The Adventures of Dallas Bauer: August

The month has come and gone just like the entire summer. The time is really flying by. Dallas finished the school program the first week of August and both his teachers and I were amazed at how well it went. Dallas's teachers said they saw him make gains in just the 4 weeks he was there. We were so pleased that he is going to school 3 days/week this fall rather 2 days as we originally planned.

His interaction with kids and social skills have taken the biggest leap this summer. Even smaller things like bopping his head to music, and playing ball are new skills for him and we are seeing more and more of stuff like that. His crawling has just taken off and he gets around really well....as long as he keeps his head up! Every now and then he forgets to lift his head and ends up banging into things quite a bit. His sitting is solid and it's becoming rarer for him to fall over while sitting. He can almost always catch himself, or at least brace himself a bit to cushion the fall. He loves to walk with his walker and wings and we have seen some improvement with stability, but still a long way to go in this arena.

His overall health has been outstanding. He hasn't had so much as a runny nose or fever since late June. The antibiotic really seems to be the key and his pediatrician said it's safe for him to be on it for 3-4 years. As far as the saliva-gram I mentioned a couple of posts ago, for now we are not pursuing that.

Dallas continues to eat lots of foods and his chewing skills are improving. We still puree some of his diet, but not near as much. Drinking has become more of an issue. He will only drink about 6-8 ounces of thickened liquid a day. He is supposed to be getting 24 ounces, so we have been making up for that by using his g-tube a lot more.

We went to the U of M today for sound booth testing and programming. Until today, we have believed that the Left Cochlear Implant was not giving Dallas any hearing. But testing today proved that he is hearing certain frequencies at 50 decibels (which is low enough to pick up speech)! It was really exciting to see and to know that taking a chance on this implant was a good decision. He isn't getting a full range of sound yet, but everything helps.....so this was good news. As far as his "speech" goes, he isn't saying any words...but you can always see the wheels turning. He did repeat what I think was "Up" while climbing the stairs this past weekend. He is also using the signs "All done", "more", and "ball" on a consistent basis.