Didja miss us?

My goal for tonight: a real life, honest to goodness, for real update on my two little guys :)

I'll start with my little chubbo tubbo.

Mr. TyTy had his 15 month checkup today and he's weighing in at almost 27 lbs and he's 32 inches tall. The doc says he looks perfect! He's a little behind the curve in his verbal speech, but he does sign a little bit and has no problems communicating his wants and needs with great enthusiasm and volume. Physically he's ahead of his peers. He's actually trying to walk down the stairs now instead of crawling, which is a little hard on my ticker... But he always holds on to the rails :) He's an eater and a drinker and a pooper and a runner... And he gives the best kisses ever. In fact, he kind of likes to make out. I'm warning you now, don't let this boy date your daughter!

And now on to my skinny mini.

Daximus Maximus is weighing in somewhere around 26 lbs now and he was 33.5 inches at last check. He is quite the eater and loves a variety of foods although he still doesn't chew or manipulate the food as well as we'd like and we still do all thin liquids via tube. He is making progress in all his therapy areas and we're about to start evaluations to determine what services will be appropriate for him when he ages out of Early Intervention and into the school district in April. He still has some significant delays in speech and OT areas, but his mobility is improving daily. He still falls... A LOT... but not as much as he once did. OT-wise he's catching up with his pointing and grasping but still has more catching up to do. ST-wise... Well, speech-wise sometimes he freaks me out a little. Dax is making slow progress with expressive verbal language, although he is making progress. He does best with repeating rather than spontaneous. His spontaneous speech is usually squeals or repetitive syllables that may or may not have any meaning. He's really gotten good at "copying" the squeals and screams of characters on TV, to a degree that it's creepy sometimes... And thanks to a certain Leap Frog DVD, he can now recite most of his letter sounds in exactly the same manner they do on the DVD. That's a little weird, too, to have a 2-year-old that, when presented with a letter, can tell you what sound the letter makes (but can't tell you that a cat says "meow.") His receptive speech is phenomenal, and he can identify his shapes, colors, letters, and many items. He's also able to match items to similar items (i.e. a red car to a yellow car) with pretty good accuracy.

Dax's skills are... Different. His brain seems to work in a manner similar to many people I've worked with who have autism, yet he has an ability to generalize that I haven't seen in those same people. His visual memory is amazing, and he can learn a sign today and still know that sign 2 weeks from now, even if he doesn't really know what the sign means. He verbally has a hard time mimicking others but physically he attempts to model behaviors he enjoys, like trying to copy a piano player's hand motions. He's very social and laughs and smiles so much and gets jealous of his brother and misses him when he's gone...

His brain is just so different than that of anyone else I've ever met. He really does have a beautiful mind, in every sense of the word. I'll be pushing for neuropsych testing as we do our evals preparing for school, as he is such a good learner in so many areas, and I want to know exactly how we need to be teaching this amazing little screwed-up brain of his...

And that's my update in a nutshell.

Dax's adenoids will be coming out Thursday, so any prayers would be appreciated for everything to go off without a hitch. Also, my dad has been in the hospital since Christmas morning due to some ongoing seizure issues, so any prayers for the seizures to get under control and for him to snap back into reality would also be appreciated.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas, and I wish you all an amazing new year!

And now, some long overdue pics!

 Santa's got a lap full of nice boys :)

 School pic

 Dax modeling his new glasses (Miraflex frames are AWESOME!)

TyTy drowns his post-shot sorrows in a strawberry sucker.

Love y'all!