Leo’s on a roll at school; every day his backpack contains notes from his teacher about how giggly he was, what great eye contact he’s making and how plugged-in he is in terms of classroom activities.  We love that.  We’re also attending a nice little multi-part seminar his school district is presenting on increasing social communication for kids with developmental delays.  After all of the reading and research and appointments we’ve had over the last few years, I frankly wasn’t expecting much to be new to me, but I’m kind of relieved to see I’ve still got a lot to learn.  The more I can push, the better off he is.

He’s doing good things, though.  Yesterday he came home from school and got to watch one of his favorite music DVDs–which isn’t offered to him all that often–and he had a blast, pulling me over to dance with him, responding to verbal cues in the lyrics, imitating the dancing he saw on screen, and best of all, falling down whenever the singer shouted, “Wipeout!”  (After that, of course, he just kept falling down as a prompt for me to yell “wipeout,” which was great, too.)  In general, falling, bouncing and dancing around are great things for him… here they are on the trampoline at a friend’s place the other night…

Luka (left) and Leo

I’ve put out my feelers for ABA therapy, though I haven’t heard back from anyone yet.  There was an interesting phone call from his therapy place, though–they wanted to know if his therapists could co-treat him today instead of doing back-to-back sessions, in hopes of it being less tiring for him.  Of course, I agreed, so we’ll see how that goes.  As it is, we’re just reaching the end of the dozen PT sessions our insurance company initially agreed to cover, so we’ll have to see where that goes.  The therapists’ office suspected we’d be offered thirty more over a three-month period, but who knows?

Luka, on the other hand, is our self-appointed style monitor.  I confess that it’s time for some serious hair-coloring on my part, and Luka was nice enough to inform me yesterday, “Mama, you got some funny hair… it’s not good.  You have a bad hair day.”  Uh, thanks.  (At least he was good enough to revise his assessment after I managed a quick run-in with the hair dryer…)

So, W and I have to do our ‘homework’ for our training sessions at Leo’s school tonight, and I need to finish reorganizing things in preparation for my mother’s upcoming visit.  There’s been much dust raised during the process in the last few days (mostly from changing out window treatments and cleaning ceiling fans…), which is doing a nice job of exacerbating the miserable cold I already have.  Peppermint oil is the only thing keeping me going.

Oh, and they both went off to school this morning wearing shirts that were part of a Christmas gift from K&A (my brother and sister-in-law)–which was funny because I was certain these shirts were so huge that the boys wouldn’t be wearing them until they were five or so.  As it turns out, three and a half is more grown-up than I thought…