16 & 17 months

16 & 17 months
Victor seems to have settled down with some of that crazy irritability. He’s got about 12 or so teeth and still working on 3 more to pop out, but since those two bottom molars have come through, he sure is happier. Vic has been eating well and now weighs close to 26 pounds. Since he still isn’t mobile, he sure is heavy! Vic continues to scoot around on the floor and while working with his therapist w/ crawling, his legs follow behind just as they should. It was so exciting to see this movement for the first time, but we’re still not quite close to crawling. Victor is also showing some good weight-bearing on his feet and holding his body better for sitting up. Yes, Vic remains on the Keto Diet (he will for a long time). We will soon bump his ratio up again to hopefully gain better seizure control. Two clinic visits ago his key tone blood level was only at a 7; it should be 40. After tweaking his diet a bit we got him closer to the 40 range. All of this means that while his level was way below therapeutic, his seizures weren’t as out of control as they could have been; meaning that we have more hope of success, if he does get closer to the 40 range.

Exciting news is that throughout all of our hard work with the Natural Environments stuff, Victor started preschool on Nov 1st. He is in a class with 2 other boys, in the afternoons on Mon & Wed. You can see him in the photo snoozing away and then wearing some silly glasses (not they aren't for vision therapy)! He also has a 1-hour vision group on Friday mornings. I wasn’t sure how he’d do on his 1st day, as the class is from 1:30-3:30 (prime nap hours), but he did great. He slept only the first 20 minutes and after I woke him up he was raring to go and in great spirits! We are so excited to see how much further along he’s going to develop.

We were home for Halloween this year and Vic had a great time. In the afternoon we went to a senior program similar to one I used to work at several years ago. I had the chance to see some old friends and introduce Victor to some fun music. Vic did great and showed off some giggles. Although we didn’t go trick or treating, we handed out candy and enjoyed a visit from our friends, Laurie, Eric & Vic’s girlfriend, Vivian.

Recently, we’ve been asked to participate in a project for Soulumination (the organization that took those black & white photos: www.soulumination.org). Lynette would like to take photos of Victor and some UW football players. It is wonderful to be able to give to an organization that reaches out to so many people, when our resources don’t allow us to donate like we used to. I’ll keep you posted.

Activism:
Things have settled a bit with some of the hard work we (mostly Gary) had been doing to protect programs like Victor’s school (www.boyercc.org). Gary has met with the County department head and several other centers. He has been extremely well spoken in standing up for kids like Victor! We were told by the dept. head that he will revamp the entire draft document of rules with regards to our issues and plans to start over, putting our group in charge of who will be nominated to work with the county. This is big, but we are still waiting for the County’s formal notice to all county centers/programs.

NEW: VIC’s VIDEOS! We’ve recently added some short video clips that can be viewed at your leisure. To see Vic’s videos go to: www.youtube.com and search “vicsmiles”. I will try to upload more videos soon.

Thanks for reading and sending Vic your positive healing thoughts!

Next Update: Sometime mid-late December.