4th of July

Nate at 4

- Still the funniest kid I know.  He makes me laugh so much.
- Getting to be such a big helper.  He likes to help with sweeping up the floors, grabbing Evy's blanket for her, and cleaning up (well sometimes!)

- Nate works so hard.  I can't imagine having to do all he has to at his age.  There are so many therapy hours.  Literally, our only free day is Fridays.  He really does work so hard and actually enjoys a lot of it.
- Just for reference, Nate does 2 hours of speech, 2 hours of OT, 1 hour of ESDM, and 4 hours of ABA a week.  And goes to preschool for another 11 hours a week.  He's a busy boy!

- After a really rough period, Nate is getting a lot better at being nice to his sister.  One day, I had them sitting side by side in a cart at Costco.  Evy started crying and Nathan put his arm around her and said, "It's ok Evy."
- I've caught Nate doing his hair with potty water.  EWWWW!
- Nate knows all of his letters, upper and lower case. I'm pretty impressed because I did not teach them to him at all.

- He's pretty good at counting too.  But my favorite has to be when he makes a mistake and calls 11, "Onie one" or 15, "Five teen" or 20 "Two-ty."
- I was reading "Pete the Cat and His 4 Groovy Buttons" to Nate at bedtime.  And Nate points to the buttons and says, "Thomas, Edward, Henry, Gordon!" For those of you who haven't watched one million hours of Thomas the Train, Thomas is #1, Edward is #2, Henry is #3, and Gordon is #4. Yes, my child counts in Thomas. I've caught him doing it a few different times.

- The things this kid says!  My favorite recently has been, "That's so awesome!" just like in The Incredibles with his hands in the air.
- Still loves his blue blankie.

- He has loved preschool this last year.  He likes riding the bus to school, he loves his teachers, and he's made some friends.  His nickname at preschool was "Mr. Responsibility" because he always made sure they followed the rules.  His teacher even sent me this picture one day of Nathan walking back into class from the playground holding hands with a little girl from his class.  His teacher said he had the cutest smile on his face while walking with her. Too cute!
- His favorite food has to be spaghetti.  He usually eats several plates which is a big deal when most meals he eats only a few bites.

- He's a little escape artist.  He learned how to open the dead bolt on our front door.  Luckily, you have to have a key in there to open it so we've just taken out the key.  But he knows how to open the sliding glass door to the backyard.  And how to open the side gate.  Which has now been zip-tied closed.
- Such a big fan of books.  He knows several books by heart.

- He loves his Duck, Duck, Moose jammies!
- He has such an amazing memory.  It astounds me.
- His 4 year stats are: 31.5 lbs (13th percentile) and 38.5 inches tall (14th percentile.)  He finally moved into 3T pants!

- Favorite things: space rangers (astronauts,) watching rocket launches with daddy, trains, letters and numbers, playing outside, riding his bike, and books.
- He has such a sweet little singing voice.  I love when he spontaneously starts singing.

Hooked up for his EEG

- While Nate has been doing so many incredible things, we have also been seeing a lot of things that have been worrying us.  Over the past several months we've had growing concerns about Nate's health and development.  We've been seeing a lot of periods of staring off.  You can talk to him and even touch him and he will not respond.  We've been told to be particularly vigilant for seizures since 1/3 of kids with autism will develop epilepsy sometime in their life.  While there are typical seizures, there are also absence seizures that quite literally look like the person has checked out and then they come back.  We were pretty scared that Nate might be having these kind of seizures.  Then started the crazy screaming tantrums.  I know Nate's just a little boy, but these were 30-90 minutes of screaming.  Like he was in pain.  Holding his head, sometimes curled up in a ball on the floor.  Nothing would stop them.  Nothing seemed to provoke them.  We think he might be having migraines.  Add to this Nate was getting progressively worse at sleeping through the night.  He'd wake up at 2, 3, 4 in the morning and could not get back to sleep.  For the next 2-4 hours.  So sometimes that meant he never went back to bed after waking up at 3.  He'd do this 5+ nights a week.  And if he did sleep he would be tossing and turning all night.  All of this was taking quite a toll on his development.  His preschool teachers were quite concerned.  Nate's skills started to plateau.  We added more therapy hours.  More things stopped progressing and in some areas he was actually starting to loose skills.  That scared me more than anything we've experienced. We went to see a lot of specialists during all of this.  A pulmonalogist for sleep, a developmental pediatrician for the developmental concerns, and a neurologist for the possible seizures and migraines.  Nate has lot of blood tests, a couple EEGs, and even a MRI.  And right now we're not really left with any specific cause.  Our neurologist warned us to be prepared that that might be the outcome of all this testing.  What we do know is it the EEGs have come back as normal so Nate is not having seizures.  His MRI was also normal so we don't have a cause for migraines.  His blood panels have all come back normal except that his iron level was low.  This low iron level was the cause of Nate's restless sleep.  It's taken months, but it's coming back up and Nate is sleeping better.  Way better.  And we've been trying an anti-migraine med for Nate. And amazingly he's doing so much better.  Maybe once a week instead of every other day.  And the side effects are that it makes Nate hungry and sleepy, which is a win-win in our book.  I'm really anxious to get him back in preschool in the fall and see how he does developmentally.  But we really are so grateful that he seems to be doing better in so many areas.
- Man, I love this kid.  He's so smart and funny and sweet and hardworking and I could go on and on. We really are lucky Nathan is in our family.