The last post about Bennett talked about how awful the week had been with him (screaming for hours on end with nothing to help), but I wanted to update that because he has actually had a really really good few weeks since then. He is in such a cute stage. He wants to cuddle with anyone and everyone, but especially Olivia. He’s LOVING soft blankets (never showed an attachment to blankets before). He is smiley smiley if you work for it. His “cheeeese” is so cute I can’t even handle it. As far as his walking and talking go, he’s still in the same place if not a little bit regressed in the walking department. He can stand forever if he’s distracted, but he’s back to mostly taking a few falling steps or just crawling where he wants to go. It seems like a motivation issue more than anything, but who knows?
His talking seems to depend on the day. I can NOT figure out why some days he’s babbling and imitating up a storm and other days I can barely get an “aaahh” out of him. But on those great days he seems to be really trying to imitate! He’s just pretty bad at it, haha. He can do percussive sounds better than vowels and consonants combined. And he has pretty good pitch-matching abilities when he sings along to music. He’s also signing a few things consistently and seems to LOVE that he can communicate with us! We love it too. Right now he signs “more”, “open”, “food”, “milk”, want, “help”, “swing”, and “all done”. Most of those are really touch and go, and no one else would ever know what he’s doing with his hands, but we know what he’s doing and he has a few really consistent ones! Right now “swing” and “more” are the most consistent. Oh, and “open”, and “help”.
He's been on the same dose of Trileptal now for 3 months and 2 weeks and has been seizure free since we started it (longest streak yet!). We're hoping this isn't just a honeymoon period and we continue to see seizure control as well as developmental gains with no serious regressions. The side effects seem to be minimal and we love having a content, happy, stable Bennett!! It makes life about a million times easier than when we never know what mood we're going to wake up to.
We're grateful for the relatively good stretch we've had lately with him, we just wish we would see more progress mentally, emotionally, socially, and physically. He's way more emotionally attached to us than he's ever been, which is fantastic, but it's still hard to watch other kids his age and see how far behind he is without knowing if he'll ever catch up (or even move past this stage). Hopefully he continues to surprise us, though, and just keeps improving! We are loving our team with Early Intervention here in Utah. They've really helped us with communicating with him and getting him to engage more with us! It's such a blessing!
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