Dark Days Behind

I just reread the past two posts and a few things come to mind. First, I'm happy that I it hasn't been a whole year since my last post. Second, my writing has suffered terribly over the past 10 month hiatus because I've only been making FB posts. And third, the past two years were really hard. Those two posts were pretty dark.

M is 3 and a half now. She just recently started preschool and is attending at the school right next door to this coffee shop where I sit for the next half hour. If I buy a cup of coffee then I get 47 free minutes of WIFI. I thought, why not get that blog dusted off?

My reasons are partly selfish in this. I need to reconnect with the international adoption community because there are issues that I don't fully understand with M that I'm hopeful others can help with. I've been trying to find some kind of intersection between the autism and adoption communities and I have found none. It's been a very lonely place to be the past couple of years where I feel like we've been charting the waters alone. I don't expect that will get any easier, but maybe it will. And then maybe there are others experiencing some similar issues to what we've been going through that I can help with.

That said, M is making good progress. She has been receiving ABA therapy for almost 2 years now and while she still has a long way to go to get caught up to her peers, I think she's closing the gap. What I see as her main challenges now are that she is still unable to talk and she is unable to focus on things for more than a few seconds which makes it very difficult for her to learn from others. Imitation is coming along, but her memory is short so learning involves a fair amount of repetition for her. From her listening and responsiveness, her sense of humor and her mischievous nature I believe that she's intelligent, I just think that something is preventing her from learning in the traditional way that little kids do. Her hyperactivity has been increasing the past few months which makes me wonder if she's got a severe case of ADHD. I know she has sensory processing issues, because she can't stop moving and bouncing. We recently started speech therapy with her and I'm really happy that I did. I also feel a little guilty that I didn't start it earlier, however, my thoughts were that she wasn't even paying attention or imitating enough to get anything out of it. A lot of her speech therapy is simply more imitation and organized play. The goal of the speech therapist is to get some organization going in that muddled brain of hers.

We also started preschool last month at a Montessori preschool. I'm very excited about this because M has been sequestered in our house getting hours of ABA therapy, leaving her no time to be with her peers. So now she is learning to sit through circle time and sharing a couple of hours of week with other little ones, playing outside and doing simple activities in the classroom. She goes with one of here ABA therapists, which is a great thing, otherwise M would be into everything. Did I ever mention that she is a wild one? That's one of the reasons I haven't been able to get the time to sit down and write.

Half hour's up. Gotta go.