Accomplishments & Successes

Since baby books are not made for children like Wesley, I often find myself struggling as I try to update his.  As a result, this post is my way of documenting Wesley's more recent accomplishments and successes, since my memory is proving to be less and less reliable these days.

Wesley playing with his OT

Expressive Speech:

• Wesley currently uses the following signs:  please/help (he signs "please" for help as well), open, all done, play, ball
• The following words are often in his vocabulary (words still seem to come and go randomly for him):  dada, run, more ("m"), in, on, up, down, go, car, mama (although we are still unsure if this is purposeful or not).  He also recently imitated "tato" for potato and "boy" and has started to surprise us as he has sought to randomly imitate different words we say.
• He still struggles a lot with motor planning but is starting to play noise imitation games with us successfully, where we go back and forth imitating things like "ssss", "gagaga", "bababa", "dadada", "t", "mamama", etc...
• Wesley DESPERATELY wants to communicate with us.  He has the whole picture card thing down pat, regularly going over to his picture card board and examining his cards until he identifies which thing he wants most to do.  Then he brings us that card and signs please.

Receptive Speech:

• He responds to commands such as "sit down", "come to Mama", "no hit", "no lick", "no touch glasses", "give to Mama" and "stop".
• He understands phrases such as "let's go outside", "it's time to eat", "it's time to take a bath", "does Wesley want to play in the water?", "does Wesley want milk?" and comes running when he hears them.
• He is learning body parts very slowly but currently knows where our ears and nose are.  He often finds his tummy and toes as well, and loves to touch his "eyes" (really it's just an opportunity to put finger prints all over his glasses).

Developmental skills:

• This week Wesley started sorting!  He has counting bears in two different colors and we realized a few nights ago that he was sorting them by color, putting only the light brown ones into the bucket.  Mike tried dropping dark brown bears into the bucket when Wesley wasn't looking, but he noticed and pulled them out every time.  Then when Wesley's DT came yesterday, she had Wesley sort shapes by color on a stacker.  He matched the shapes to the similarly colored post every time except for once.  He has also started carefully looking at all of his options before making a choice rather than doing things without looking.
• Wesley also has started to correctly identify where puzzle pieces go.  He is unable to manipulate puzzle pieces to get them to go into the correct spot, but he often sets them down in the right place before we help him to shift the puzzle pieces to fit them in.
• Up until recently, he hated stacking blocks. (We think this had a lot more to do with hating to sit still and concentrate on anything.)  Now he is able to stack up to five blocks with minor assistance.  He puts the block on top, but we assist in keeping the rest of the tower from falling over in the meantime.
• He sits and listens to whole books (VERY short ones) before getting up and walking away.
• He has learned that my diaper bag always has snacks in it and insists on having it opened right away when he finds it in the basket of the stroller.
• Wesley imitated his therapist while playing the other day, watching her walk the Little People boy up to the top of the house and then doing the same.  It is exciting to watch this play skill emerge.
• Blanket time is improving slowly but surely.  I still need to stay on the couch next to the blanket for the full fifteen minutes, but Wesley now understands that he needs to stay on the blanket and play until the timer goes off.  He doesn't WANT to stay, but he UNDERSTANDS my instruction.  My goal is for this to be something that Wesley consistently does without crying or getting off the blanket by the time the baby is born so that I can nurse the baby or deal with a blow-out without worrying about where Wesley is or what he is getting into.

Sensory:

• Wesley willingly crawls through a tunnel (he's been doing this for a little while now). He is also learning how to crawl under small tables and over cushions in obstacle courses without crying, as a way of helping him with his sensory aversions.
• He now enjoys bouncing on an exercise ball and lying inverted on the ball, whereas before this was a very unpleasant experience for him.
• He is still unable to operate a ride-on toy, but is now willing to sit on one calmly while playing with another activity.  This is a huge step for him, as mentioned in this post.

Fine motor skills:

• Wesley's love of gears has helped him significantly with his fine motor skills and graded movements.  If we set up some gears for him, he loves to turn the crank using his pincer grasp and watch the gears move.  As the video above shows, playing with gears gives Wesley plenty of opportunities to practice his expressive language as well.
• He has become much more interested in coloring, loving to both scribble and make dots all over the paper.  Currently he insists on only coloring with the red crayon.  We'll have to work on that.

Gross motor skills:

• Wesley now crawls up the steps and goes down the slide at the park unassisted.  He also walks up the steps holding the rail with minimal assistance.
• He walks up stairs with one hand on the wall with minimal assistance.
• Last week he shocked me when I found him sitting on the couch.  He proceeded to show me over and over that he has now figured out how to get up on the couch by himself.  He's still not interested in sitting there for more than 2 seconds, but we have time to work on that.
• Wesley has figured out how to get into his cube chair all by himself.
• He has mastered climbing up into our Little Tikes cube and then going down the slide all by himself.

Feeding:

• Wesley adds new foods into his diet on a regular basis these days.  Our most recent additions are hamburgers from McDonalds (I know, not very healthy, but his feeding therapist said this would be the best way to introduce him to ground beef without him gagging on it), apples (peeled), and peaches (peeled)
• He now drinks apple juice, both diluted and undiluted, which is a wonderful addition to his preferred beverages - coconut and soy milk.
• We are working on assisted self-feeding, which he is very interested in.  He is currently unable to get food on his fork, but once we help him, he is able to direct his fork to his mouth and eat his food.  Spoons are harder!  We are still doing hand over hand for the entire meal when he eats things like oatmeal and yogurt.
• Wesley is also doing a great job at transitioning from mixing his entire meal into one bowl to using a sectioned bowl and going around in a circle eating a bite of each food.  We still struggle when we get to the vegetables. but he gets the concept now that once he's eaten a bite of vegetables, he'll get a bite of what he wants.
• He is doing a spectacular job of drinking out of a straw, so we have basically eliminated sippy cups now!

While we are always striving to help Wesley to make steps forward in all of these areas, it is also a joy to step back and see how far God has brought him.  We rejoice as we see the work that God is doing in our sweet little boy's life.