Week 25 Progress

Ok I know apologies are in order as the last 2 and a half weeks has been the longest hiatus I've had in blogging on this site. Long story short, there was no internet connection in my hotel room in Queenstown (when I last wrote), neither any in Manila (where I was a week later) and then upon coming back to Brunei, I was just too busy gaining back some level of momentum with the babies, other work, reports, my workout etc etc and of course Raiyan and his therapy..

After being away for 11 days, it's no surprise that I felt quite estranged from Raiyan's programme and a tad lost with what I had to do in helping generalise the programme with him.. which is probably the main reason why I haven't blogged in a while.

But alhamdulillah I've slowly regained confidence and understanding of what I had missed during my absence. And again, I am thankful every minute for how far he has come...

• Raiyan has been promoted to Year 1! Jeff and I were actually agreeable for him to be retained in reception actually for fear that he may not be able to cope with year 1 seeing how his speech development is not all there. BUT, his teachers and therapists insisted that he does go up and that we'd be cheating him if he doesn't! It is not going to be easy I must say as the syllabuse in year 1 is quite a big leap from reception, especially in the amount of writings they do. And Raiyan absolutely HATES writing. I think it's mainly because of the endless amount of writings he had to do in his old school where he would write words that he has no comprehension of. But Jo said that he is getting better nowadays and we basically have to be more creative and show him the incentives in writing by making him write his own words or lines of stories that he is familiar with.
• His storytelling and recalling skills is really good now. You know how I've always dreamt of him telling me what he did in school. And now he's beginning to do that, though in very short sentences and he doesn't actually tell me everything he does (I would still need to double check with Jo and Kerri if what he told me was correct too!). Now we are starting to make it more specific by making him do something eg. locking the door and then 10 minutes later and half an hour later and then a day later, we ask him "Raiyan, what did you do at the door just now/yesterday?" and he would remember and say "I locked the door"
• His past tense is really good and he even knows a bunch of irregular verbs such as flew, blew, hung etc;
• His knowledge of obscure opposites is literally so advanced! He knows by heart a whole box of opposite lottos which consist of "monotone/multicoloured, witch/fairy, stationary/mobile;
• He is starting to learn to talk in proper conversations by asking questions and pausing to wait for the other person to answer;
• He has de-sensitised himself from the touch of glue and rain water. He is also a lot better with new sounds now (though I did mention that he is de-sensitised of new sounds in an earlier post, there are still times when he gets anxious though);
• He is more open to trying new foods now;
• He is so friendly (sometimes too friendly I must say) and waves and says hi to any random person he sees!

Some things we are working on more now is:

• Because he's been doing the phonetic sounds with Jo, we are finding him making the "P" sound a lot, sometimes to the extent that he'll spray when saying it to another person. I'm thinking it's a form of a stim because he tends to do this when he's bored or sometimes distressed with something. I've told him today that he has 5 more chances to do this and if I catch him doing it more than 5 times, then he's not going to Singapore Zoo (yes, a trip is imminent sometime this month!)
• He has been watching more TV than usual (well to excuse myself a bit, I was away when the increase started). So we have been cutting TV down a lot this week and found improvement in him being engaged with others since we've done that.

After this newly gained connection, can you believe that I'm leaving again for 9 days tomorrow? sob sob.. hopefully there's internet connection in Edinburgh! And I'm going to miss my babies so much!!