viewing it with Matthew I realized that it wasn’t too “old”, instead, it offered higher concepts which Matthew would be able to grow into. I think it will grow with a child for several years and can be used in many situations much like social stories are used. I would hope that the creators of Playtime with Zeebu would expand the DVD to a series or collection and create other scenarios. If a parent is motivated to interact with their Autistic child I think that Playtime with Zeebu offers a unique opportunity to do just that, but I think it offers even more. I think because the people at Thought Bubble (the group that makes Playtime with Zeebu) give parents so many suggestions and additional teaching tips on their website, this would be a wonderful tool for any parent to have in their Autism Arsenal – hey, maybe I should coin a new phrase!

In our house we celebrate Christmas. And one of my favorite memories of my childhood is baking what seemed to be thousands of yummy Christmas cookies every holiday season. My mother had wonderful recipes for peanut butter cookies that we topped with M & M’s, the absolute best chocolate chip cookies (which if truth be told, I like to eat raw even better than when they were cooked), sugar cookies with a slight almond flavor and in our house, the piece de resistance, kolache cookies. They are flaky pastry-like cookies which are rolled up with a filling inside, then dusted with powdered sugar. Traditionally they are filled with lekvar, which as my mother tells me is a prune jam, poppy seeds, ground nuts or other fruit jams. In our house it was always a sweetened, ground walnut mixture, moistened with either milk or water. These took hours to make as we had to hand grind the walnut mixture and hand roll the cookies. They are no more than an inch in length and only one roll wide. I loved grinding the nuts. My father would go to the basement and bring out our old wooden ladder to which he would attach our hand cranked meat grinder (which I don’t think ever ground any meat in its lifetime) and we would grind the walnuts. The house smelled wonderful and my mother always insisted we listened to the local Polish radio station which played Christmas Carols and made dedications in Polish. My aunt, knowing our tradition, would always call the radio station and make a dedication to us. It was a wonderful time of year.
Having my own family makes me long for those wonderful traditional times but also having an Autistic son on the GFCF diet makes it impossible to make some of my favorite Christmas cookies. Well I decided that was OK. We could make our own traditions. So I started searching for yummy cookies that our whole family could love and enjoy. Here is what I found. I hope you love and enjoy these cookies and candies as much as we do. Have the most wonderful of holidays. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! With Love.

The best little meringue cookies can be found at Smitten Kitchen. I used Ghirardelli 100% cocoa bar for the chocolate chips (processed it in the food processor) to stay GFCF and make a wonderful, yummy cookie. I also added a few things to make other versions of the same cookie. I made a mocha cookie by omitting the chocolate chips and adding 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder and 1 teaspoon of espresso powder. That was a lovely, sophisticated cookie. I did another where I used 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder again, but this time I folded in chopped candied cherries for a bit of a black forest feel. You could probably also fold in some flaked coconut and drizzle with melted chocolate for even more pizazz.

One of my dad’s favorites are Peanut Butter cookies and this version of Flourless Peanut Butter cookies just rocks. I used smooth peanut butter and omitted the chocolate chips since I didn’t have any more Chirardelli 100% cocoa bars in the house and I didn’t feel like using Tropical Source’s GFCF Chocolate Chips, although they would have been wonderful in this recipe.

I also tried to make Divinity, but made a fatal candy making mistake. I made a phone call while watching my sugar/water mixture come up to temperature, and since I wasn’t paying much attention I ended up with something more like marshmallows (although not exactly), and significantly less like candy. Try it if you like. I may take the plunge again next year.

Lastly, I made a candy recipe from my husband’s childhood. Potato Candy. Larry’s grandmother used to make it every Christmas and she would color the dough red and green for the holiday. I omitted the food coloring but made the candy just the same.

Other GFCF options, but ones I didn’t make this year, could be Pignoli cookies. I want to make these next year since Larry loves them and they are very Italian (his background). Banh men cookies look really interesting. I love coconut and coconut flour so I think I might try these once. Maybe when the holidays and the pressure to make wonderful things are over and I can be free to make mistakes.

And for Christmas Dessert we are serving Pavlova. I decided to try Pavlova since the boys went nuts for the meringues and they are basically the same. I’ll serve it with homemade strawberry fruit sauce (made from frozen organic strawberries and sugar). I think it will be a nice, light, delicious ending to a traditional GFCF Christmas dinner.

Have a wonderful holiday!

For some reason this time of year always reminds me of the song in The Sound of Music – My Favorite Things and when one of my girlfriends, whose son is also Autistic, asked me what my favorite supplements were, I just figured I had to write about them. So here goes:
I think my number one favorite and probably the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is possibly one of the most basic. It is the GFCF diet. I absolutely love this diet. Not because it is easy, because if any of you have done the diet you know it isn’t, but because it was the first thing that brought us a glimpse of Matthew. This diet is the first thing I go to when I hear of an Autistic child that isn’t doing biomedical. “Have you tried the diet?” is the first thing I’ll ask the parents. The GFCF diet lifted the fog Matthew was living under and it was the first intervention which showed real promise for a brighter future for our whole family. I think for us the diet was very big. Maybe it isn’t for other families. But in my mind, and my heart, the diet will always be number one simply because it was the first thing we tried that really, really worked.
Secondly, I love probiotics. I don’t think I can actually get enough of them. After I spent some time learning about the bio-chemistry going on inside my son, I realized that probiotics rock and I need to be getting them into my whole family whenever possible. I love the ones we use as supplements but I am really starting to get into the naturally occurring probiotics. If you read one of my earlier posts you know that I am making my own sauerkraut, not because I’m sadistic (or is it masochistic?) but because I want to harvest as many good bacteria I can and homemade sauerkraut is a great way to do that. I am also looking into making my own coconut milk keffir. I’m planning to tackle that after the holidays. I don’t want too many fermenting things on the counter for Christmas! And I must say I am intrigued by the idea of kombucha. So when the new year hits you may just be hearing me say how much I love homemade coconut milk keffir and kombucha. One of the best things probiotics did for us, besides helping to straighten out Matthew’s GI issues was to also help him stop biting us. We believe he was biting because he had too much yeast in his system and after we introduced probiotics he completely stopped biting. The probiotics were not used to target the biting but it was a wonderful “side effect”!
I guess my next favorite supplement is Methyl B12 injections. Let me rephrase that, I love the results we see from the injections but I hate giving him the injections. At first we were doing really well. We gave him the shots in his sleep, but he is starting to get wise to that and it has become more difficult. We still do it while he is sleeping, and our new DAN! doctor has given us a more concentrated form of Methyl B12 so the injections are significantly smaller, so I’m hoping this gets better soon. But the results have been amazing. Matthew started to, well, just make more sense when he spoke. When you start talking about cognition and processing it becomes much harder to define what we are seeing. I don’t have all the technical words so I have a much harder time giving a clear picture of the changes we are seeing in Matthew. But it is very obvious to us that he is understanding, processing and expressing much more since the shots.
In combination with the shots we have added zinc and Polyenylphosphatidylcholine (brand name Phoschol). These two supplements together have really taken Matthew to the next level. As I said above, when you start taking about cognition and processing it gets rather fuzzy if you don’t know the subtleties and distinctions, which unfortunately I don’t, but we are clearly seeing changes for the better. Matthew’s memory seems to be improving. He speaks in longer sentences that are more “on topic”, and he seems more engaged in most activities. He is pretending more, something he almost never did. His expressive language has blossomed, and I think his receptive has gotten better also. These two supplements may be rapidly moving to the top for me, because we are seeing such huge improvements in him. Today he was at his school’s holiday party and a special education teacher that knew him a year ago when he was at his first special ed pre-school could not believe he was the same child. She pulled me aside and told me that when she first walked into the room, she thought he was a peer! She thought he was a peer!!!!!!! If you don’t know what that means, she thought that Matthew did not have any special needs but that he was in the school as a normally developing peer that would help the other children with special needs to model correct behavior. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. All I could do was throw a big “Thank You!” up to God one more time. I like to thank Him at at least once a day, because I think His hand is guiding us. I’m pretty sure He is the one opening the right doors for us, sending us the right messages, people, help, everything.
Anyway, right now these are a few of my favorite things (in the realm of supplements). I will add one more, DMG. I wasn’t so sure of DMG. It didn’t seem to make much difference and Matthew hated the taste of the liquid. So our DAN! doctor told us to do a challenge and remove it from his supplements. I really can’t explain what happened, but Matthew just got very different. It became apparent to us that DMG was making a big difference in him. We put him back on the DMG and again our little boy started to emerge again. I won’t be taking him off DMG again, any time soon.
Well, I’d like to leave you with this: My wish this year is that all of our children return to us. That we are healthy and happy in the New Year. And that our families be whole. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I believe the best is yet to come.