Labels

If you know Reuben well, you'll know that he loves playing with the washing labels on his clothes or toys, bibs and blankets, and he won't sleep without a taggie blanket to rub between his fingers he loves them!

Lately though there has been talk of a different kind of label, one for one of his many conditions. For the past couple of weeks the words aspergers and autistic spectrum have been floating around in the air and today we saw the neurologist who seemed to also be leaning towards the same thing. Reuben is a little young to make a full assessment but he has been referred to the Community Paediatric team who will monitor him in various situations and see if there is anything which flags up but to us, Reuben is Reuben, whichever box he doesn't tick it doesn't matter to us :o)

With regard to Reuben's bimanual synkinesis, the neurologist said that he displays the most extreme case he has ever seen! He explained the workings of Reuben's brain and the results of the scans etc, which are a bit difficult to understand but the short of it is that they just have to monitor and help him adapt to learn his own ways of dealing with it as he gets bigger.

The good news is that the neurologist has said that his spinal condition is purely an idiopathic scoliosis and not a neurological issue, so they don't know the cause for it, which doesn't seem like good news, but it is!

So we'll see what comes next - whatever it is bring it on!

The smallest things are the most fascinating!

A couple of days ago we found some ladybirds on our way home from school, Reuben was fascinated! It's the small tiny things in life that he finds the most fascinating, he was enthralled with the ladybird crawling across his fingers and watched intently as it walked up and down and round and round, Reuben is so delicate and gentle with things and loves small intricate things like Esther's dolls house and small toys to play with :o)

You can see his mirrored hands in this photo!

Portage Assessment

We've had a call from Portage to say they are coming to assess Reuben on the 1st December. They will do a risk assessment of the house also for their workers and hopefully will be able to start soon! They will work on helping Reuben to develop and learn through play, helping him with speech therapy and achieving the early learning goals. Sadly it means that Angela his occupational therapist won't be coming as often, Reuben loves it when she comes to play with him he gets very excited, but I'm hoping he loves the portage workers too!

Reuben had a bit of a sickness bug last week, he was ill for a couple of days but has his appetite back now - and surprisingly he hadn't lost any weight when he went to the clinic to be weighed he had put on the usual 2oz!

Angela came yesterday and Reuben did something quite extraordinary! He had 2 pens of different colours and although he couldn't coordinate his hands to take the lids off, he managed to use the pens to make some marks on paper and then using lots of concentration and determination worked out putting the correct lids on each pen - and managed to put the lids on all by himself! We were astonished! He finds it so difficult to do tasks like that and we were so pleased with him, he's managing to learn to do more and more things around the condition with his hands they are small steps but he's getting there!

Reuben Crawling!

Managed to get a quick video of Reuben crawling - he did it for the first time on Sunday!