A Victory Dance

Yesterday I had a home visit with my blue eyed boy and I decided to really put him to the test. He is our mystery child, our little one who presents with so many delays but all of the testing the doctors have conducted have revealed no answers. To anyone who first meets him, he would probably be considered to have severe disabilities limiting all areas incuding language comprehension and cognition. Yet more and more as I work with him I am seeing him make incredible progress and demonstrate that he comprehends almost everything that is said to him, and that he is learning preschool skills that are pretty age appropriate. So I took two of our color sorting boxes to his home visit yesterday. In each colored box are four items that are the same color of the box. With some positioning and assistance from his awesome mom with holiding the items against the lids of the boxes, we asked him the colors of each item using yes/no format. I was so careful to keep my tone of voice neutral so that it would not be a clue to him. The only prompt he received was that when asked "Is the (object) red?" his mother would hold up the red lid behind the object and when asked "Is the (object) yellow?" his mother would hold up the yellow lid behind the object. My blue eyed boy correctly identified 7 of the 8 items!!!!! I was amazed and stunned, and thrilled!!! We cheered, clapped, sang, and little boy blue earned a special treat. In my heart, I did the biggest victory dance! He is learning, he is aware of everything around him, he has greater comprehension than I would have imagined when I first met him a litle over a year ago and was told that he sat in a beanbag and that was about it. Now my challenge is to figure out a way to pull his comprehension out of him, to establish a communication system for a child who is nonverbal, who does not functionally use his hands, and for whom vision is unreliable. Time to get creative!!! Victory is so sweet and he has earned this one! He has earned a gold medal for this victory, for coming so far and defying expectation. I am just glad I got to come along for the ride!