Thoughts on Our One-Year Anniversary
One year ago today I took Hannah’s hand and led her, crying and with her arm flung over her face, to the guest room downstairs for our first therapy session. We sat in facing chairs with her little legs couched between mine, so she couldn’t run away. Her first lesson was “Look at Mommy.” She would cry and curl up in her little chair whenever I gave the prompt. On the ninth try, she glanced at my face . . . and that was the beginning of her progress.
That day we also started to teach her to imitate, something she didn’t do naturally. I would clap my hands and say “Do this,” wait two seconds for a response, then gently take her hands and clap them. Again, she didn’t figure out what to do until the ninth try.
Our third skill was trying to get her to point to what she wanted, since she couldn’t ask for it verbally. (She was four years old.) She had never pointed at anything previously. I would say, “Hannah, what do you want?” while holding up a piece of cookie. Then I would form her little hand into a “pointer” and guide her to touch it. She got two out of the ten tries for that skill also.
You’ve traveled the journey with us, and it is time to celebrate what God has done for Hannah over this past year.
She makes eye contact when we remind her. We’ve also “caught” her looking at people in a crowd. She’ll watch a person in the row in front of us at church, or watch a person in our living room during small group. Yes, she still has rough days when she doesn’t want to “look at Mommy,” but she’s taking longer looks into our world and venturing in more often.
Summer 2003 — Hannah rides her sister’s plush seal.
Having three sisters has helped so much with Hannah’s imitation skills. She is learning how to play by watching her sisters. (You’ll remember that a year ago she didn’t know how to play. She would simply line everything up over and over.) She has recently started writing letters and numbers and drawing pictures by imitating and copying. In fact, we’re just finishing up a study of ancient Egypt in which she has been present but not expected to participate. She drew something on the whiteboard yesterday in the craft room and told the girls that it was “Egypt.” We slowly realized that she had copied the pharaoh’s mask that the girls were making out of paper mache. She had the circle for the head, the stripes going out of the head, and the false beard, complete with circle at the bottom (because the girls used a toilet paper tube to make the shape of the false beard in the paper mache mask).
I remember one year ago looking at the list of skills that was to form our curriculum with Hannah and thinking, “There’s no way she’ll do that.” Especially with the Expressive Language goals, I told myself countless times, “We can’t force her to talk. There’s no way.” One year later Hannah can now point, and does often, but she can also tell us with her own voice what she wants. I remember distinctly the “meltdown” day followed by the “break through” day. Meltdown day was the day we sat at the table with a bowl of ice cream, determined that she would say “ice cream” before I would give her a bite. I’d heard her say it before in other situations, so I knew she could. But every time I prompted her, “What do you want?” she wouldn’t say it. We were both in tears at the end of our ten tries; in fact, I think we only make it to seven or eight tries before we just sat and sobbed. But then the Breakthrough day came. As we sat for the umpteenth time pointing to a picture in a book and asking, “What is that?” the Holy Spirit gave me an idea out of the blue. I know it had to come from God because I certainly wasn’t trained in this therapy and had never before encountered anything like what we were facing now. The idea was this: Give her the beginning of the word. So I pointed to a picture of a horse and said, “What is this? . . . Hor” and she said “s.” And that technique opened the door. She still needs lots of shaping and practicing with her expressive language, but one year later we are working on correct usage of pronouns. I never thought we’d get to that skill on the list!
In fact, we have accomplished all 59 of the Beginning Curriculum skills and all but 12 of the Intermediate list of 87 skills. She’s gone from “Points to desired items in response to ‘What do you want?’” to “Describes objects in view using attributes.” All praise to God!
Please be sure to thank the Heavenly Father for His goodness to us this past year. And please join us in prayer about two specific things.
- Perseverance. It’s hard to believe that we’ve done this therapy for a full year. It has truly been a day-by-day process. Many days I thought, “I don’t want to go down to that room and do this again.” (Isn’t that awful to admit? But it’s true.) But God has given us grace and strength to persevere thus far. We know that His grace and strength will not run out; that’s not the problem. Pray that we will be faithful to rely on His provision and not ourselves. That we will persevere in this journey with His loving hand upholding us.
- We’ve started making some changes to Hannah’s diet to see if that will help her. We’ve done lots of research and are finally ready to implement the results. In a nutshell, many autistic children are affected by gluten (found in wheat, barley, and some other grains) and casein (found in dairy). The theory is that their bodies cannot properly digest those proteins, so the proteins form peptides that make their way to the brain and create havoc. There’s really no reliable test that can determine whether the dietary change will help; you just have to give it a try. You can take two approaches: eliminate all gluten and casein from the diet or give extra enzymes to help break down the gluten and casein in the diet. We’ve chosen the enzyme approach right now. Please pray that we will have wisdom and keen observation skills this month especially. We should be able to tell by the end of a few weeks whether this treatment will make a difference to her.
I realize this has been a long letter, but I didn’t want to rob God of any of the glory due Him so far on this journey. Thank you for coming alongside us, for holding up our hands when we grew weary, for weeping with us over disappointments, for rejoicing with us over victories, and mostly for lifting us before the throne of God that we might “obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
