Updates from the Patriarch

Well, it's been a long time since I, Jay, have written on this thing. At one time it was my doing, but I turned Christi into blog junkie.
Anyway, quick Andrew allergy update...
The results from his blood test put him at HIGHLY allergic to cats, as well as a high result for peanuts. With the peanuts thing, we of course had to enter the world of the EpiPen. A magic marker looking syringe filled with adrenaline that kills allergic reactions to things. Very interesting. Hopefully, we'll never have to use it. But the school has one and we have to carry one and all that jazz. But Andrew doesn't really eat anything, so whatever.
Ministry is good. Family is good. God is great! We are amazed at how God has led us on our journey to where we are now.
Well, that's all for me. I'm tired of typing. Blessings to you who have touched our family in some way. May we continue to glorify our Father in heaven!

Yay for Allergists!!!

Our appt. with the allergist went very well!!! Andrew was almost an angel...they had to draw blood so that was the only bad part, but lasted two seconds. The allergist took lots of time with us asking questions and letting us ask questions. Basically she ran two panels on him. One for regular food, mold, dust and pet allergies and the other is a very new panel that she can't even tell us is 100 percnt accurate, but it will let us know if milk or wheat is effecting his behavior any. I was so pleased that she brought up this test when we were talking about his autism. Most medical drs. won't even discuss these types of things with you. We will get the results of the panels on the 25th.
In discussing his allergies with us, she told us to up his dose of Zyrtec (because he weighs what a 6 year old does!) and she also sent us home with samples of a nose spray and an inhaler. We saw results immediately!! And he slept through the night Wednesday and Thursday!!! What a blessing.

The above picture is Andrew doing a breathing treatment. He's come a long way hasn't he Nana?? He used to kick and scream the whole time and it was torture. He's such a big boy now.
The below picture is Andrew and Jay kicking back and having some popcorn. Jay took the college students to Passion last night and will return home this evening. Andrew is really missing his Daddy. He woke up at 6 this morning screaming for him....he calls him Jay sometimes when he doesn't answer immediately, it's too cute.

Glimpses of Progress

I'm not sure if any of you read the last post but Andrew has had a rough few weeks. Well, today God decided to show me that Andrew is very smart and indeed making great strides. Our son absolutely loves sea life....all kinds, but sharks and whales are the favored ones at the moment. Tonight as we were putting him down to bed, we were reading this informational book about sharks that we have read many times. Jay decided to ask Andrew if he knew what kind of shark was on the page and our brilliant child replied "That's a whale shark." AND IT WAS!! Not only was he right about the type, he also said a full sentence!! He then proceeded to tell us which one the hammerhead was just in case we thought he was guessing before. Jay and I were both overwhelmed with joy and pride. We have known Andrew is smart and capable of these types of things, but haven't seen much fruit of it. He's been talking so much more here lately and saying more and more sentences. They're usually two or three word sentences, but tonight shows that he's capable of more. God is good.
On a side note, Andrew's been sick the last few days with a horrible cough that is making is asthma flare up. I took him to the dr. yesterday and she said his ears were a little red and gave us an antibiotic. Between that and the breathing treatments every 4 hrs., he seems a little better tonight. Another thing we got while we were at the dr. was an appt. with the pediatric allergist on Monday! I'm very excited about this as Andrew's allergies just keep getting worse the older he gets....and we're pretty sure he has a peanut allergy so that will be good to know for sure. I hope the next post is telling about how my child was a perfect angel while they gave him these allergy tests! We'll see. :)

Thank God for Fish Faces

Andrew has had a rough few weeks and today was the worst. I went to pick him up from school in hopes that the teachers would tell me he had a good day....those have been few and far between here lately. As I walked into the school I could hear screams coming from his classroom and I thought "Wow, who is that?!" Never in a million years would I thought it was Andrew. But indeed it was. He was in the middle of the most violent tantrum that I have ever seen him throw. The teacher was trying to get him to calmly sit in time out, so I didn't let him see me so she could follow through and make him obey. While I waited, I witnessed him slap her and kick her all the while screaming. She finally got him calmed down and then tried to calm me down. I expressed that I felt he was regressing and she promised me that he was still making strides, but was just testing his boundaries right now. Then she told me she was sorry I walked in while he was doing that....she said SHE was sorry!!! I'm telling you, she is one in a million. She didn't want me to think that he was like that all the time....she says that he is still doing his work great and following directions better. This all coming from the woman that was just abused by my son! It's hard to stay encouraged when I don't see progress and see these horrible fits coming back. He hasn't acted like this since before he started school. Please just pray that we would find answers to help him and that his behavior would improve. And that he would sleep better....that may be the cause of all of this, I don't know. Autistic children don't tend to sleep very well, and while Andrew hasn't really had too much trouble in this area before, he seems to now.

Thankfully he's not like this all the time, he still has moments of adorableness. In the picture above he is doing his fish face, which cracks me and Jay up. I wish you could see it in person...it's so funny.

Andrew's Eating!!!!

Unfortunately it's not food he's eating. He's been having VERY fitfull sleep the last few days and Jay and I have been wondering what in the world is going on with him. Well, as Jay changed a poopy diaper last night, we found the answer. *WARNING The following may gross some of you out.* Jay called me into Andrew's room and said, "you have to look at his poop", so I looked and discovered an ear plug in his poop!!! There is no possible way this just fell in his diaper. No friends, he really put this in his mouth and then swallowed it. He still won't eat most real food, but apparently ear plugs are pretty tasty. (He also tried a leaf a couple of weeks ago, but spit it out...I guess they're not as good as ear plugs.) We are so thankful that ear plugs are mushy and it was able to pass through his little body. I'm still a little worried it might have done some damage, but I guess we would know if he was in pain. We are also thankful that we had a great night's sleep again last night. This let's me know that this was indeed the cause for his unrest. I think we're going to start laying real food miscellaneously around the house to see if it might try it.

Visitors

As you might remember from a previous post, Alyson came and stayed with us for a few days a couple of weeks ago. Here a some pictures of her and Andrew:



The day after Christmas we got to have some more visitors! Perry & Kendall came all the way from Tennessee to go to a youth conference with us. It was great having them around and the conference was great also! (I took two pictures of the boys together and I thought this one captured their personalities better).

Christmas party at school

The Wednesday before school let out for Christmas break, Andrew's class had a Christmas party. If you've never been to a party with 6 autistic children, well, let's just hope you never have to. There was too much sugar and too much stimulation, but overall Andrew did ok. Here he is on the swing they use for sensory therapy:

These next two are of him actually sitting down!! Let me just say, it was short lived.


And this is his teacher Ms. Becky. I wish I had a million dollars to give her....she deserves it.

Andrew goes back to school tomorrow and we're praying that he adjusts back ok. As you can imagine, we've been far from any kind of routine or structure so Ms. Becky may be in for it.

Christmas

Since I have been such a slacker in blogging, these posts are kinda going to be lumped together. I'll start with Christmas.

Andrew & Alyson on Christmas day at Mamaw's.

Andrew and Mommy at Mamaw's.

This isn't actually on Christmas, but I thought it was cute.

This microphone was in Andrew's stocking from Santa. He also got a fish tank from Santa, but he wouldn't move his head when I was trying to take the picture, so I never got a good picture of it. But he loves it!! He really loves feeding them.

This is Andrew holding his transformer, which he opened first and really didn't care about anything else he got.

Christmas in Dallas

This past weekend we went to Dallas and had Christmas with Jay's family. It started with the big family get together on Saturday. All of the kids get a present, and this is Andrew scoping out the other presents that he thought were way better than his:


Aunt Mindi is very happy!
Saturday night we had our gift exchange with Jay's immediate family. Andrew, of course, got tons of stuff!



He thoroughly enjoyed opening the presents this year. After he opened all of his, he then proceeded to open all of mine. He's such a great helper. Then Sunday morning while I was making breakfast, Andrew opened his Pop's present! I re-wrapped it and explained that it wasn't his...I'm not sure if he cared. We spent the rest of Sunday just lounging around and enjoying spending time with family.

Dylan Kane

Yesterday my little sister had her second baby, Dylan Kane. He weighs 6lbs. 7 1/2 oz. and he's 18 inches long. Isn't he adorable??

Since my sister had a c-section, I decided to take my neice, Alyson, off of her hands for her until Friday. Andrew and her are having so much fun together!

Andrew's First Awards Ceremony

This past Sunday night, the precious praise choir got to walk across the stage and get their award for memorizing hymns (which Andrew did not, but they had pity on the little guys). Let me tell you that when they told me Andrew would be doing this, my heart stopped. Andrew LOVES, I mean, LOVES to be on stage. So I just knew that he would never get down once he was up there, but he surprised me once again. They brought them in the sanctuary all together, as seen here:

When they called his name, they led him on stage and he got his trophy (with his name engraved and everything!). He then turned around (wish I had a picture, but the camera malfunctioned) and just looked out at everyone and smiled. He started to protest getting off the stage, but then miraculously just came down and sat with Jay and I. We were very proud of him.

Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving day with Jay's family in Dallas, where unfortunately I didn't get many pictures. I did get this one of Jay and his cousin, Casey.

Casey has three kids and Andrew loved his oldest, Katherine. He kept calling her "hey girl" and followed her everywhere! On Friday we headed to Tyler to see my family. Andrew and Alyson had a blast playing together!! I'm so glad that he's starting to enjoy his cousins!

The picture below is my cousin's little girl...isn't she a cutie!
We really had a great time seeing family and now we're getting ready to head back to school tomorrow. Getting to sleep late this past week has been wonderful, but Andrew is ready to get back into his routine. He's asked for Ms. Becky (his teacher) every day this week! On that note, he's doing really well in school. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago where they confirmed that Andrew is autistic...moderate is what they labeled him. They said that academically he's doing great. They also said that he's got great receptive language and a really good vocabulary. They said that he does really well one on one, but when they try to do group activities, he gets distracted. They feel that by the fall he will be in a mainstream pre-k classroom! This was really great news! Please continue to pray for us. We are really thrilled with Andrew's progress, but we want to know that we are doing everything possible to help him recover from this. He will always be autistic, but seeing how far he's come in so little time gives us hope that he can lead a "normal" life.

Visit to ER....

And I'm not referring to the set of the popular medical drama. Today Andrew had his first visit to the emergency room. He started coughing yesterday and then woke up this morning having trouble breathing. So we gave him a breathing treatment. It helped some, but by lunch time he had also developed a fever. So we decided to put him down for his nap and see how he was when he woke up. Well, he couldn't even get to sleep he was coughing so much, so I went in his room to check on him and I heard the wheezing as soon as I opened his door. He was really struggling. So we decided to take him to the clinic that's open on Saturdays. As soon as we got back in to the room the nurse said, "wow, he's really struggling, I think I'm going to go ahead and get the dr." The dr. came in and listened to him and said that he really thought we should take him to the ER. He said his chest was really tight and he really thought he should have an x-ray. So, off we go to the ER. I'm really worrying by this point because I didn't think autistic children and hospitals meshed very well. I just knew he was not going to cooperate with them, especially since he was going to have to have an x-ray!!! Well, Andrew amazed us. He did soooo great through everything. They gave him three breathing treatments and decided that he has bronchitis. We've always had to hold him down for breathing treatments, but by the second one he just sat there like a little angel and we even gave him one tonight before bed and he just laid back and relaxed during it!!! Here are some pictures of our visit:

This is after the second breathing treatment, I think. He was already feeling better. Oh and did I mention that we were supposed to be having our sunday school class over for appetizers for our progressive dinner tonight? Thankfully our pastor's wife is a saint! She came over and fixed all of the stuff I had already bought and everyone just came over as planned. When we got home we couldn't even tell anyone had been here!! So anyway, hopefully Andrew will be feeling all better soon. He's on cough medicine, steroids and an antibiotic so I'm sure he will!

Happy 30th Jay!!!

I think it was a pretty good farewell to the 20's. We started the celebration yesterday by heading to Dallas after lunch. We dropped Andrew off at Nana's and then headed off to:
It was wonderful!!! From there, we headed to the Dallas Stars Game. If you know my husband, this was the perfect birthday present. Someone gave Jay their season tickets for that night and we sat 8 rows off the ice! It was sooooo cool to be that close. Unforunately the Stars played horribly and lost 5-0! But we did get to see Wayne Gretzky so that made it a little more bearable. Oh and we saw a fight with blood and everything....you get to see a really disturbing side to people at hockey games when the players start to fight. They start taunting and cheering the players on to beat the brains out of the other one....like I said, disturbing.

Then today we spent with Jay's family. His dad drove down from Oklahoma and we ate way too much and just enjoyed laying around together. Among other things, Jay got a Blackberry from his family and it's pretty cool even to a technological idiot like myself. Overall, I think it was a pretty great birthday.

The Force is Strong with this One

This past Saturday was the fall festival at the elementary school so our little Yoda decided to make his debut. He was not thrilled at first with his costume, but I convinced (forced) him to wear it anyway.


Below is Andrew and James, our music minister's little boy. Andrew was very excited to see him!

There was a bubble blowing machine outside at the musical chairs and that would be where we spent the majority of our evening. Who cares about candy when you have bubbles??

ABC's Part II

We thought you might want to hear the ABC's for yourself. He didn't do quite as well this time as he did last night, but still quite cute if I do say so myself.

ABC's

Tonight as Jay and I put Andrew down to sleep, we prayed with him and then asked him if he wanted to sing a song. Usually this consists of Jay and I singing while Andrew joins in a few lines here and there. Tonight he busted out in the ABC's and did the whole thing by himself! It was the most precious thing to hear....Jay and I were both in tears by the end. We thank God amazing times like these.

Fun Time in Beerleyland

Sorry that I don't have any pictures for this post, we accidentally forgot the camera on our adventures this week. And I say adventures because we had two separate ones. Jay headed out to San Diego for a youth minister's conference, while Andrew and I stayed in Dallas with Nana. Jay had a wonderful time. He said that it was very smokey from all of the fires. I'm glad he got out before it got too bad in San Diego. Andrew and I also had a wonderful time with Nana, but Andrew got sick while we were there. He was running fever and pretty whiney the whole time. Jay flew back Monday night, then we went with Nana yesterday to go get Aunt Mindi from work and then headed home. We got here at about 5:30 and it was pretty cold in our house, so we turned on the heater and then these little wall heaters in the bathrooms because they don't have vents. Well, the carbon monoxide monitor went off so thus begun our crazy evening. Andrew was already asleep, so we just opened all of the windows and doors and let the house air out. I then called the gas company and they said they would send someone out shortly. An hour and a half later (10:15 p.m.!) the guy showed up.....we were freezing by this time. He said that those wall heaters were putting off an insane amount of carbon monoxide and he wanted to shut our gas off altogether. He checked all of the other gas-run things in the house and since the wall heaters were the only things putting off the CO he had mercy on us and made us sign our life away saying that we wouldn't use the heaters anymore. Like he had to convince us! Today the church sent out a plumber today to cap the things off so they can never be used again. I guess we'll just have to get some electric heaters because let me tell you it's almost unbearable to go in there and it's only into the 40's at night right now! But I am thankful that we had a CO alarm in the house. If you don't have one and you have anything run on natural gas....GET ONE!
On a quick side note, I decided to take Andrew to the dr. today since he cough had worsened. It turns out he has a double ear infection!! No wonder he was so whiney at Nana's!

Zoo

Yesterday I went to Tyler to see my little sister and neice Alyson. We decided to take the kids to the zoo since it was such a pretty day. Andrew LOVED it!!! I knew he would since he loves animals so much.

He behaved pretty well too....the only tantrum came when we were leaving the reptile house. I think he might make that his new home if I would let him. But I spanked him and then ignored his fit for a minute and told him to come on and he just got up and came.
Afterward we went to visit my grandmother where Andrew and Alyson played/wrestled some more. For some reason Andrew really loved laying on Alyson.

The day must have worn him out because after about two minutes into the ride home, I looked back and saw this:

Haircut & School Update

We decided that instead of paying for Andrew's haircut, we would do it this time. We just buzzed it, but he did a lot better for us than he does for the ladies at Cool Cuts for Kids. It made me a little sad to have his hair all gone, but I got over it when I didn't have to fight him to fix it for church!


He's doing really well in school. In the three full weeks he's been in now, we've seen dramatic improvements in his behavior. The Wednesday night after he started, I picked him up from the church nursery and they said he actually participated in the lesson. And everytime since then when I've picked him up they tell me that he's doing tons better at playing with the other kids, doing the craft, and sitting in circle time. Thursday night and Friday night we went to some local football games and he sat there the whole time like a little angel! He never once tried to get off the bleachers...he just sat and either watched the game or played with his toys. He also ate some popcorn at one of these games! This is a big deal because Andrew would never eat popcorn before. He loves it now though. Hopefully he will continue to try new foods. His teacher tells me that he does great at school. He has the occassional tantrum, but gets over it quickly. They even go to the big cafeteria to eat and she said that he just sits there and eats his lunch (which I hate to call lunch since it's at 10:30 a.m.!). So we're really proud of him. We are currently looking into taking him to a doctor who specializes in autism. There are just tons of things we've read about that we'd like to have him tested for. But it's a little scary because we know nothing about these doctors. I made an appointment with one the other day and asked Jay's mom to see if she could find out anything about him (she's a nurse in the Dallas area) and it turns out he's a quack who reads the kids aura!! So please pray that we'll have wisdom in choosing the right doctor.