Support Easter Seals!

We are gearing up for Walk With Me 2012.  If you didn't help out last year, or you didn't see the video of Luke.  Here is a video reminding us what all Easter Seals has done for our little man.  Enjoy!

Communication

With Luke this has become a BIG thing.  It’s one thing if your child can’t walk at the age of 4, but for him to also have limited communication skills also…that is totally different.  I know I’m not alone out there, but there are times…like last night where I felt so alone and frustrated.  Luke has been sick on and off since Dec 1, 2011.  We get over one thing and something else comes up.  We made two trips to the ER last week, and finally got an answer for his cough and fever, Bronchiolitis.  So we started breathing treatments which, thank the Lord, helped him tremendously.  His fever went down and his cough has grown better and better…and I thought we were on the road to recovery until last night.

After Luke was asleep for an hour, he started crying.  Sometimes he does this in his sleep or will cry for 5 minutes and go back to sleep.  First, I tried getting him up and holding him a while and then putting him back in bed…that didn’t work.  Then I tried getting him up, giving him Ibuprofen and holding him a while and putting him back in bed….that didn’t work.  Then I tried getting him up and holding him even longer…to let him calm down good….and that didn’t work.  Finally I got my pillow and blanket and crawled into bed with him…which kept him quiet…but he didn’t fall asleep.  After 40 minutes of getting poked, pulled, and pushed…I finally left his bed at 12:20am when he tried crawling over me to get to the “door/gate” of his bed…so he could play with it.  The good news was he only cried for about 5 minutes and was quiet and I assume went right to sleep.  It was still a long night….and still frustrating.

You remember those early days when having a baby?  How tired you are and when the baby doesn’t go to sleep and you are so tired you just start crying because your exhausted and you just don’t know what to do?  Yep…those fun days!  That is how it felt. 

Last week, when I was on the phone with a nurse and we were trying to get Luke’s temp down from 105.3, I was trying to explain how Luke can’t communicate and she said “kind of like having a baby”.  So right she was, it is like having a 4 year old baby. 

What do you do when a baby cries?  First you check their safety (any fingers pinched?), then you check the diaper (maybe change it just in case), then you try feeding them, and if all that fails you just try to rock and sooth them.  That is so much what it is like.  Only Luke is starting to communicate a little.

In fact I have to share how wonderful it was when a few weeks ago Luke came home from school and he started crying at me.  I know…that sounds silly.  But it wasn’t that he was crying, but what he was doing while he was crying.  I noticed that he put his feet in front of himself on the floor and started hitting his shoes.  So…I took off his shoes….and he still wasn’t happy…but after he hit his socks…I took those off too…and sure enough he just crawled off like nothing happened!  It may seem small…but it was so great!!  For a kid who doesn’t point and things he wants, he finally figured out that he could tell me what he wanted by touching his shoes!

Now this has become a daily thing….and I’m wondering if the braces he wears are starting to hurt him after he walks for so long….but I’m still glad he is telling me he wants his shoes off!

Keep trying little man!

You ever see your child try something and they are SO CLOSE and you just want to do it for them?  I get this all the time and it’s so frustrating.  Luke gets SO CLOSE to doing things like, putting coins in the toy pig or putting the triangle in the triangle shaped hole. 

The other day we had another one of these moments that I couldn’t help but laugh.  Lately Luke has been getting this certain magnet off of the refrigerator and then putting it back on.  Usually this ends in frustration for him, because he tends to put the magnet back on the fridge backwards.  A few weeks back he took this magnet off the fridge, then tried to put it back on the fridge backwards.  I told him “flip it over” and low and behold, he flipped it over and it stuck!!  I was so excited!

Well, about a week or so later he was back at the fridge trying to get a magnet to stick.  I started to tell him to flip it over, and then realized it wasn’t a magnet at all, instead it was a Luke’s sister’s “debit card”.  It is small, flat and plastic and has stickers on it so that it looks like a real debit card.  It was the right size and shape for most of our magnets so I can see where he was a little confused. 

I couldn’t help but laugh though, as much as I told him it was not a magnet…he kept trying to get this “magnet” to stick to the fridge and it wouldn’t.  I caught a little of this on video so you can enjoy it as well.  Although in this video I caught him trying out the "magnet"....then he decided to try another use for his "magnet" if it wasn't going to stick.

Is that laughter I hear?

I know I have mentioned Luke’s sense of humor several times in the past, but once again he just cracked me up the other day.  He has been sick…again..so he’s been home a lot lately.  I wonder if being home so much…he got bored….or what happened.  Either way, Luke found something new and funny.

I was in the kitchen cleaning and I hear laugher.  (You know, one day I hope to have a kitchen that opens up to the living room, so I don’t have to always leave the kitchen just to find out what the kids are up to).  Anyway, I go in the living room and I hear a “thump” followed by a laugh.  I look to the recliner and there is Luke up on his knees playing with several toys, but then Luke lifts his arms high and drops them down to the recliner fast, “thump”!  Luke then laughs, because the result of his hitting the recliner is that all the small toys jumped up in the air!  He continued to do this for a good 10 minutes.  I tried capturing it on video, though he stopped laughing once I broke out the camera…he didn't stop hitting the recliner.