speaking progress

I'm blogging remotely from Spencer's today (thanks to our wonderful babysitter, Kellie). It's nice to have some time to myself for a couple hours. I've been sitting here thinking about how much progress Lewis is making verbally. He's been 'talking' incessantly for the last couple of weeks. He just woke up saying 'uh oh' one day and has been consistently trying to say more and more words. We're pretty amazed and humbled. Here's the current list:

--go
--uh oh
--kuh kuh for Krista (our developmental interventionist)
--ba woo (balloon)
--book
--buh buh (bubble)
--ba (ball)
--me
--bow
--cow
--buh ee (bunny)
--be-ee (belly)
--bye bye
--oh (labels the letter 'o' and calls Owen 'baby O')
--baah (sheep)
--moo (what a cow says)
--neigh (what a horse says)
--ow

We spent some time reading "Barnyard Dance" the last couple of days and Lewis loves filling in the words and sounds that he knows.



There are other good things to report, including Owen's one year stats, but I'll have to save that for another post. I will mention that we had a meeting with the directors of the Big Red School this week. Lewis starts in a couple weeks and goes for the summer session. They seemed really on top of things. It seems like the perfect transition from all of our home based therapy to regular preschool. For those of you who are not familiar with Big Red School is part of WKU's Clinical Education Complex. The classes are generally about 12 students, half typically developing and half with delays or other special needs. They know a lot about autism and seem to have a good plan for working with Lewis. He loved the small amount of time we were there. He'll just be going one day a week for a couple hours, but it will certainly help him adjust to being around other children and listening to other adults (in an extremely fun environment).

Today is Justin's last day at the newspaper. We are all ready for a change in schedule and it should be a good fit for him. Thanks for your prayers for us.......we're thrilled with all the positive changes in the Shepherd household.